By Wyatt Reed and Max Blumenthal / The Grayzone
State Department-linked Spanish celebrity chef José Andrés has emerged as the US government’s preferred conduit for aid to enter Gaza, following the Biden administration’s decision to suspend funding to the enclave’s main supplier of food, aid and education, the UNRWA.
The operation appears designed to serve as a stopgap measure to provide minimal quantities of food to Gaza’s famine-stricken population until the US military finishes building a pier in the Mediterranean Sea, and a shadowy contractor run by former US Marines and CIA officials is able to implement an aid program called “Blue Beach Plan.”
Andrés’ organization, World Central Kitchen, has already finished constructing its own jetty, which was made from the rubble heaps in Gaza — a decision that virtually guaranteed the building materials contain the remains of humans killed by Israeli bombing.
The use of genocidal biomatter in the construction of the pier has been roundly ignored by legacy media outlets, whose fawning coverage of the plans has instead cast Andrés as a kind of maverick “superhero” fighting to protect Palestinian civilians in the face of international indifference.
In their rush to lionize the shady chef, the Washington Post falsely claimed, “The first ship bearing aid to Gaza since 2005… was spearheaded not by the United Nations or a world leader but by a celebrity chef, José Andrés.” In 2008, activists succeeded in using boats to deliver aid to Gaza six times before Israel began sinking the ships and killing members of their crew.
Strangely, these English-language outlets have generally neglected to mention that WCK is only able to operate in Gaza with the explicit permission of the Israeli military. The New York Times was an exception, noting in a glowing profile of Andrés’ group that “the Israeli military helped World Central Kitchen’s operation, providing security and coordination” and that “every step was carried out with permission from the Israeli military.”
“Nothing goes in without Israel’s permission,” Andrés himself conceded in an interview with NBC News. The chef claimed Israel’s COGAT unit which controls aid to the besieged enclave is “doing everything at its disposal to help the people of Gaza,” but that its “hands are tied” by the military operation.
Immediately before their recent pivot to Gaza, Andrés’ WCK spent several weeks providing meals to Israeli soldiers following Hamas’ October 7 attack.
On October 16, when Spain’s then-Minister for Social Rights, Ione Belarra, condemned Israel for conducting a “genocide” in Gaza, Andrés immediately jumped to Tel Aviv’s defense and demanded her resignation:
“You as Minister have to first recognize that the Hamas attack against civilians is a terrorist act… and that Israel @IsraelinSpain is defending its citizens… then you can ask for restraint and respect for the lives of civilians in Gaza,” the US government-aligned chef bellowed.
“Do you also support Russia? Who has killed children and women and old people and civilians?” Andrés continued. “Are you Pro @KremlinRussia_E and Pro Hamas? You do not represent me or Spain. She does not deserve to be a minister…. President [Sanchez] should remove her from her position…”
State Department asset Jose Andrés likens Blinken to Thomas Jefferson
Andrés has collaborated closely with the US government. Since early 2023, the celebrity chef has worked with the US State Department as a member of the so-called “American Culinary Corps,” a new partnership between Foggy Bottom and the James Beard Foundation.
When Andrés gave a softball interview to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on his podcast that February, their warm and comfortable relationship was on full display.
“You are this fascinating man, who graduated at Harvard… you even play guitar, you have three songs on Spotify,” Andrés gushed, during his first question to the top American diplomat. “You grew up in New York, in Paris, you are fluent in French… What do you remember eating as a young man growing up in Paris?”
When Blinken responded that “for me, going to the McDonald’s… that was the culinary experience,” and said his most cherished foods in France were “English muffins and Bumblebee tuna fish,” the world-renowned chef generously compared him to America’s second Minister to France, Thomas Jefferson, who famously grew his own crops and had various foods shipped from his Virginia slave plantation while stationed in Paris.
But the real purpose of the conversation quickly revealed itself when Andrés asked his follow-up question: “What else US and international community can be doing to keep putting pressure on Russia to make sure that grain has not become another form of weapon?”
Andrés serves not only as a semi-official emissary of the US government, but as a representative of one of its top client states. In September of 2023, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky personally welcomed Andrés to the country, describing the chef as an “ambassador” of Ukraine’s official aid collection agency, whose “strong voice helps us maintain global support.”
The chef’s intimate relationship with the US predates the current conflict in Ukraine. In 2020, he was honored at an event by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he was warmly introduced by now-CIA chief Bill Burns, who called it a “special pleasure” to bring Andrés onstage.
The result of this collusion appears to be a series of double standards that treats the lives of Palestinian as secondary to those living under the US government’s preferred regimes – a disparity which was unintentionally highlighted by recent headlines from US outlets who conducted interviews with the chef.
In April 2022, Axios wrote: “José Andrés: Russia is ‘totally’ using starvation as a weapon of war.” When speaking about Israel two years later, he displayed a significantly milder tone. According to NBC’s Meet the Press, “José Andrés says Israel should ‘totally’ be doing more to get aid into Gaza.”
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
Max Blumenthal
The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.