Why Is José Andrés Feeding Israel While It Starves Palestinians in Gaza?
When does feeding the hungry become feeding the machine?
It was golden hour when I received a late call from an editor asking me to hop on a photoshoot with José Andrés. I was already driving to leave the city for the weekend, but I turned around. This is an opportunity, I thought.
The first time I met him was during the pandemic. I had spent much of that period documenting American officials failing their public miserably, either by refusing to acknowledge the catastrophe or by lacking the courage to secure urgent aid. His work stood apart. He opened his restaurants to feed people for free. People were not used to that kind of spontaneous generosity. It came from an immigrant, the kind America claims as its own only when it suits the narrative of success.
He arrived late, first an hour then another, without notice. At his level, I suppose, such delays barely register. I waited. His assistant appeared first. José followed, smiling, already engaged with his team. I greeted him. He continued speaking to them. By the second frame, it was clear: the photograph held no priority for him.
What bothered me was not the delay itself but how insignificant my time appeared to him. The coordinator offered a quiet apology as they walked away. I brushed it off, I’d shot plenty of celebrity portraits. One learns fast how myth dissolves up close. Still, it did not feel personal.
Because I have bled loved ones, I do not take much of this life seriously anymore. There is a strange freedom that comes with having lost everything you once loved. They take souls out of your soul. What remains is released from expectation and forbidden from certain joys. I call it freedom.
I assumed then that our worlds were fundamentally different. He had likely never walked the streets of my Gaza, never breathed its dust, never carried its weight.
I know pain, in theory, has no nation. But in practice? It lands unevenly. It respects borders when it wants to. It grants immunity to some and denies it to others.
When Israeli occupation forces struck the World Central Kitchen convoy, killing seven of his team, I hoped he would keep the promise his work had made. They did not die in the fog of war. Their vehicles bore unmistakable markings, carried approved permits, and had been fully coordinated with the Israeli military. The logos were emblazoned across the roofs, visible from above, and still not spared. He wasn’t in the vehicle. He isn’t in Gaza. But the pain, now, is his to reckon with.
Israel struck the first vehicle. The survivors, burned and broken, rushed to the second. Israel struck the second. As the surviving staff turned back to rescue the wounded in the third, Israel struck the third.
Six international staff. One Palestinian. Executed car by car while fear and pain still lived in them. The permits meant nothing. The logos meant nothing. They were known, marked, and erased anyway.
Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, Palestinian. Damian Soból, Polish. Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom, Australian. James Henderson, British. John Antony Chapman, British. James Kirby, British. Jacob Flickinger, Canadian.
José Andrés stood at the head of the organization that carried their names on its payroll. The same man whose kindness once knew no borders.
And now he returns to Gaza, feeding millions of Palestinians who stand under Israeli siege and forced starvation. I remain exiled from my family and from home. His world still grants him passage. Mine does not.
His kindness, it seems, still refuses borders. Yet I cannot help but wonder: when he hands food to Israeli settlers, to the same military apparatus, is he truly feeding the hungry? Or feeding the aggressor? A settler colonial nation that has repeatedly stomped on food aid convoys, blocked essential supplies, and pushed Gaza toward engineered famine. It faces no hunger risk of its own.
That is the difference between us. One gets to keep moving through the world, feeding both sides with apparent ease. The other is left carrying the names of the dead, wondering what generosity truly means when it chooses access over memory and appears to appease the very force that crushed his own workers.
The golden hour faded long ago. Some lights do not return with the next dawn.
Sources:Legal framework: Geneva Conventions; ICRC Customary IHL Rule 31. WCK incident details: WCK official statements, UN OCHA; Bellingcat; Amnesty International. Gaza context: UN OHCHR, UN Independent Commission of Inquiry. Reporting standards: CPJ, Dart Center. All sources public.
Why is this happening . Unbelievable
Psychosis of Whiteness. The Sodomites of Israel have the fucking world lobotomized and/or habituated to the Jewish State of Rape Murder Hate Theft Maiming Starvation.
In the U$A of Israel, they are now promoting full veterans' benefits for those who murdered in the IDF as long as they are "citizens".
https://paulokirk.substack.com/p/bullshit-jobs-deplorables-in-the
An all-encompassing, insightful and wry look at living in a racist world, by a leading black British voice in the academy and in the media. Take a step through the looking-glass to a strange land, one where Piers Morgan is a voice worth listening to about race, where white people buy self-help books to cope with their whiteness, where Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are seen by the majority of the population as 'the right (white) man for the job'. Perhaps you know it.
All the inhabitants seem to be afflicted by serious delusions, like that racism doesn't exist and if it does it can be cured with a one-hour inclusion seminar, and bizarre collective hallucinations, like the widely held idea that Britain's only role in slavery was to abolish it. But there is a serious side too. Black and brown people suffer from a greater number of mental health difficulties, caused in no small part by living in a racist society. Society cannot face up to the racism at its heart and in its history, so the delusions and hallucinations it conjures up to avoid doing so can only best be described as a psychosis, and the costs are being borne by the sons and daughters of that racist history.
https://www.lse.ac.uk/lse-player/the-psychosis-of-whiteness