On the first day of the new year, Bloomberg ran an opinion article by Daniel Gordis — senior vice president at Jerusalem’s Shalem College — titled “Vaccination Miracle Brings Israel Back to Its Roots.”
The “miracle” in question refers to Israel’s aggressive coronavirus vaccination drive, thanks to which it currently leads the world in per-capita vaccinations. And while Israel’s literal “roots” lie in the uprooting and slaughter of Palestinians, Gordis prefers a more mythological version of the Israeli past: “early socialist roots” that cultivated a “sense of social cohesion [and] shared destiny,” a nation that saw itself “as a family” and that knew “how to come together when facing a mortal enemy.”
Gordis was able to get his own personal “Israel of yesteryear” fix at the sports arena in Jerusalem where he was administered the vaccine: “[A]s I looked at the eyes of other people waiting, their faces hidden behind their masks, I could tell that I was not the only one overwhelmed by a profound sense of gratitude for being part of this country.” The old Israel was also embodied by the “small army of nurses and medical techs injecting one person after another with utter efficiency.”
Efficient or not, the vaccination campaign has only underscored Israel’s roots in Palestinian oppression: the nearly 5 million Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are being criminally excluded from the program. As Amnesty International notes, Article 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention requires occupying powers to ensure and maintain “the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics.”
Not that Israel has ever done much for Palestinian medical establishments and services. Along with bombing hospitals, ambulances, and medical personnel, Israel has imposed a crippling blockade of Gaza for the last thirteen years that prevents the import of necessary medical equipment and supplies. Even before the pandemic, the coastal enclave’s health care system was already on the verge of collapse. The Israelis invoke the Oslo Accords in claiming that the Palestinians are responsible for sorting out their own vaccines, but this is kind of like cutting off a person’s legs and then telling them to jump rope. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.