The US State Department’s deputy political counsellor on Gaza, one of two individuals in the entire government explicitly focused on Gaza, resigned over the administration’s policy towards Israel’s war on the besieged Palestinian enclave.
Mike Casey, a US Army veteran who served in Iraq, told The Guardian in an interview on Wednesday that he quietly tendered his resignation in July after four years at the State Department.
He explained his decision as stemming from disillusionment with US policy towards Palestinians, both humanitarian and political, which he said essentially amounted to allowing Israel to do whatever it wants.
“We don’t have a policy on Palestine. We just do what the Israelis want us to do,” he told The Guardian.
“I was too embarrassed to continue being an American diplomat,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t go to another assignment and function.”
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Casey’s job description included serving as the “lead political reporting officer on internal politics and security issues in the Gaza Strip and on Palestinian reconciliation issues”, according to an internal job posting obtained by The Guardian.
“The officer leads the mission’s interagency efforts on Gaza and is the back-up for Gaza economic issues,” it goes on to say.
The US Office of Palestinian Affairs, established in 2022 to serve as the core of American engagement with Palestinians, has seen its ability to manoeuvre and influence US policy overshadowed by the Biden administration’s broader response to Israel’s war on Gaza, which began in October 2023.
Senior US State Department official and expert on Israel-Palestine resigns amid Gaza war
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Casey said he and his colleagues proposed several strategies for Gaza’s reconstruction, but they were all outright rejected.
“Every idea we came up with, [the Biden administration] would just say: ‘Well, the Israelis have another idea,’” he said.
Those Israeli proposals included having local clans run the strip.
“We wrote numerous reports and cables explaining why this wouldn’t work,” he said. “It’s not in our interest to have warlords running Gaza.”
Reports fall on deaf ears
Casey’s work included chronicling the humanitarian and political situation inside Gaza through research, reporting and classified cables.
“We would write daily updates on Gaza,” he said, adding that his colleagues joked they could attach cash to the reports and still no one would read them.
He told The Guardian that one moment early in the war hit him hard: when US President Joe Biden publicly questioned the death toll in Gaza – figures Casey had personally documented.
“I was the one writing the reports,” he said. “What’s the point of me writing this stuff if you’re just going to disregard it?”
“I got so tired of writing about dead kids,” he said. “Just constantly having to prove to Washington that these children actually died and then watching nothing happen.”
Casey now works at a local bank in Michigan.
He is not the first US official to resign since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza. More than a dozen officials have left the Biden administration, citing frustration with its policy on Gaza.
These officials ranged from those in domestic agencies, such as Tariq Habash from the Department of Education, to senior State Department officials directly involved in overseeing US arms sales to Israel, such as Josh Paul.
