If Chef Jose Andres was an adult
this is what he'd say about the death of his World Central Kitchen compatriots....
Hello, I’m Chef Jose Andres, the “Founder & Chief Feeding Officer,” as I put it on my website, of an NGO—World Central Kitchen. We pride ourselves for being “first to the front lines, [to provide] fresh meals in response to humanitarian, climate, and community crises.”
Yes, we realize that front lines are the most dangerous places in a combat zone. You don’t really want to be near a front line unless you’ve put your affairs in order, taken out some hefty life insurance, and made peace with your maker. We accepted that when we came in. We accepted that we couldn’t laud ourselves—and allow the president of the United States to go all fan boy over us—if we weren’t actually running a real risk to do what we do.
Actually, that “front line” bit on our website’s landing page was a touch of er…swagger. (I’m that kind of guy; that’s what it takes to become a celebrity chef.) The people needing “food aid” are generally not on the front lines. They are, as they say in the military, far to the rear. They are civilians so they’re generally huddling in their homes, far from the heaviest action.
On the other hand, in this unique case, Israel v. Hamas (actually Israel v. Iran, because Hamas is just one of Iran’s many funded and armed proxies), it is accurate to say we have rushed to the front lines: Hamas puts the front lines anywhere and everywhere. They ignore traditional military ethics calling for delineation of combatant and civilian, of battlefield and residential area.
Thus Hamas installs rocket launchers (there’s plenty of video documentation of this) next to, even inside, schools, mosques, and hospitals, notably the Strip’s biggest hospital complex, Al-Shifa. Even the US government’s intelligence community “has independently corroborated information on Hamas and [Palestinian Islamic Jiahd]’s use of the [Al-Shifa] hospital complex for a variety of purposes related to its campaign against Israel.”
So that utter confusion, that complete lack of clear lines between combatant and civilian, combat zone and residential area, makes this conflict more dangerous than any other in which we’ve chosen to operate.
On the other hand, the media attention one gets in Gaza is off the charts. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t choose conflicts for their attention value. Yes, as you can see on our feeding map that we’ve somehow managed to forget the continent of Africa—and Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, where 70% of the world’s hungriest people are purportedly located but perhaps we’ll get around to those unmediagenic areas one of these days.
The sad truth is I need media attention to continue to get grants, like the $100 million I got from Jeff Bezos. That’s just how it works in the NGO game.
As for fateful night of April 1? We had been coordinating food deliveries with the IDF. They had been providing protection for us. We accepted that in an active hot war, unless you hire private security—which in many ways is the most moral choice—you must choose your “protexia,” to use a Hebrew term.
We do admit that hiring private security is a better way to preserve one’s independence—and highly trained mercenaries, former U.S. SEALs and the like, are available for hire all over the Middle East. But those “contractors” got a really bad rap during America’s Iraq war and those swaggering…well…all-too-American Americans would hurt the brand.
On the other hand, if one doesn’t use independent security there’s a real risk of Stockholm Syndrome, wherein frightened workers begin to love the party who scares them the most. It’s called “identification with the aggressor”—or if my heart is pure, if my captors sense that I really love them, maybe they won’t kill me.
The Stockholm Syndrome is behind the too common phenomenon of aid workers “going native.” It happened on a grand scale to UNWRA workers. Established in 1949 by the UN General Assembly in order to provide aid to Arabs who’d fled, or been ordered to leave, the area that became Israel after the War of Independence, the relief organization gradually morphed into an arm of Hamas.
Bottom line: Either you accept the help of an organized, accountable military like the IDF or you make a deal with the bandits. We didn’t want to make a deal with Hamas to protect us, but I wasn’t everywhere in the Strip and it’s possible that one of my deputies, in a moment of weakness, made a deal.
But Hamas is really kind of bad at making deals. Their word is generally worthless, and it’s entirely possible that a protection agreement allowed Hamas to get close enough to our cars to actually lead us into harm’s way.
Why would they attempt to get us killed?
One possible answer is that the viewing audience was getting a bit enured to what Alan Dershowitz has called Hamas’s “dead baby” strategy. The Israel-is-committing-genocide narrative needed zhooshing up, and what better way to grab headlines again than with an Israeli missile strike that took out highly relatable Western aid workers, i.e. people who looked like members of the viewing audience.
In fact, there is evidence that something fishy (something I of course did not know about) might have been going on the night of the tragedy.
The drone team claimed they began tracking our vehicles because they spotted an armed man sitting atop the roof of a car, and then firing at an unseen or nonexistent target. Hamas, Islamic Jihad et al are actually quite famous for appropriating aid vehicles—ambulances for instance—to deliver arms and personnel to the frontlines and rifle fire is sometimes used as a primitive form of GPS to summon more troops. BBC reporters have viewed drone footage from that night and report that WCK logos were not visible at night to the operators and that the footage shows “a figure holding a gun, on top of the lorry,” [who] at “one point” fires his gun. None of these factors alone excuse the missile fire, of course.
But why were we operating at night? There are a number of possible, perfectly valid reasons, but so far I’m not even answering questions like that and when, say, talk show hosts bring up the mere possibility of Hamas involvement I have given answers like “Hamas shouldn’t be ‘brought into the question’ every time something happens.”
Israel has not released the drone footage to the public and the footage shown to reporters is not complete. From a “hasbara” point of view this is not good; on the other hand, I accept that there may be legal and security factors at play that I don’t know about. Israel can’t release all of its evidence all of the time for all sorts of reasons. It protects the identity of its soldiers, for instance, and, not surprisingly, it doesn’t like to air footage that could reveal what it knows about enemy M.O.
Bottom line, we accept that in a hot war like this mistakes happen. When used correctly—as they are by Israel most of the time—drones are actually the civilian-sparing choice. Theoretically, the most surgical weapon is a ground soldier, but Israel has been taking casualties at a Yom Kippur War-like rate in an attempt to go house-to-house, and spare civilians, in neighborhoods full of hidden snipers and booby traps.
And of course, a frightened soldier is more prone to jumping the gun, so to speak. Certainly frayed nerves contributed to the awful friendly fire incident wherein Israel killed three young Israeli men who had just escaped from a Hamas dungeon.
Drones are controlled by teams. They review footage collectively in real time and then get a go-ahead from a senior officer. Whoever ok’d the strike has been fired, and now Israel is trying to extract “lessons learned.”
Can the United States say the same? After an air war in Kosovo that resulted in a number of infamous “misfires,” the hot-to-trot, posturing Biden administration in 2021 ordered a drone strike that took out a top aid worker and nine members of his family including seven children.
So the Blinken/Biden sanctimony is getting nauseating.
________________________________________________________________________
Sadly, Chef Andres said nothing like this. Asked about the drone footage showing “a Hamas operative firing from an aid truck, prior to the Israeli army killing seven WCK aid workers with multiple air strikes,” Andres, who it turns out, is as famous for his activism as for his restaurants, said that “Hamas cannot be ‘brought into the question’ every time something happens.”
“It’s been six months of targeting anything that seems to move,” he said. This is no longer “a war against terror or one about “defending Israel.” It now “seems to be a war against humanity itself.”
Please Chef, leave war analysis to others. Stick to food—which you may or may not be good at.