THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2024 13 New Director at VOA Voice of America (VOA), the broadcasting network run by the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), announced on April 19 that Michael Abramowitz will take over as director this summer. e position is currently held by John Lippman, who has been acting director since October 2023. VOA has not had a permanent director since 2021. Abramowitz has served as president of the nonprofit Freedom House since 2017. Prior to that, he was a director at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; he also spent 24 years as a reporter and editor at The Washington Post. He wrote “Diplomacy and Democracy: Putting Values into Practice” for the JanuaryFebruary 2021 Foreign Service Journal. Abramowitz told The New York Times he appreciates VOA’s work to counter disinformation from authoritarian countries like China, Russia, and Iran: “These countries are waging ferocious information warfare aimed at undermining democracies, aimed at undermining the United States, and we need to fight back. I think that the VOA is one very important tool for the United States government in this information war.” Abramowitz is a Foreign Service family member: His father, Ambassador Morton Abramowitz, was the 2006 recipient of AFSA’s Lifetime Contributions to American Diplomacy Award. Dissent at State As the crisis in Gaza has led to massive protests on college campuses across the U.S., dissent within the State Department and other foreign a airs agencies continues. To date, three State Department officials have resigned in protest over the war in Gaza. First was Josh Paul in October 2023; then on March 27, Annelle T his quarterly online journal seeks to inform readers about international issues and diplomacy, promote greater understanding of the Foreign Service and the role of diplomats, and encourage readers to consider a Foreign Service career. American Diplomacy is published in cooperation with the University of North Carolina– Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences and its curriculum in peace, war, and defense. From analyses of postwar relations between the U.S. and Vietnam to firsthand accounts of American diplomats working under fire, American Diplomacy provides a window into the lives and work of Foreign Service officials abroad. In 2021 it celebrated 25 years of continuous online publication—its archives have grown to include more than 2,000 articles since its inception in 1996. To subscribe, email join—amdipl_announce@listserv.unc.edu. In addition, if you wish to send a submission, email editor@americandiplomacy.org. Podcast of the Month: American Diplomacy (https://americandiplomacy.web.unc.edu/) The appearance of a particular site or podcast is for information only and does not constitute an endorsement. Sheline, former foreign affairs officer in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, stepped down in protest. On April 25, Foreign Service Officer Hala Rharrit became the first Foreign Service career diplomat to resign in protest of the war. She was serving as the State Department’s Arabic language spokesperson and as the deputy director for the Dubai Regional Media Hub. On April 29, Rharrit spoke to NPR about her resignation, saying that after 18 years of service to the United States’ Gaza policy, she found it difficult to do her job given the continued flow of U.S. arms to Israel. “The policy really became unacceptable. I was holding out, hoping to try to change things from the inside, until I realized at one point that this policy was undermining U.S. interests. It was destabilizing the Middle East. And it was indeed a failed policy. And with that, I decided I could no longer be part of the department and decided to submit my resignation.” Rharrit maintains that U.S. diplomats are losing credibility: “We could no longer talk about human rights when we were allowing and enabling the mass killing of civilians. We could no longer talk about press freedom when we remained silent on the killing of over a hundred journalists in Gaza.” Asked by NPR host Mary Louise Kelly about whether she had attempted to go through official internal dissent channels before resigning, Rharrit said that yes, she had. Rharrit added her former colleagues at the department are “uneasy” about the policy and unable to talk about it internally: “I’ve never faced that before. We’ve always been able to talk about what’s working, what’s not working. We’ve been able to have very open and frank conversations. This has felt very, very different.” When asked what she would say to Secretary Blinken, she said: “The answer is diplomacy. The answer is us leveraging our influence on Israel, working with our regional partners across the Arab world to put pressure on Hamas to get to a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel, which is a two-state solution that the U.S. has long supported. Arms and bombs are not going to achieve that, only diplomacy will.”
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