Wearing an olive-drab apron over the white T-shirt-and-jean-shorts uniform of influencers everywhere, Brooke Baevsky is explaining her morning to her audience on TikTok. “I traveled about two hours from Tel Aviv to G@z@,” Baevsky says, spelling the name of the territory this way in the caption.
In October, Baevsky, a food influencer and private chef based in Los Angeles who calls herself Chef Bae, was in the small farm community of Shuva cooking for Israeli soldiers coming back from the front lines. The outdoor kitchen where she worked and posted was set up by a trio of brothers who have been providing hot meals for members of the IDF. Ten minutes from the explosions in the north of Gaza, Baevsky prepared industrial-size bowls of gluten-free schnitzel; fennel, potato, and celery salad; and chickpea stew with fish balls. “The IDF not only has Israelis but Moroccans, Druze, and Arabs, so there was pressure when it came to my spice game,” she tells her viewers.
Later, Baevsky felt another kind of pressure: Some of her 250,000 Instagram followers and nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok weren’t thrilled by her decision to cook for soldiers waging a war in which Gaza was months ago so thoroughly flattened that its authorities could no longer count the dead. “I’m so glad people are exposing their sadistic selves,” one wrote. “How do you sleep at night?” several........