The White House is planning to throw a “morale booster” party amid renewed discontent among administration staff over its Israel policy, according to a new report.
President Biden’s millionaire chief of staff, Jeff Zients, would throw the “off-campus” party for hundreds of staffers to celebrate their work over the last three years, and to give them a boost heading into what could be Biden’s final year in office, according to Axios.
The party plans come as one senior Biden education official resigned Wednesday in protest of the administration’s policy on the war between Israel and Hamas, and as more than a dozen Biden campaign staffers similarly issued an anonymous letter expressing their discontent with the administration’s approach to the war.
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President Biden joins Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a war cabinet meeting, in Tel Aviv on Oct. 18, 2023. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
The party invite was emailed to staffers on Wednesday, noting it would be held at a private venue in Northern Virginia later this month.
“To ensure we are able to include as many staff as possible, this invitation is non-transferrable and does not include a guest,” Zients wrote in the invitation.
Although the party will be for official staff rather than those working for the campaign, the renewed backlash over Biden’s Israel policy shows the dissent expressed by numerous administration officials as the war ratcheted up in November has only grown.
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Jeff Zients, White House chief of staff, attends an event in the East Room of the White House, March 1, 2023. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
“I cannot stay silent as this administration turns a blind eye to the atrocities committed against innocent Palestinian lives, in what leading human rights experts have called a genocidal campaign by the Israeli government,” Tariq Habash, special assistant in the Education Department’s Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, said in his resignation letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
The 17 Biden campaign staffers used similar language in their letter as they argued that the deaths of Palestinians “cannot be justified.”
“As your staff, we believe it is both a moral and electoral imperative for you to publicly call for a cessation of violence,” they wrote.
The White House in Washington, D.C. (Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“We joined this campaign because the values that you – and we – share are ones worth fighting for. Justice, empathy, and our belief in the dignity of human life is the backbone of not only the Democratic Party, but of the country,” they added. “However, your administration’s response to Israel’s indiscriminate bombing in Gaza has been fundamentally antithetical to those values – and we believe it could cost you the 2024 election.”
In November, 400 government officials from 40 departments and agencies within the administration signed a letter opposing the president’s handling of the war and demanded a cease-fire, and a leaked internal State Department memo included staffers urging the administration to change its public stance toward Israel and support a cease-fire.
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Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House for comment.
Fox News’ Sarah Rumpf-Whitten and Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report.
