Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield
At a press briefing held by US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, she outlined her country’s agenda as rotating president of the Security Council this month, focusing mainly on AI, Ukraine and Sudan. She is expected to leave her post by the end of the year. Her carefully cultivated reputation may well be shadowed by her vetoes against Gaza ceasefire draft resolutions, Dec. 2, 2024. JOHN PENNEY/PASSBLUE
Linda Thomas-Greenfield walked out of the hallowed chamber of the United Nations Security Council with a spring to her step.
It was the afternoon of March 25, about five months since the gruesome Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Thomas-Greenfield, the United States permanent representative to the UN, had just been spared from casting another veto against a ceasefire resolution for Gaza. Instead, the US abstained from voting on the text, which was sponsored by the 10 elected Council members, enabling the draft to pass with 14 yes votes.
It was the first successful “immediate” ceasefire resolution focusing on the Gaza war after three attempts that were blocked by the US since Oct. 2023.
“She was practically dancing,” said a staffer of a nonprofit organization that is part of a civil society working group on Israel and Palestine. The person did not want to be named because she did not have the authority to talk to the press.
“She looked so happy that she didn’t have to vote no.”
The US has used its veto power five times in defense of Israel since Oct. 7: Four times to block demands for a ceasefire and once to stop Palestine’s full membership to the UN, a critical step that could kick off the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine to exist side by side with internationally recognized borders. But Thomas-Greenfield’s steadfast adherence to US policy as part of her job may have put her own integrity into question, sources for this article suggested.
She cast two of the vetoes. Robert Wood, the US alternate representative for special political affairs at the UN, cast three, including the one blocking Palestine’s quest for full UN membership.
“The United States is disappointed this resolution made no mention of Israel’s right of self-defense,” Thomas-Greenfield said after casting the first veto — on Oct. 18, 2023, against a Brazilian-led ceasefire resolution that also condemned Hamas — since her appointment as the US ambassador to the UN. An appointee of President Joe Biden, Thomas-Greenfield, now 72, took up her post on Feb. 25, 2021.
Numerous sources in UN circles who requested anonymity told PassBlue that Thomas-Greenfield was “devastated” after the first veto and often traveled to Washington as a cabinet member to advise Biden on the Gaza conflict and its effect at the UN. It is unclear how much she tried to influence the US position on Gaza since she rarely spoke about it publicly, but sources close to her said she regrets that the US has kept using its veto to protect Israel. The president decides how the US ambassador votes in the Council.
However, diplomats at country missions to the UN who were close to the negotiations preceding many of the proposed draft resolutions on Gaza said she was constantly talking to Washington and always open to working with other Council members on draft texts to help them get approved by the White House.
Thomas-Greenfield herself listed her openness with other UN country missions as one of her achievements during her term. This is her last time chairing the monthly rotating presidency of the Council.
“I came here with a policy that no one thought that I could achieve, and that was to have meetings with every single PR from every single country,” she said during a press briefing on Dec. 2, referring to permanent representatives.
“I did that. There are four or five countries that we don’t meet with, but for all the countries that we meet with, I have met one on one, or country to country, with every single one of those countries.” She didn’t name the countries that the US does not meet with.
That morning of March 25, hours before Resolution 2728 was adopted, Thomas-Greenfield worked with her Council colleagues even as Washington attempted to scuttle the negotiations with a last-minute change. A senior diplomat told PassBlue that Washington wanted to insert yet another amendment to the draft after Council members had agreed what they considered the final text the night before.
Reportedly, the US asked to change language in the text to replace “permanent cease-fire” with “lasting cease-fire” and to make the cease-fire conditional on the release of the hostages, which is in line with its policy and the negotiations it is leading with Qatar and Egypt. (The resolution called for an “immediate” ceasefire.)
The senior diplomat said the move angered Russia and China. Both countries then introduced their own amendments into the Council session, throwing a wrench in the progress that had been made from weeks of laborious negotiations. PassBlue was told that Thomas-Greenfield persuaded Washington to withdraw the last-minute amendment so the draft could be adopted.
“She feels with us,” the senior diplomat said.
Malta’s permanent representative to the UN, Vanessa Frazier, also told PassBlue that Thomas-Greenfield helped get the Malta-led Resolution 2712 adopted in the Council in November 2023. “Linda as a person made a difference in the Security Council,” Frazier said.
But while abstaining might have given Thomas-Greenfield a respite from continuing criticism in the Council, many parts of the UN and a swath of the global public, it did little to help her country’s reputation from further damage for every veto it has cast on draft resolutions that could have saved innocent lives in Gaza.
The thwarted draft resolution of Nov. 20, 2024, led by the 10 elected Council members, had called for an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire. But the US veto once again showed that the country was alone in its blind support for Israel. Fourteen members — including Britain, which has in the past abstained during previous resolutions vetoed by the US — voted yes on the draft text. Many Council members left the chamber deeply discouraged as the war has raged on and the death toll in Gaza has kept climbing.
Failed US-UN attempts
In June 2024, Thomas-Greenfield rallied her Council colleagues behind a three-phase peace plan proposed by Israel, according to Biden, who announced it on May 31. She said the plan, negotiated with the US, Egypt, Qatar and other Mideast countries, demanded that Hamas accept the deal. But while Thomas-Greenfield repeated in the UN that Israel was on board with the US-facilitated plan, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country had not consented to the arrangement.
A Council member who asked not to be quoted by name said that countries who voted for the US-led resolution on June 10, endorsing the Gaza ceasefire deal — which received 14 yes votes and an abstention from Russia — were disappointed that the plan never materialized. In its remarks after the vote, Russia said the implementation of the deal was unclear.
Six months have passed since the adoption of Resolution 2735, with no letup in the war.
“We did not know what we were agreeing to,” an elected Council member told PassBlue.
The US has supported Council resolutions calling for humanitarian aid access in Gaza: one led by the United Arab Emirates in December 2023 and the other by Malta a month earlier. However, the short-term ceasefires called for in the texts were never fully carried out. The March 25 resolution, which called for a ceasefire during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, also failed.
It is ever-more difficult for humanitarian aid to get into the Palestinian enclave as trucks remain on hold at entry points operated by Israel as the occupying power. In some cases, when the convoys enter, they are besieged mostly by gangs. In October, food and other essentials were sealed off from northern Gaza as Israel Defense Forces intensified ground military operations in the area.
That month, the US issued a 30-day ultimatum for Israel to surge lifesaving goods to enter the enclave with a threat to cut arms funding if there was no improvement. When the 30 days expired, the US gave Israel a pass even though the UN and other international NGOs said aid flow actually dropped during the 30 days.
At least 44,000 people have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Hamas-run health authority. The UN said 1.9 million of 2.2 million people in the enclave have been displaced than once. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Netanyahu and the former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, accusing the duo of starving civilians in Gaza. (An arrest warrant was also issued against a top member of Hamas, though he is presumed dead.)
Moreover, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion in July 2024, determining that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 is illegal under international law.
The US has singlehandedly enabled the war to continue, said David Wildman, the executive secretary of the Human Rights and Racial Justice program of the United Methodist Church.
Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of American foreign aid since 1948. The Council of Foreign Relations said Israel has received about $310 billion in total economic and military assistance over time. A report from the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University said the US spending on Israel’s military operations in the region totals at least $22.76 billion. This figure includes $17.9 billion the US government approved in military assistance for Israel’s operations in Gaza since Oct. 7.
“Without that support [and] the veto at the Security Council, Israel would not have been able to continue this war the way it has,” Wildman added. “The US government has enabled genocide and mass killing, war crimes and crimes against humanity to continue. I think it’s shown that, despite rhetoric to the contrary, the US government has been actively supporting the mass slaughter of civilians.”
Resignation was an option
Thomas-Greenfield grew up in Louisiana during the segregated Jim Crow era in the Deep South. She told a TedTalk audience in 2017 that she was on campus at Louisiana State University at the same time as David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. She talked about her struggles in an American society that oppressed and harassed her for being Black. She narrated her near-death experience as a professional diplomat during the Rwanda genocide in April 1994.
“I was harassed in my dormitory,” she also told the TedTalk crowd. “I had a world-renowned historian use the N-word regularly in the classroom. One of my professors gave me an F in a class, and when I asked why he had given me the F, he said to me: ‘If you don’t know the answer to that question you don’t need to be here.’ What he did not know was that failure was not an option for me.”
When she joined the US Foreign Service in 1982, it was a white-male-dominated organization, yet Thomas-Greenfield rose through the ranks. She became the director of recruitment and dedicated most of her time in the office mentoring young Black and Brown officers in the service, her former colleagues said.
Wildman said that Thomas-Greenfield’s defense of Israel in the Security Council, at the expense of starving Gazan civilians, contrasts with what she stood for, her life experiences and her proclaimed compassion for the downtrodden.
“I think this is a lasting stain on whatever legacy she may have,” Wildman said. “She was the voice of blocking ceasefires. She was the voice of refusing to lift up the humanitarian situation, refusing to work multilaterally, and frankly, has been the voice of repeated vetoes that are shredding the international multilateral system of international law.”
Thomas-Greenfield told reporters when she first arrived at the UN, in March 2021: “I’m a humanitarian at heart, I spent half my career working in the humanitarian area not only in Africa but actually working on refugees and migration issues when I served in Geneva. Those are the issues that worry me the most, because it leads to so much suffering.”
Other people in the UN orbit who were interviewed for this story said that Thomas-Greenfield could have resigned if she felt conflicted with decisions coming out of the White House. Since Oct. 7, two major universities have withdrawn their invitations to her as their commencement speaker in protest of her stance on Gaza.
The ambassador herself must know the blows that the US response has done to her legacy. On Dec. 2, 2024, she reeled off to reporters the challenges she dealt with as US ambassador, but she breezily referenced the war in Gaza.
Loyal to Biden
Every Thursday, a handful of peaceful protesters gathers in front of the US mission to the UN, right across the street from the organization, to voice their opposition to the US’ military involvement in the Israel-Hamas war. A few times, the ambassador has walked by them, guarded by her security detail.
Mary Yelenick of Pax Christi International, a Catholic peace movement, told PassBlue that they had been signaled “quiet” nods from staffers at the mission. After months of protests, Thomas-Greenfield addressed Yelenick and the other protesters in front of the US mission. The ambassador told the group that she wanted a ceasefire too, Yelenick said.
“One can only imagine what one feels being in a position like that,” Yelenick, who has fasted in her protests, said. “It’d be very difficult to watch this conflict day after day and not feel the twinge of humanity, and yet you’re expected to exercise a vote in the Security Council in which you put all of that aside. In my view, I think it’d be hard psychologically and physically to be in that position.”
Sources told PassBlue that the ambassador didn’t always agree with the position of her country on Gaza, but she will be remembered as the face of Biden’s unbridled support for Israel as Gaza continues to suffer grave human casualties, infrastructural ruin and severe economic damage since Oct. 7, 2023.
“If it wasn’t for Gaza, I think we would be talking about her role in rallying international support for Ukraine at the UN in 2022. I think that was a high point of her time in Turtle Bay,” said Richard Gowan, the UN director at the International Crisis Group, based in New York City. “But in the end, she is inextricably linked with Biden’s team’s handling of the Gaza war. That has upended a lot of the careful and painstaking work she had done to restore US credibility at the UN.”
Thomas-Greenfield came out of a 35-year-career retirement to heed Biden’s call for her to reposition the US after a tumultuous four years under former (now incoming) President Donald Trump. She was one of the first senior career Foreign Service officers who resigned under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a Trump appointee who pushed cuts to the Foreign Service and reshuffled rank and file. (He was fired by Trump in March 2018.)
Her appointment by Biden was meant to put the US-UN relationship back in order after the Trump administration’s rocky years at the UN, including budget cuts and withdrawals from several UN entities, including the Human Rights Council. In the first two years, Thomas-Greenfield worked swiftly for the US to rejoin some of the agencies Trump withdrew from.
Now, as her tenure ends, Thomas-Greenfield’s nearly four years representing the US at the UN are spoken of in pre- and post-Gaza war dichotomy. The diplomatic hurdles she faced — the Covid-19 pandemic, a disrupted global economy, the climate crisis, mass migration, extreme poverty and international demands for social justice — were formidable.
Had the Hamas assault on Israel, killing some 1,200 people and kidnapping at least 200 more not happened, Thomas-Greenfield would have contended with familiar but no-less difficult diplomatic challenges. She rallied allies’ support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in February 2022 and led humanitarian and political initiatives in Haiti and Sudan. Much of the good will she enjoyed through those achievements has been eroded because of the US position toward the Gaza war.
In 2021, Foreign Policy wrote at the start of her term that she would be “a loyal soldier who will carry out the president’s policy.” Her loyalty to the Biden administration, which has lost much public support — including a re-election — is perhaps her ultimate sacrifice to the president, which could end up being a huge disservice to her own legacy against oppression.
Damilola Banjo
Damilola Banjo is a staff reporter for PassBlue who has covered a wide range of topics, from Africa-centered stories to gender equality to UN peacekeeping and US-UN relations. She also oversees video production for PassBlue. She was a Dag Hammarskjold fellow in 2023 and a Pulitzer Center postgraduate fellow in 2021. She was named the 2020 Nigeria Investigative Journalist of the Year by the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism and was part of the BBC Africa team that produced the Emmy nominated documentary, “Sex for Grades.” In addition, she worked for WFAE, an NPR affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina. Banjo has a master’s of science degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a B.A. in communications and language arts from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.