The spin master in charge of feeding Gaza

Vox

3 days ago

The desperate plight of starving Gazans has captured the world's attention. Children are dying of malnutrition. Over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while attempting to receive aid. The United Nations World Food Program has found that one-third of Gaza's roughly 2.1 million residents are not eating for multiple days in a row.
More than 100 international aid organizations — including Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, and Oxfam — signed a letter last week saying that 'restrictions, delays, and fragmentation under [Israel's] total siege have created chaos, starvation, and death.' And more than 30 countries, including Israel's allies, issued a joint statement earlier this month condemning 'the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.'
So who is overseeing this disaster? A public relations professional, the Rev. Johnnie Moore, with little experience in humanitarian aid. Moore is the executive chair of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private group backed by Israel and the US.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has been controversial since it took over aid distribution in Gaza in May. Its first executive director, Jake Wood, resigned after a few weeks and complained of Israeli interference in their operations. The UN had set up 400 distribution sites in Gaza, but the GHF reduced that to four. The shortage of distribution sites has meant that Gazans walk long distances for food, and often leave empty-handed.
Violence has also been prevalent at the aid distribution sites. American contractors armed with live ammunition and stun grenades guard the food alongside Israeli forces, who have opened fire on crowds awaiting aid. Israel denies responsibility and blames Hamas for the violence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that there is 'no starvation' in Gaza.
Today, Explained co-host Sean Ramewaram spoke with Arno Rosenfeld, enterprise reporter at The Forward, the largest Jewish news outlet in the United States, about Moore's background and how he's navigating the crisis.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There's much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Tell us more about the guy who's in charge of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), Johnnie Moore.
Johnnie Moore is an evangelical leader with a long history in Republican politics. He graduated from Liberty University and then worked in communications for them for a number of years. That's the university founded by Jerry Falwell, a big evangelical mecca in the country. And then he went from that into PR. He was running a boutique PR firm that got acquired recently by a larger firm, and they do work for both Marriott Hotels and also Focus on the Family. It's not exclusively conservative religious causes, but it includes that. And then he's had various roles in the government. So he was an evangelical adviser to President Trump during his first campaign. He prayed with Trump in the White House…
Prayed with Trump! Didn't know Trump was a big prayer.
Well, he's surrounded himself with these leaders. And Liberty was a big part of burnishing his conservative evangelical bona fides during that first race. So he has a long history there. And Moore held various posts in the government. He was on the committee that the US has to promote religious freedom around the world. So he's traveled around the world to defend the religious liberty of Muslims in China and different groups in different countries in the Middle East. He was involved in some of the diplomatic work with Saudi Arabia with Trump. He met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a number of years ago. So Moore has had long ties to the Trump administration, and now he is in this new role as a humanitarian.
Everything makes sense up until '... and now he's in this new role as a humanitarian.' Because, as you're saying here, he's basically a PR guy. How does he go from PR flack in the Trump administration to in charge of maybe one of the most consequential humanitarian missions on the planet?
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is a very strange entity, but the most direct answer to your question is that Moore has a long history of supporting Israel, of traveling to Israel. He's deep into the world of Christian Zionism. Of course, a lot of Israel's strongest supporters in the United States are evangelical Christians. And so he comes out of that world and has these ties. And I think for a variety of reasons, when they were looking for someone to take over this organization after the executive director stepped down in May after only a few weeks on the job, they brought Moore in to burnish its reputation. He's been on a big media tour. So he's leaning into his PR expertise in this new role.
What's he saying on his big media tour?
His argument is basically that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is the victim of conspiracy theories promoted by the United Nations, which wants to hoard all of the aid and the glory for delivering food for themselves. He's also claiming that Hamas is on their own PR tour and has snookered all of these reporters around the world into repeating lies about the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
So, basically, GHF is doing great work. They're doing the most Christian thing possible, in his words, feeding people. And unfortunately, the entire international aid community at the behest of the UN and perhaps also Hamas just has it in for them. It's very unfair, but they're not going to let that stop them from doing the Lord's work.
What does he have to say about all the dead Palestinians?
The dead Palestinians as a result of starvation or as a result of being shot while trying to get food from his organization?
The second one.
His argument is, again: It's very tragic. They never want anyone to lose their lives. He said that they complain often to the IDF when the IDF shoots at people queuing for aid. He said the IDF has taken responsibility for those incidents. He said Hamas has also attacked GHF employees and Palestinians trying to get aid from GHF, and that Hamas has not taken responsibility for that. He said that more people are being killed trying to get UN and World Food Programme aid than have been killed trying to get his organization's aid. It depends a little bit how you parse the statistics. I don't think that's true, but that's what he's been saying in these public appearances.
Is he convincing anyone?
One of the things that's important to understand about his role and what the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is intended to do is that there is a segment of Israel supporters in the United States that live in a little bit of an alternate reality. And I think his job is to convince those people that Israel and the United States are not responsible for Palestinian civilians starving in Gaza.
So, for example, the piece that I wrote was about him addressing the American Jewish Congress. And his argument to them was basically: Yes, there is a humanitarian crisis. We are doing everything in our power. The United States and Israel are doing the right thing. Unfortunately, all these other aid groups are just letting food rot.
He's a charismatic guy. He's good at talking to these audiences. So I do think it's a convincing message for that audience. It's just a very specific audience.
Does it tell us something, though, that this is the kind of person that was put at the top of this operation, that it wasn't someone with deep experience in aid, but instead someone who would fight the PR war around the effort?
It's another good question because Cindy McCain, John McCain's widow, runs the World Food Programme. So it's not totally unprecedented to have people who have a public profile and political connections in these figurehead roles atop humanitarian organizations. But Cindy McCain, after a lot of pressure, has become increasingly critical of the Israeli government. That's what people thought might happen with GHF.
It's not just that Moore has these political connections or that he doesn't have deep expertise in humanitarian aid, but his job is to defend the United States and Israel, which is incredibly unusual. It's not anything that I've seen an aid organization do in the past.
Certainly sometimes they speak out politically here or there, but they're not typically primarily promoting what almost seems like a political agenda. And that's a lot of what we've seen Johnnie Moore do, even as he insists the politics are the worst possible thing for humanitarian aid and he doesn't want anything to do with them.
A lot of Israel supporters in the United States are liberal. They do care about civilians in Gaza, and they're very alarmed by what they're seeing in the news about starvation in Gaza. And so I think those people desperately want to be reassured that Israel, the Jewish state that they support, is not responsible for mass starvation and civilian suffering in Gaza. And he's presented a very compelling narrative to them.
That's a lot of the role that he's playing right now. And I think that he's playing it well.