Above photo: Members of Congress and About Face held a press conference in front of the U.S. Capitol to call for a ceasefire on Nov. 9, 2023. Twitter/About Face.
Defectors from the U.S. military and federal agencies are using their unique influence to push for an end to the war in Gaza.
As the crisis in the Middle East rages on, a growing movement is confronting U.S. funding of Israel’s wars — including a perhaps-surprising number of those once charged with enforcing U.S. policies. Some are military veterans, while others worked for the State Department and other federal agencies.
Such resistance is critical to any nonviolent revolution, says Erica Chenoweth, co-author of “Why Civil Resistance Works.” Chenoweth describes such “defections” as foundational to any hope of real change; dissent by the government’s enforcers — security forces, civilian bureaucrats — show cracks in a regime’s powers. Those defections are happening in real time, among military personnel and federal agencies. And with Trump entering the White House, this trend will likely only escalate in the coming months.
Currently, war flashes in Lebanon and Iran are at times overshadowing the Gaza conflict in the public eye. But the responses from both military and civilian enforcers came in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas brutalized Israeli civilians and soldiers alike, and the Netanyahu government responded by nearly destroying Gaza. Shortly after the war began, Air Force officer Juan Bettancourt gave notice to his command that if he was told to work in support of Israel, he would refuse. “I said I would consider it an illegal order,” he told me.
These defectors watched as U.S. arms were used to pummel villages in the hunt for Hamas militants, with U.S. politicians including President Biden refusing to put conditions on those shipments. Such a refusal was “an impulsive reaction built on confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy and bureaucratic inertia,” wrote former State Department employee Josh Paul, when he resigned from the Political-Military Bureau, which facilitates arms transfers to allies.
Paul resigned on Oct. 18, 11 days after Hamas’ attack — during which nearly 5,000 Palestinians had already been killed. He wasn’t alone; a new Reuters investigation shows that emails among staffers “reveal alarm early on in the State Department and Pentagon that a rising death toll in Gaza could violate international law and jeopardize U.S. ties in the Arab world.” They sent internal “dissent memos” to Secretary Antony Blinken urging a ceasefire, and in November 500 U.S. officials, from across 40 agencies, signed an open letter to Biden urging a ceasefire.
In the months to come, more and more of those officials would make their protest public, joining an international movement that saw 150 Dutch diplomats holding a sit-in at the Hague, the home of the International Court of Justice. Those sit-ins began in December and continued every two weeks, joined by activists from around the world.
As 2024 began, 100 Americans were among the 800 signatories of a “Transatlantic Civil Servants Statement on Gaza,” which urged the International Court of Justice to act and for all governments to “Use all leverage available — including a halt to military support — to secure a lasting ceasefire and full humanitarian access in Gaza and a safe release of all hostages.”(The full statement is here.) A few weeks after that Feb. 2 statement, the movement’s military wing strode into the limelight, when active-duty airman Aaron Bushnell immolated himself in front of the Israeli Embassy.
“Morale is being affected,” airman Juan Bettancourt told me in June 2024. He was talking about the images and videos from Gaza that have flooded social media. Israel’s bombing campaign has so far flattened much of Gaza, displacing around 1.9 million people — nine in 10 Gazans — and killing 43,000. Those images and realities have spurred many military members to question their involvement in an institution that is actively supporting Israel’s war.
“By wearing the uniform of a nation whose government is complicit in the brutal slaughter of innocent lives, I feel an overwhelming sense of embarrassment and despair,” Bettancourt said.
We were talking just after the launch of Appeal for Redress V2, a campaign to mobilize active-duty and reserve troops to tell their members of Congress that they oppose U.S. support of Israel’s current war in Gaza. At the Zoom launch on June 4, Bettancourt also announced that he was applying for discharge as a conscientious objector, or CO. The launch was co-sponsored by the Center on Conscience and War, which has received more than 50 inquiries about applying for CO status based on agony about Gaza.
The first Appeal for Redress, in 2006, was a brainstorm of former Center on Conscience and War director J.E. McNeil, after she was approached by then-Navy sailor Jonathan Wesley Hutto, now author of “Antiwar Soldier: How to Dissent Within the Ranks of the U.S. Military.” “How could they mobilize all the troops afraid to speak out publicly? The answer was in the Military Whistleblower Protection Act,” McNeil told me years later. That Act carves out a protection for servicemembers to seek redress from members of Congress.
The newer Appeal, hosted by Veterans For Peace, offers servicemembers a choice of letters, between a simple, informal approach (#1); a more formal military communication (#2); a more emotional testimony (#3), or a legal focus (#4) that goes into detail about the international law aspects of U.S. involvement. The site then matches the member’s address to the appropriate Congressional representative. “There is so much resistance inside so many who serve,” Bettancourt told me. “So much potential.”
Bettancourt, a Ph.D. candidate in history from Brown University, enlisted to serve the country where his parents brought him when he was 10, fleeing Colombia’s then-horrific violence. After he completed his coursework in 2019, he took a leave of absence and joined the Air Force. “I had ideas for public service, where I’d learn the ins and outs of government,” he said. “The idea of a true democracy, where progressive ideas like mine fit in every sect of society.” The latter idea met reality during basic training at Lackland Air Force Base. It was there that his desire to be a medic was squashed, and he shifted into intelligence.
Then came Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing warfare that burst the blister of the status quo. “Everyone here is pretty plugged in,” Bettancourt said. The constant stream of images and videos of the devastation snapped him into action — including the death of fellow airman Aaron Bushnell. Bettancourt was shocked by the lack of official response from the Air Force in the days that followed. And he was furious about the memorial service held for Bushnell at his own base, Lackland AFB in Texas. “They didn’t even mention Palestine.” Bettancourt then did the only thing he felt he could do — place a small Palestine flag at the room’s vigil table.
Only 15 have joined the Appeal, most of whom are also working with the Center on Conscience and War on their CO applications. Other service members and veterans, eschewing the Defense Department-approved processes, expressed their concerns about Gaza by joining Veterans for Peace or About Face. “Since October 7, 2023, over 250 veterans and active-duty members have applied to become members of About Face: Veterans Against the War,” said About Face operations coordinator Shiloh Emelein.
Jon Hutto, who started the first Appeal, wrote on Facebook last spring: “I’m beyond moved and inspired by this current generation of active-duty being tip of the spear in the struggle against the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.” Hutto has emphasized that organizing those currently in uniform is crucial and often overlooked.
Veterans for Peace, which still hosts the Appeal, is a key forum for the new resisters; its summer conference was keynoted by Major Harrison Mann, whose public resignation from the Defense Intelligence Agency made him the summer’s media darling. Mann and Josh Paul were soon contacted by hundreds of other federal employees who were contemplating doing the same. Thus was born Service in Dissent, a joint statement by dozens of those who had resigned, issued on July 4: “Each of us has had our own experience of the cascading failures of process, leadership and decision-making that have characterized this administration’s intransigent response to this continuing calamity,” they wrote.
“This intransigent policy risks U.S. national security and the lives of our service members and diplomats as has already been made evident with the killing of three U.S. service members in Jordan in January and the evacuations of diplomatic facilities in the Middle East,” the letter continues, “and also poses a security risk for American citizens at home and abroad.”
Those who remember the Vietnam era might hear history rhyming. The channel for the “dissent memos” during that time was established in 1971, after tumult inside the establishment over the Nixon administration’s Southeast Asia wars. “In 1968 alone 266 Foreign Service officers, 80 percent of them junior officers, resigned,” retired U.S. diplomat David Jones wrote decades later.
A group of retired senior military officers, including former Marine Corps commandant David Shoup, had become famous for their vocal opposition to the war, making the cover of Esquire as “Brass Lambs” in 1967. While Shoup and the other Brass Lambs were lauded by the nearly 3,000 underground G.I. newspapers, they were mostly ignored by the Pentagon, though turmoil at the State Department was exposed in 1971 when former Marine and civilian adviser Daniel Ellsberg leaked a ton of those internal communications to the press in the Pentagon Papers.
The language of the Service in Dissent statements echoes that of Shoup and the other retired senior military officers 50 years ago, as does their decision to go public.
Josh Paul connected me to the July 17 webinar Voices of Conscience, where he spoke along with a fascinating mosaic of voices. These included the Interior Department’s Lily Greenberg Call, the first Jewish political appointee to resign in protest of U.S. policy in Gaza; the State Department’s Annelle Sheline; Tariq Habash, former policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development; and former members of the military, including Master Sergeant Mohammed Abu Hashem and Major Harrison Mann.
Mann spoke presciently about the Lebanon front, a conflict that “threatens to draw in the United States and put U.S. forces, bases, embassies and troops in the region at risk when we become a target, because we look like we’re a direct participant in that conflict.”
As things have evolved, many of the “Voices of Conscience” have become press contacts for media stories, while Feds United for Peace has openly joined Gaza protests since December. They have called on the Defense Department’s Inspector General to better investigate whether arms transfers to Israel are in violation of the Leahy Act and the Foreign Assistance Act.
These defectors also include many who haven’t yet spoken out, and they hope to bring in other federal employees who may share their concerns. Antiwar veterans groups are speaking with military personnel who are currently questioning U.S. involvement in the war more quietly.
A month after the Voices of Conscience webinar, the Appeal for Redress went international, with a press conference that included members of Combatants for Peace: ex-Hamas fighter Ahmed Helou and former Israeli special forces officer Eli Hanan. Both were congratulated by Veterans for Peace’s Mike Ferner, a Vietnam-era conscientious objector who also praised “all the U.S. active-duty CO applicants here.”
I first learned about Combatants for Peace from Stephen Eagle Funk, one of the founders of Iraq Veterans Against War (now About Face), nearly 20 years ago; those connections are just now being rediscovered, according to About Face’s Shiloh Emlein. And About Face’s September convention, which ended with testimony from Israeli Defense Forces resister Meital Yaniv, brought together members of the 9/11-era cohort and dozens who joined recently, most of them passionate about Israel-Palestine and many feeling inspired by Aaron Bushnell.
On the anniversary of his resignation from the State Department in October, Josh Paul announced the formation of a new political action committee, A New Policy PAC. “I do think that what we face here is a deep-rooted and very entrenched set of political, economic incentives that will make it very hard for anyone to change U.S. policy in this regard,” he told Democracy Now! “What we face here is actually not a policy problem. We know what the policy problems are. The people in government know what the policy problems are. What we face here is a political problem.” A New Policy’s team includes Tariq Habash and Robert Ford, former U.S. ambassador to Syria. All are relying on the built-in gravitas built on their experience serving the establishment — or, in other words, their status as defectors.
“Challenging or disobeying orders is abnormal behavior for members of security forces,” Erica Chenoweth noted in International Security in 2008. Nonetheless, “security force defections make nonviolent campaigns 46 times more likely to succeed than nonviolent campaigns where defections do not occur.” In that article, Chenoweth is talking mostly about defections much larger than what has occurred so far around the war in Gaza — what they call “large-scale, systematic breakdowns in the execution of a regime’s orders.” One example they cite is Myanmar, where bureaucrats in 1988 gave room for mass protests, and “some air force soldiers broke ranks to join the protests,” according to Gene Sharp.
Most of the formations in relation to the Gaza war are quite new — as new as the war itself and the movement to end it. All of them have signaled their intention to keep resisting in the second Trump administration, including on any use of the military against civilians and immigrant communities. What their ultimate impact will be is unclear. But these defections might prove an essential element of any change to come.