Here is the headline we did not see these past two days: “Seven aid workers died in the humanitarian crisis in Gaza”.  Instead, headlines and politicians alike condemned Israel’s deadly military strike on the World Central Kitchen team. 

The difference is telling. We find that human beings with names and faces have been killed. We find that Israel’s intentions and tactics have magically reappeared after six months of so often being passive-languaged out of the narrative by Western governments, the press and most concerningly by humanitarian agencies.  People have thus been re-awakened to the idea that Israel is killing aid workers and civilians in Gaza. Over 197 of the former and 32,000 of the latter (if we limit our numbers to the past six months).

Such is the power of six Western aid workers deaths. (My apologies for omitting from that death toll Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, a Palestinian member of the team. The headlines were not for him, even if he and his family should weigh equally in our sympathies.). We have U.S. President Joe Biden exclaiming outrage and even highlighting that this attack on humanitarians was not a “stand-alone incident”. That politicians now find the voice to employ such unequivocal language reeks of concern for the cost of their unflinching political and material support to Israel. It also seems like an attempt to create distance from their woeful abandonment of the rules of war over the past six months.

I wonder. Will Israel’s “mistake” provoke more than a shift in tone? I wonder for humanitarians as well. Can we express our outrage over the killing of WCK’s staff without overplaying the narrative of aid workers as “heroes”? Our outrage requires deft communication. Can we make this about the 32,000+ and those to come (because even a ceasefire today will not avoid many of the deaths of tomorrow)? Or even better, can we play on the “heroes” language, perhaps using it to describe not ourselves but the Gazan fathers feeding scraps of scavenged food to their children, or Gazan mothers rinsing from their stinging eyes the dust of their former home?

The issue is that the language and imagery of heroic aid workers too easily invokes a differential; a holier status for people like me and an idea that routine civilian killing is less horrific than special civilian killing, despite the 4571-fold differential in numbers.  As grotesque as the attack on WCK’s vehicles is, instrumentalizing it to open up the space for greater humanitarian action brings risks.  Aid agencies should ensure that our stand on these deaths does not echo the longstanding prejudice and hypocrisy in which the deaths of seven will exert more influence over policy and practice than the deaths of 32,000.  We must thus avoid reinforcing the industrial dehumanization of Palestinians through actions and words that suggest their lives are worth exponentially less than those of Western people.

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