US government employees are planning a “day of fasting for Gaza” this week to draw attention to the humanitarian crisis in the territory and to denounce Joe Biden’s policy toward Israel.
Representatives for Feds United for Peace, a group of several dozen government employees frustrated with the Gaza crisis who organized an office walkout earlier in the month, told the Guardian that on Thursday its members will stage a one-day hunger strike. Participating federal employees are expected to show up to their offices dressed in black or wearing keffiyeh scarves or other symbols of Palestinian solidarity.
A federal employee speaking on behalf of the group said the Day of Fasting is a response to Israel’s use of “starvation as a weapon of war by intentionally withholding food from entering Gaza”, citing UN reporting that up 2 million people in the territory are at risk of famine.
The group says its members represent more than two dozen agencies, among them the departments of defense, homeland security and state, and include career public servants and political appointees. They expect hundreds of government employees to participate.
A walkout staged by the group earlier this month drew strong reactions in Washington, with national security officials from both parties criticizing their protests as insubordination.
“They deserve to be fired,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, said.
Feds United for Peace representatives say that their goal is to force a conversation in their offices, where many federal employees might support a ceasefire but fear retribution for speaking out, or are afraid to even casually discuss politics because doing so might hamper their own efforts to effectively work on policy.
Government employees have been organizing against the war under other umbrellas as well. Staffers for Ceasefire, for example, put on a vigil for Gaza outside the White House in December.
Last week, Staffers for Ceasefire published a scathing statement in opposition to the efforts of senior White House officials to boost morale that has flagged as a result of opposition to the US’s support of Israel. “While White House chief of staff Jeff Zients throws a morale-booster party for staff tonight, a child in Gaza is killed every 8 minutes,” Staffers for Ceasefire said in a statement. “We are disgusted by this display of complete apathy towards the lives that have been taken in the region over the last three months.”
Van Jackson, a political scientist who worked in the Pentagon during the Barack Obama administration, said the recent protests from US public servants were unprecedented. “We are in uncharted territory, and no presidential administration the past 40 years has been denounced by its own staff like this – not collectively, not so publicly, and not with this regularity,” Jackson wrote in his newsletter Un-Diplomatic.
But it is not clear whether the demonstrations are having an effect. Insiders say Biden himself is the decision-maker on the administration’s Israel policy, and he does not seem swayed by dissenters.
The state department has been holding “open forum” sessions for its employees that have become “very frank” and “quite heated”, according to internal department emails seen by the Guardian.
Thursday’s action follows a string of public acts of dissent from inside the government. In early January, a senior political appointee from the education department, Tariq Habash, resigned in protest. State department employees have used the department’s “dissent channel” to convey policy disagreements directly to the secretary of state. More than a thousand officials for the development agency USAid signed a letter in support of a ceasefire. At Biden’s 2024 re-election headquarters, campaigners have also anonymously signed petitions.
Government employees say that even though their substantive criticisms of the administration’s policy do not seem to be changing policy, the barrage of dissenting actions have reached the Oval Office.
“The president is aware, and his entire senior team is aware. I just think that they’re in a bubble,” said a Biden official affiliated with Staffers for Ceasefire. Dissent against Israel policy is “something that goes incredibly high up, no matter how much folks try to disregard that”.