The Biden administration has finally begun to distance itself from the Netanyahu government. How much difference will that make?
Israel’s attack Monday night on a three-car convoy of the food-aid group World Central Kitchen brought to a head something that had been building slowly for a long time: American discontent with the war in Gaza.
Israel immediately said the attack, which left seven aid workers dead, was a mistake. But WCK Founder José Andrés wasn’t buying it:
This was not just a bad luck situation where, “Oops, we dropped a bomb in the wrong place.” … The airstrikes on our convoy I don’t think were an unfortunate mistake. It was really a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by everybody at the [Israel Defense Forces].
Thursday, the report of an internal IDF investigation told a more complex story.
The IDF’s investigation concluded that the army unit involved had believed the vehicles they were tracking from the sky had been taken over by Hamas gunmen, and that they were not aware of the coordination procedures put in place between the military and World Central Kitchen for that evening.
Andrés is calling for an independent investigation.
One reason this particular incident has had such an impact on world opinion is that it is part of a larger pattern.
Scott Paul, of Oxfam, said in a briefing with other relief organisations on Thursday before the results of Israel’s investigation were released: “Let’s be very clear. This is tragic but it is not an anomaly. The killing of aid workers in Gaza has been systemic.”
“Systemic” seems very carefully chosen. It does not necessarily mean “intentional”, but it includes that possibility. What “systemic” suggests to me is a kind of indifference: As things are, aid workers die on a fairly regular basis. This fact does not cause the system to change.
According to AP (which attributes the number to the UN) “at least 180 humanitarian workers have been killed in the war so far”. Those 180 are again part of a larger whole: around 33,000 Gazans, at least 13,800 of them children, have died since the war started. A much larger number of people are at risk due to the famine developing as insufficient quantities of food are brought in.
The larger numbers, though, are harder to form clear opinions about. Some of the 33K dead were the Hamas fighters Israel has every right to target. Some civilians were Hamas supporters, and some probably ventured into places they had been told to stay out of or ignored Israeli warnings about impending attacks.
But the seven WCK workers did everything right. They told the IDF what they were doing, which centered on delivering food to people who need it. They, like the 180 dead aid workers they joined, were people risking their lives to make sure strangers got food and medical care. We are, in short, talking about seven (and 180) of the best people in the world.
Until now, the Biden administration has chosen to keep its conflicts with the Netanyahu government behind closed doors. The public would hear reports that Biden was pressuring Netanyahu to be more forthcoming in negotiations over the ceasefire-for-hostages deal the US would like to broker, but publicly the US had Israel’s back at the UN and in every other public forum. Biden has paid a fairly large political price for this among progressive Democrats, especially young people. More recently, even longtime supporters of Israel, like Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have begun criticizing Netanyahu.
Thursday, Biden and Netanyahu had a phone call. The White House account of that call had a significantly different tone: Biden was demanding specific actions, and threatening consequences if they didn’t happen.
President Joe Biden ticked through several things that he needed to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu do immediately: open up the Erez crossing into northern Gaza and the port of Ashdod in southern Israel for humanitarian aid; significantly ramp up the supplies getting in through Kerem Shalom.
For now, Israel seems to be doing what Biden asked. But it will take time to see whether anything has substantively changed: Will more aid get through to Gazans? Will the famine abate? Will an attack on Rafah produce a new spike in civilian casualties? Will some kind of ceasefire-for-hostages deal actually happen? And if nothing changes, will Biden follow through with the “changes in our own policy” Secretary Blinken has suggested?
I think it’s important to keep repeating a point I’ve been making from the early days of the Gaza conflict: Americans should not be bringing this war home. American Jews are not the Netanyahu government. American Palestinians are not Hamas.
I am in complete agreement with Rabbi Mike Harvey on this point:
Memo to the bigots. Israel does not set its policies or run its war from: Synagogues, Jewish community centers, Holocaust museums, Kosher grocery markets, Jewish-owned cafes & shops
Bringing a mob to scream outside these places is an act of hate and antisemitism, not protest.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Thank you for this clear assesment. We (Americans) in our land of “milk and honey” jump easily into irrational conclusions & protests. The sad news constantly streaming out of the Gaza Strip is rife with human suffering. This business with the attack on the WCF convoy requires a thorough, non partisan, investigation. Somewhere in all the secreted electronic communications that occured that day is the answer to all our questions. It will take courage and diplomacy to discover it all.
Humanity has a very long history of marginalizing, silencing, imprisoning, and murdering the very best people among us. Sadly, the workers at WCK are just another entry on a very long list.
The long-term goal of the Israeli political right is to complete the annexation of all of the Palestinian Territories and impose the one-state solution, where that state is Israel. The Arabs of the PT have never agreed to a two-state solution, and they never will. Hamas explicitly exists for the purpose of liquidating the state of Israel, and the surest way for a Palestinian representative to wind up like Anwar Sadat (or Yitzhak Rabin for that matter), would be to agree to a solution that includes the right of Israel to exist.
The October 7th attack was the tipping point for Israel, deciding that the Taiwanesish strategy of daily extending an unresolved status quo until tomorrow would only bring another October 7th someday, and it was time to stop “mowing the grass” and instead pave the yard over.
Aid to Gazans works against this goal. They need to be displaced, not fed. Since Gaza is unmanageable, it needs to be leveled and its residents relocated.
That makes aid workers targets, which clearly the WCF was, and not for the bs excuse that the military group operating the drone that fired on it three separate times thought Hamas had commandeered the convoy and the WCF reps were no longer inside the vehicles. It was a message, and its delivery was successful, as aid workers have now withdrawn.
Gaza is essentially uninhabitable now; and that is by design. It will be up to Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, along with the US and Europe, to manage the transition to what follows. The international order can have the sole Jewish state to go along with the 55+ Muslim ones that currently exist, or it can have Hamas. It can no longer have both.
I wish this commenter hadn’t put the choice so starkly, but given the choice of a establishing a victorious Israel 1-state solution based on atrocities that rival those in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Nazi Germany, I’ll regretfully take no Jewish state.
This is partly a matter of self-preservation. A single Jewish state will be a target, sooner or later, for a handful of neutron bombs that would wipe out most of the Jewish population — or biological or radiological weapons that would render it uninhabitable.
We’ve done well in exile before, we can do it again. That is, we can do it again if we are not, as a people, considered to have committed one of the largest war crimes, violations of the Geneva convention, or maybe even a genocide (as that seems to be what the commenter is describing) in modern history. So for the selfish reason of not wanting to invite justified hatred and revulsion for being Jewish, this Jewish liberal would rather end the Israeli Experiment than see it become anathema. (This is only fair: the Israeli right is working to end the American Experiment this year.)
Luckily, I believe that this commenter is wrong — and that a two-state solution (with the most contemptible of the Likudniks and violent ultraconservatives in the dock if they can’t play nice) is still barely possible.
That good man, Joseph Biden, is being played for a fool by that Trump-with-more-brains in Jerusalem. It is sadly, sadly, well-past time for the flood of military aid to Israel to end. They cannot use that aid responsibly — and that it harms American Jews is just a bonus to them.
So does anyone know how a Jewish retiree can become an aid worker? That comment up there gave me a big push.
thank you for that wonderful, thoughtful post. My suggestion would be to start by trying to find out what organizations are doing the kind of work that you want to do. Check Google, the local library, non-profits that aren’t doing exactly what you want (because people will have ideas that can point you in the right direction).
Good luck.
I do enjoy your Weekly Sift and I look forward to receiving it. I usually agree with your positions, but not always. But this time I was led to respond.
You recently wrote, regarding Gaza:
“The larger numbers, though, are harder to form clear opinions about. Some of the 33K dead were the Hamas fighters Israel has every right to target. Some civilians were Hamas supporters, and some probably ventured into places they had been told to stay out of or ignored Israeli warnings about impending attacks.
“But the seven WCK workers did everything right. They told the IDF what they were doing, which centered on delivering food to people who need it. They, like the 180 dead aid workers they joined, were people risking their lives to make sure strangers got food and medical care. We are, in short, talking about seven (and 180) of the best people in the world.”
I was quite uncomfortable reading that. It raised a number of questions for me.
If Palestinian civilians support Hamas, it’s okay to kill them?
According to the Hamas 2017 Charter, the organization wants to liberate the Palestinian people and establish a Palestinian state. The charter describes the Palestinians as “a people who have been let down by a world that fails to secure their rights and restore to them what has been usurped from them, a people whose land continues to suffer one of the worst types of occupation in this world.” Further, it denounces anti-Semitism: “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity. Hamas rejects the persecution of any human being or the undermining of his or her rights on nationalist, religious or sectarian grounds. Hamas is of the view that the Jewish problem, antisemitism and the persecution of the Jews are phenomena fundamentally linked to European history and not to the history of the Arabs and the Muslims or to their heritage.”
So, people who politically support these ideas are fair game?
People who “ventured into places [in their own land] they had been told [by enemy intruders] to stay out of” were also fair game?
Do we know for a fact that the WCK workers and 180 others did not support liberation of Palestinians and establishment of a Palestinian state
I’m judging Hamas not by their public statements, but by actions like the October 7 attacks and the hostages they still hold.
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond to me. But the response (that you judge Hamas by its actions), doesn’t address my concerns.
The Weekly Sift seemed to suggest (without knowing their political stances) that 187 “of the best people in the world” have more value than any of the ten of thousands of dead Palestinians (whose political stances are largely also unknown).
And yes, of course we should be concerned about the Israeli hostages in Gaza, but let’s not forget the hundreds of Palestinian detainees (many held without charges) who are being mistreated in Israeli prisons see the Haaretz editorial “Abusing Palestinian Detainees Is Not the Way for Israel to Fight Hamas” (https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2024-04-05/ty-article-opinion/abusing-palestinian-detainees-is-not-the-way-for-israel-to-fight-hamas/0000018e-aaab-d906-a5cf-aabf93f10000). But that’s beside the point.
Again, my original criticism was directed at the devaluation of Palestinian people — not judging Hamas. Please be careful not to conflate all Palestinians with Hamas.
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