Rapid Response: Lessons from Gaza & Israel, with World Central Kitchen’s Erin Gore and the Builders Movement's Daniel Lubetzky

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1:18Hey, everyone. It's Bob here. We're fresh off the invite-only Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. Two days of extraordinary conversations and insights from AI to brand loyalty to team building. And one of the most important stage sessions I led had to do with Gaza and Israel. We're going to share that session with you here today. It features Aaron Gore, the CEO of World Central Kitchen, which is providing much needed food relief in Gaza and has lost several team members in the violence there. and Daniel Lubetzky, founder of Kind Snacks and the One Voice Movement, an organization dedicated to building bridges between Israelis and Palestinians.

1:59As you'll hear, our conversation clarifies the challenges in the region, as well as offering lessons on how to lead during crisis and how to keep our minds open to varied beliefs and perspectives. It's important stuff, so let's get to the stage. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

2:23We're going to do a live Rapid Response session here today, and we're going to talk about managing in an environment of crisis and uncertainty and division. And it's serious. We're going to be talking today about Israel and Gaza. This is a difficult and challenging topic. We realize that. There will be references in the conversation to violence and to hate and to other difficult issues. We ask you to be respectful of what you hear, that you try to keep your eyes, your ears, your minds open. and please do try to be respectful of the opinions that you hear voiced by everybody up here because it is a challenging topic.

3:15And in the process, we hope that you can look for and find and see ways of dealing with really fast-moving, challenging situations in a way that might apply to your world because we all have challenges that we are addressing with our teams and in our world. So with your cooperation, some deep breaths as we delve into this topic. I'm going to have two guests up here. The first is the CEO of World Central Kitchen, Aaron Gore. You saw World Central Kitchen is a winner of this year's Master Scale Rapid Response Award. World Central Kitchen is an extraordinary organization. They've been feeding millions of people all around the globe, from hurricane victims to Ukraine and to Israel and Gaza as well.

4:06So if you will join me, please welcome Aaron Gore. All right.

4:21All right. So, Erin, we're going to jump right in. Let's do it. You ready? Ready. Okay. So World Central Kitchen works in incredibly difficult situations all over the world. Thousands of people have been tragically killed in Gaza and Israel and Lebanon over the past year. I want to begin by asking you about what you've called the worst day of your life. last April 1st when seven World Central Kitchen aid workers were killed by an IDF strike in Gaza. You and your team first heard about this on social media when people were posting images of bloody bodies and of your colleagues with passports identifying.

5:07I mean, I can only imagine that trauma. Friends, yeah. So how do you react in that situation as a leader? How do you think about leading your team? Like, what do you do? And then I guess from there, sort of how does it impact World Central Kitchen's relief efforts going forward from there? Yeah, a lot to unpack. And I think I'm still honestly processing some of it to this day. Our work in Gaza, our work in Israel, our work in Lebanon, it's so profound. We have learned so much about who we are, how we show up how we have impact over the almost 15 years that we have been in existence as a non-profit.

5:50Our purpose is to feed people after disasters, after crises. What I've heard from the team in Israel, especially in Gaza and now in Lebanon, is that our work has never been more dire, more profound, more life-saving than what we are doing, what we are accomplishing in Gaza. Our team, the seven colleagues and friends that we lost on top of the 500 Palestinians that still carry out this work in Gaza for us every single day, they were there because we had served over 75 million meals. We were a driving force in breaking through barriers to really complicated, really challenging scenarios where food is absolutely a lifeline.

6:42I mean I could see in a situation like that also sort of saying like well maybe we should pull back a little bit because we're in danger in a way that maybe we didn't expect we were necessarily going to be in danger and yet instead you sort of doubled down added new kitchens named after some of your colleagues yeah look we had really really hard conversations I mean you're showing my colleagues right now it's Saif, it's Sami, Damien, Jacob, John, Jim, and James. You know, a lot of the work that we do carrying forward is in their honor, to honor their legacy. I speak their names often because they're not here physically, but I can keep them alive.

7:28We can keep their memories alive by saying their names. And that is a promise that we have made, that I have made to their families, to the organization that they would want. And so, you know, in moments of crisis or disasters, and like that's what we do, right? Of all the people that are used to operating in disasters and crises, it's World Central Kitchen. But to lead in that moment, there's, as you said, how we found out social media, and that's common in Gaza. There aren't a lot of news outlets. There's not a lot of international press. There's, again, so many Palestinian heroes that are doing their best, risking their lives to share so many different stories every single day.

8:13And so for us to find out on social media, everybody has a crisis plan. You have your A, you call this person, you call that person. All of that just implodes. It explodes, right? And so for us, it was just leading through making decisions with incomplete information, which is oftentimes what happens during crises, during disasters, it's piecemeal. But you have to make immediate decisions, immediate actions. And you have to sort of set your own emotions aside? Try to. Yeah, try to. In this case, I was able to do that because my first priority was the families of our victims, of our colleagues, of our friends, right?

8:58Everything, my purpose became, you know, to find information, to give them answers. obviously World Central Kitchen we want and need more answers than we have today and we continue to ask those questions we continue our investigation which we're not so open about we're not public about but that does continue but yeah it's really challenging and I think we're all here because we do challenging things and you know there's lots of pride and accomplishment that drives us forward but sometimes there's lots of pain as well but you know through these moments it's very iterative you learn more information or you make a decision and then oh it wasn't the right decision so you have to very quickly pivot so you just have to be very comfortable in that space even when so much is weighing on you when the world is looking at you when other NGOs are calling and saying okay this is the moment World Central Kitchen is in the limelight you guys can change the trajectory here you guys can change Israel's decisions.

9:59And I mean, as much as I would love to have and wield that power, it's simply not true. And so there is a lot weighing, you know, in these crisis scenarios. But, you know, we did pause the activation, right? You mentioned that we stopped and then we carried forward. We did pause the activation because there for a while, I wasn't sure if this paella pan that is our beloved logo, if this paella pan was effectively a bullseye, right? The vehicles that our teammates, that our colleagues and friends are traveling in were marked vehicles. They were mostly armored vehicles. And the drones, you know, hit right through our logos.

10:37And so safety, security first in a context where there are no guarantees, but in a place where international humanitarian law should carry some weight, right? And so it did take us a while. I did pause our activation for about a month, had really hard conversations with colleagues had really hard conversations and when I say colleagues I mean the 500 Palestinians who are working with us still to this day essentially and effectively what it came down to was them their heart their passion and we as World Central Kitchen needing and always leading with community and listening to the community the situation again it's a lifeline there's so many dangers I have so many messages in my WhatsApp, yeah, of saying, you know, we're gonna, we might die, we might die today.

11:26There are so many that have just kind of accepted their own mortality, right, that any day, any moment could be their time, and that their time might come from a gun, a missile, or starvation, and them saying, I don't want to die from starvation, and we can do something about that. So how can we not show up? I'm going to thank you for sharing all that. I'm going to bring out our second guest to join us, another MasterScale Awards honoree, our Global Impact Award winner. He spent decades working to try to bring Israeli and Palestinian businesses together to build bridges, build bridges through the One Voice movement.

12:09He's also the founder of Kind Snacks. So please welcome Daniel Lubetzky.

12:25Well, Daniel, thanks for joining us. You were a guest on my Rapid Response podcast a year ago, just after Hamas, the October 7th attacks and hostage-taking. And you talked about needing to support builders over destroyers. Since then, we've seen a lot more destruction than we've seen building. I mean, Gaza's leveled, you know, thousands of Palestinians perishing, violence spreading to Lebanon. How has the last year impacted your perspective? Are you still focused on building?

13:06Yeah, the last year is one of the hardest years of my life. I mean, pales in comparison to what my father went through. He was a Holocaust survivor, so I want to also be a little bit respectful of other people's suffering, which is much greater. But just to give people some background, because you might not know this about me, and then I can answer your question. I was born in Mexico, but came to the United States when I was 16. My first company after law school is PeaceWorks, which for 25 years brought Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Turks to use business as a force for breaking stereotypes, cementing relationships, and building ventures that lasted for a quarter century.

13:47And then, together with a Palestinian-Israeli co-founder, Mohammad Daralsha, we launched the One Voice Movement, which became the largest grassroots movement in both Israel and Palestine, to try to empower citizens to seize back the agenda for conflict resolution and seize it back away from forces of violent absolutism on all sides. And so during the Hamas massacre of October 7th, a lot of our Palestinian and Israeli staff and family members died, including Mohammad Rausche, my co-founder's cousin, who was a Muslim nurse trying to tend to victims of the massacre and who was killed by the Hamas terrorists.

14:31and following Israel's response to Hamas, we had also a number of our Palestinian staff members die and it's heartbreaking, like it's heartbreaking to have Israeli, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim and Palestinian members be killed by this conflict. And what breaks my heart even more is what I've noticed, you know, when I started Peace Works and One Voice, I always thought that my role was going to be to build bridges in the Middle East and to prevent what happened to my father from happening again to others in the Middle East by bringing peace to that region. And I worry globally that instead of us exporting that, we're importing across the world more tribalization, more hate.

15:20All of us here in the United States are experiencing more division, certainly since I immigrated to the United States. And it's a global problem of builders versus destroyers. And there's many, many forces contributing to toxic polarization that are actually winning right now. If you look at the last year, every one of us around the audience, myself, all of us, are being impacted by that. And every one of us recognizes that there's a problem on the other side. But we don't recognize it happening to us and to our groups. And it's very, very serious because whether it's in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where pro-Israel people have one set of information that they're getting and pro-Palestine people have another one, or in the context of the blue-red divide here, our social media feeds are telling us what we want to hear rather than what we need to hear.

16:15and each side only sees the worst of the other side. They don't understand the pain of the other side. We're just losing empathy. We're losing an appreciation for a little bit more nuance and context. And it's going to be harder for us as builders to overcome these divisions if we allow that. So I think it starts with everyone that's listening today and everyone in their daily lives understanding that this is happening to us, that whether it's rigid ideologies or foreign adversaries funding groups to try to divide us, or political forces using scandal and division to raise funds and stay in power rather than to solve problems, or social media algorithms feeding us this hate, or all these toxic forces polarization.

17:01We need to try to overcome that by building alliances with those that are different from us, however difficult it is, it's doubly important, searching within ourselves for the four C's of curiosity, compassion, creativity, and courage that make a builder's mindset, and then affirmatively doing something about it. And it's just going to take a ton of work. I want to ask, you mentioned that you're Jewish. I'm Jewish also. You have not been a supporter necessarily of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He said he considers you an enemy. He's called you a traitor to the Jewish people. I'm curious how you parse your feelings about Israel versus your feelings about the Israeli government.

17:48So the easy part for, I assume, in the audience for people to like me is to say, yes, I recognize that Prime Minister Netanyahu was not in the best interests of the Israeli people, of the Jewish people of the world over 10, 12 years ago. And the reason he called me that is because I supported who's now President Herzog when he sought to unseat Prime Minister Netanyahu over 10 years ago. I don't think he's a good person. But just like the context of Trump, just because it's Netanyahu or Trump that has a policy, doesn't necessarily make everything they're doing monstrous. And so I'm going to challenge you and myself by just saying that the conflict today, the extremists are winning because they're manipulating us.

18:38And so... Extremists on both sides. On both sides. And so prior to October 7th, the Netanyahu Ben-Greed Smotrich government is the most far right wing government that's existed in Israel's history. And there's a lot of factors why Netanyahu allied himself with them, which are not good reasons related to his investigation. So I think that government is definitely a problem. But today, for people like Kai to be able to come and be builders and build jobs and build opportunities and bridges, I recognize that that will never be possible so long as Hamas stays in power in Gaza. So I'm a peacemaker.

19:19I'm not a pacifist. For me to do my job and for my Palestinian partners to do their job and my Israeli partners to do it. I'm a confused Mexican Jew, by the way. So I'm like, I mean, this, but I've been to Gaza multiple times. I've been to the West Bank countless times, to Israel countless times. I very much believe in the right of Israel and the homeland to the Jewish people to live in peace with its Palestinian partners as the homeland of the Palestinian people. And, you know, I will answer your question in one second, but I want to say anybody that place into violent absolutists on either side is actually condemning their own people.

20:02Because over the last year, we've been seeing people supporting Hamas and supporting the extremists on either side. You're not helping your own people because if you have an absolutist vision that wants Palestine to raise Israel, the Israelis are never going to hand the keys. It's just going to create a perpetual conflict. And the people that are living with the consequences in Palestine and Israel understand that, and they want to find a historic compromise. But it just gets harder and harder. But going back to Netanyahu, I don't think he's a good person, but I wouldn't just because he supports a particular policy think that necessarily I oppose that policy.

20:37And I, as painful as it is, because I see everyday images today, I saw images of 7 ,000 Palestinians leaving the Jabalia refugee camp. And it's heart-wrenching to see the kids having to leave. And I see that content because my Palestinian partners make sure that I see it and my Israeli partners to make sure that I see their content. But until we remove Hamas from power, my Palestinian partners tell me this, it's not going to be possible for us to start bringing investments, bringing jobs, and starting to rebuild a better future. Just like we need to remove the Netanyahu Bank versus Mottish government from power through elections, because in Israel there will be hopefully democratic elections in the next 18 months.

21:17And once you have those conditions, we need to double down. But until then, we need to start preparing with a builder's blueprint for how we're going to take this horrible crisis and turn it into the need for us to advance this. Just a quick breather here to absorb what we've been hearing. The complications in the Middle East are so challenging and they reflect rising challenges elsewhere. But there is hope and incredible heroism underway. After the break, we'll hear more from Daniel and Aaron, as well as a reflection from a Palestinian business leader. Stay with us.

22:03Before the break, we heard World Central Kitchen CEO Aaron Gore and Kind Snacks and One Voice Movement founder Daniel Lubetzky on stage at the Master's of Scale Summit talking about the conflict in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon. Now we get into the emotional challenge of trying to be neutral amid so much strife and the role of optimism versus determination in working to resolve the conflict. Plus, insights from a Palestinian business leader. Let's get back to it.

22:35I want to ask you something, Aaron. I was recently at an event with you, World Central Kitchen, that you had with founder Jose Andres. And I got to meet a bunch of your colleagues who have been serving people in the Middle East and elsewhere. And I could see that for them, it sort of can be hard for them to maintain neutrality. You know, they have a lot of strong feelings about the environment that they're in. But I also know that as an aid organization, you kind of have to be neutral to be able to get access to these areas where you're working. And I'm just curious how you balance this neutrality with sort of addressing these strong emotions from your teams.

23:18A lot of folks out here have teams that have strong emotions on all sides of this issue. I know you've had two people quit because they wanted World Central Kitchen to take stronger positions. Like, how do you think about balancing those things? I mean, from a corporate mission standpoint, it's simple. It's so simple. We show up, we feed people, no questions asked. Have you been affected by a disaster crisis? is, here's a warm meal. From the people standpoint, it has been challenging. It really has. And I think that that really speaks to the divisiveness that you were mentioning earlier. I mean, there's a simplicity to what we do, right?

23:55Non-political. We actually started feeding in Israel first, shortly after October 7th, I think on October 8th, actually. And then as soon as we could get into Gaza, because it's very complex and complicated getting in there, then, And, you know, we started feeding in Gaza and now we're in Lebanon. And so, you know, we walk the walk. We talk the talk. I, as a leader, always have to be very purposeful and driven, grounded and rooted. But the minute we start to take a side either way is the minute that we don't have the freedom and the liberty to feed around the world. Right. And I would never jeopardize that.

24:30And I think that it really speaks to. I mean, has the business community been, global community, been like sort of helpful or not in helping you deal with the situation, in, you know, protecting people in harm's way? Like, do you feel like the partnerships are in the right places? You know, I love that question, actually, in their hearts, yes. Not always in their actions, right? And I think that there's so much trepidation from business leaders in particular to come forth outright and support. I mean, we're a nonprofit, so we take financial donations, right? We haven't raised as much as we have in the Ukraine when the Ukraine war escalated, right?

25:15And so I think that there's a lot of fear to take a side or that helping, which I don't really understand. We're helping humanity. We're feeding people, right? It's not taking a side. You're picking people. But the world isn't so. You've had some frustration about the business. I want to go deeper to what you were talking about. I really want to make sure that all of us understand how serious these issues are, not just in the very serious context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but in everything that we're experiencing nowadays. Because I believe if you were to track how open-minded society and all of us were 10 years ago versus right now, every one of us is less so today because of all these forces that I said.

25:53And so we need to exercise the muscle of a builder's mindset. And when I say curiosity, I mean what we all need to do is, as painful as it is, read sources that we're uncomfortable reading. As painful as it is, click on links of commentary from the opposite side of where we come from. So we better understand the other side. Because these algorithms are just going to tell you what you want to hear and affirm rather than inform your beliefs. And it just gets worse and worse. I even see it in my own algorithms. I used to get more balanced Israeli-Palestinian stuff. But as a Jewish person, it's hard for me to click on that painful stuff about Palestinian suffering.

26:28So now my feeds are much more just the Israeli narrative. And it just takes a lot of work to do the painful work to understand what's going on on other sides. Like almost always when I get information from 99 % of people, I know what they're going to tell me. They're not trying to challenge themselves. Don't just share to reaffirm what your friends believe, what you believe. it so much easier for all of us, try to understand the other side, because whether we're talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the election here, I mean, I was going to... Aaron was actually backstage showing me some photos of her recent trip to Florida during the hurricane, and you showed me a gumball machine, which is not something, yes, it's a gumball machine with ammunition in it, which is, you know, just another part of the world to reflect on.

27:20There's actually, there's someone here in the audience who I want to bring into this conversation, if I can. He's a Palestinian business leader. He was forced to flee his home in Gaza in 2014. I think I have that right. He works here in the U.S. now. He actually works with Daniel at the One Voice movement. His name is Ez Masri. Ez, thank you for joining us here. Back at your family's home in Gaza, you experienced a lot of hardship. Hamas had hit guns in your backyard, your home was ransacked and eventually destroyed. You still have family and friends there. So what are things that you think the business community, that this group here should understand about what's happening on the ground in Gaza?