Strikes on Humanitarian Workers Are a Tragedy. Accountability Is a Necessity.
Strikes on Humanitarian Workers Are a Tragedy. Accountability Is a Necessity.
Plus: An ‘outraged and heartbroken’ Biden stays the course.
Bulwark Military Affairs Fellow Will Selber has thoughts on Israel’s mistaken killing of aid workers in the Gaza Strip this week:
After World Central Kitchen Strike, Accountability Matters
Humanitarian aid workers are heroes. I met a few during my time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although they keep a healthy distance from uniformed military members to maintain neutrality, I gained respect for their work. It takes a special type of courage to deliver aid to innocent civilians in the middle of a shooting war.
It is a tragedy when they are killed by combatants, especially when it is inadvertent. I’ve seen airstrikes go bad, up close and personal. During a firefight in Afghanistan, an A-10 provided much-needed close air support to my team but killed local Afghans in the process. While it was an accident, it was devastating for the Afghan family involved. We provided financial compensation, but nothing can replace a man’s family.
This Monday, the Israel Defense Forces made a similar disastrous mistake. A three-vehicle World Central Kitchen convoy—fresh from a job unloading aid at a warehouse in Deir al-Balah—was driving back to a staging area near Egypt when it was hit by multiple Israeli strikes. Seven humanitarian aid workers were killed, including a dual-national American citizen.
By all accounts, the aid workers had done everything right: They were traveling in clearly marked vehicles, and WCK had coordinated their movements in advance with the IDF, receiving military clearance to drive along the coastal road. It didn’t matter. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, citing defense sources, reported that “an Israeli drone fired three missiles one after the other” at the convoy; photos from the scene show a gaping hole from a precision strike that punched straight through the WCK logo on the roof of one armored car.
Both the IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apologized for the incident and pledged a swift investigation. Halevi insisted the strike was simply a terrible fog-of-war mistake.
“I want to be very clear—the strike was not carried out with the intention of harming WCK aid workers,” Halevi said. “It was a mistake that followed a misidentification—at night during a war in very complex conditions. It shouldn’t have happened.”
Halevi could also have added that his crews have been fighting nonstop for nearly six months. It’s too early to pinpoint what went wrong—simply because any of a thousand things could’ve gone wrong in the IDF’s intelligence cycle.
“A civilian casualty in a drone strike is never acceptable. But there’s always a reason it happened and lessons to be learned. Most of the time, it was due to tactics or training that needed to be refreshed. Sometimes it was bad intelligence or equipment failure,” one retired American service member who sat in on hundreds of drone strikes and the outbriefs of dozens of civilian casualty investigations told The Bulwark. (This service member, whose first name is James, requested that his last name be withheld because terrorist groups continue to target American drone operators and their families.)
Tragically, innocent people, even those helping the needy, are routinely caught in the crossfire. In October 2015, an American AC-130 struck a Doctors Without Borders clinic in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 22 staff members. According to a 2021 New York Times investigation, the Department of Defense made repeated mistakes in its air campaigns, resulting in thousands of dead, innocent women and children in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.
The DoD’s air campaign, combined with the Iraqi Security Force’s determination, turned the tide in Iraq. However, in Afghanistan, America’s errant air strikes turned segments of the rural population against the United States. While the IDF is involved in a different kind of war, it must quickly fix the mistakes that led to this tragic error. The IDF cannot afford more misfires, which zap popular support for its six-month-long war against Hamas. The IDF must hold accountable those who made these mistakes, something the U.S. military rarely does, and do so publicly to help staunch the bleeding before public pressure becomes too untenable for its patrons.
—Will Selber
Biden Grits His Teeth
The strike on the WCK convoy has once again ratcheted up the Gaza-related political peril facing President Joe Biden. In a Tuesday statement, Biden said he was “outraged and heartbroken” by the strike, adding that “Israel has also not done enough to protect civilians.”
But the White House continued to say its fundamental view of the conflict hasn’t shifted. “Nothing has changed,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters. “We’ve been clear about that, certainly since yesterday. We are going to continue to have those really tough conversations—important, tough conversations about how Israel moves forward with their operation.”
The stakes keep getting higher, but the fundamental political pain point remains the same. President Biden holds to America’s longstanding foreign policy on Israel: that it is a key ally in a region where most everyone would rather see them (and America, for that matter) wiped off the map, and that the ongoing militance of regional terror groups like Hamas in Gaza is an exigency Israel can’t afford to tolerate if it wants to survive. In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 terror attack that left hundreds of Israeli civilians dead, Biden was unequivocal: The United States would steadfastly support Israel in its pursuit of the elimination of Hamas in Gaza.
Many progressives in Biden’s base hold precisely the opposite view: the Jewish state of Israel as colonizing—even genocidal—oppressor, not besieged minority state in its region. These are the voters with whom Biden has been butting heads for months. But every flashpoint like the WCK strike threatens to broaden the anti-war coalition beyond those with pro-Palestinian priors. For less ideological Americans, it just may not matter how just is Israel’s cause for war, and it may not matter that Hamas is ultimately the entity responsible for the carnage: Israel is still the party dropping the bombs.
These political dangers are not lost on the White House, but there’s little indication they see any way to subvert them. Instead, the Biden administration has pursued a gut-it-out strategy: continuing to back most of Israel’s strategic moves while insisting that, if they were calling the shots, fewer civilians would be dying in the conflict.
At Tuesday’s White House briefing, Jean-Pierre doggedly refused to elaborate on Biden’s “outraged and heartbroken” statement. Six times in the briefing, she deflected questions about the strike and how the United States would respond to Israel’s pending internal investigation, repeating almost verbatim the same mantra: “We’ve called for this investigation to happen. We wanted to see it happen in a swift manner. We want to make sure that the findings are public and that there is accountability.”
—Andrew Egger
By George!
Kudos to our friend and Bulwark colleague George Conway who, in case you missed it, has donated $929,600, the maximum legal contribution, to the Biden Victory Fund.
When asked about this, George explained to CNN that “this election is about nothing less than whether we’ll continue to live in a democracy under the rule of law. That’s priceless, so I consider my contribution to be a bargain.”
On Twitter, Julie Zebrak commented that she hoped George’s “generosity will inspire others to dig deep—including those who never imagined themselves aligning with the Democratic Party.” To which George responded, “I hope so, too.”
This is great.
And inspiring.
But—I know George agrees with this—it shouldn’t inadvertently be a bit daunting to others who can help in different ways.
Because it’s not just money that’s needed. It’s not just money that can make a difference.
Grassroots volunteer efforts of many kinds; the use of social media to highlight key news items and advance different issues to voters you think need to hear about them; helping other groups spread their own complementary messages—those matter. They matter a lot. (By the way, those are all things George also spends a lot of time doing!)
This is a campaign of what Ben Wittes calls “a coalition of all democratic forces” on behalf of democracy. Different efforts with different messages using different mechanisms can get to different groups of voters, and it’s hard to know ahead of time what's going to be most effective or helpful or necessary.
So help out in whatever way you can, and in whatever way you think best. In our great democracy, everyone has a part to play in this great cause.
—William Kristol
Catching up . . .
Trump campaign on track for $43 million night in Palm Beach this weekend: Axios
Florida court allows 6-week abortion ban, but voters will get to weigh in: New York Times
There’s a reason you haven’t heard the White House bash Johnson’s Ukraine aid ideas: Politico
U.S. and China continue to talk, but economic divide remains wide: New York Times
State laws create a partisan divide in what is taught to most schoolchildren: Washington Post
Quick Hits: Hollowing Out the Conservative Legal Movement
Our pal Gregg Nunziata, who helms the Society for the Rule of Law, published his latest piece in The Dispatch—the nerve of that guy! It’s well worth your time. “The conservative legal movement took shape in the wreckage of the Nixon administration,” he writes. “As America faces the prospect of a second Trump administration, it faces an existential test”:
For many legal conservatives, a two-word incantation—“but judges”—defined the Trump era. It began as an exhortation or, perhaps, a justification. Later it became a coping device, edging into gallows humor. As the shadows lengthened in the last days of a desperate and increasingly lawless presidency, it became a rueful question. A mob, incited by the president who refused to accept a lawful election, sacked the Capitol, assaulted police officers, interrupted the electoral count, and hunted down officeholders—“But … judges?”
Conservatives who had wagered the Trump gambit worth the risk got the upside of their bargain. Trump nominated many excellent men and women to the judiciary. A confident conservative majority, grounded in originalism and textualism, now controls the Supreme Court. The white whale of Roe v. Wade—long emblematic of lawless usurpation of policymaking by the Court—fell . . .
But these advances in jurisprudence came at a deep civic cost. The president with whom legal conservatives allied themselves used his office to denigrate the rule of law, mock the integrity of the justice system, attack American institutions, and undermine public faith in democracy. Beyond the rhetoric, he abused emergency powers, manipulated appropriated funds for personal political ends, and played fast and loose with the appointments clause, all at the cost of core congressional powers. . .
Through the chaos and lawlessness, too many in the conservative legal movement remained silent—or worse. Now, as the former president faces long-delayed legal consequences for a variety of misdeeds, they stand by his self-serving slanders of our independent judiciary and obscene self-description as a “dissident.” Corners of the right even echo the former president’s strange affinity for foreign strongmen, favorably contrasting the illusion of order provided by the jackboot to the sometimes messy ordered liberty of our civic tradition.
Ominously, there are signs that the illiberalism of the Trump era has begun to infect how some legal conservatives think about their core commitments to the role of the courts. Partisans promise that Trump in a second term would nominate judges more loyal to the president while Trump-friendly, post-liberal thinkers develop theories like “common-good constitutionalism” in which conservative judges would abandon originalism in favor of promoting certain ends. Adrian Vermeule, the leading academic proponent of the latter view, has argued that “originalism has now outlived its utility, and has become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.” It would be deeply ironic, and the ultimate failure of the movement, if the “but judges” bargain were to end with purportedly “conservative” judges legislating from the bench.
Cheap Shots
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Bill, over the decades I literally can never recall ever disagreeing with you on anything.
In this case, I'm struggling with the idea of punishing the soldiers, who apparently were fighting at night and under unspeakable duress.
Imagine if the media were criticizing the U.S. military after each little bombing during WW2. The U.S. carpet-bombed German cities killing tens of thousands of people per night, but it was necessary to defeat Hitler. Otherwise we would all be saluting Nazi leaders to this day.
An idea I have is that reporters who are allowed to report on the war must be required to actually be fighting in battle alongside the soldiers, to ensure that reporters are being realistic in their critiques of all the efforts to keep Israel from being wiped off the map.
I'm late to the game, here, and there are likely others who commented on this yesterday, but...
"Trump nominated many excellent men and women to the judiciary. A confident conservative majority, grounded in originalism and textualism, now controls the Supreme Court."
This is disingenuous at best.