COVID-19: The patriarchal pandemic

 Al Jazeera English

Shortly after the onset of the pandemic here in Mexico last year, femicides and calls to domestic violence hotlines soared. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) – who had previously expressed annoyance that the femicide issue should distract from a very important project to raffle the presidential plane – then took it upon himself to claim that 90 percent of emergency hotline calls were false.

The AMLO government went on to release a public service video containing ludicrous advice on how to ostensibly prevent violence in the home, such as by taking a deep breath and counting to 10.

Of course, for many women in Mexico and around the world, the pandemic’s stay-at-home measures have produced a situation in which they effectively cannot breathe – much less deeply.

From Argentina to Malaysia and Sudan to the United Kingdom to the United States, there has been a surge in reports of violence against women. To be sure, there are more opportunities for domestic violence when people are confined to domestic space.

And yet the pandemic has disproportionately affected women in other ways, as well. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Covid-19: On Israel's vaccination 'miracle'

 Middle East Eye

On 8 March, ABC News ran the headline: “Israel celebrates 5 millionth coronavirus vaccination” - a milestone in the country’s race to prove its global superiority by vaccinating its nine million people faster than anybody else.

It helps, of course, that Israel was able to strike a data-sharing deal with Pfizer-BioNTech, according to which all Israeli vaccine needs have swiftly been met in exchange for a gargantuan sum and rampant violations of medical privacy.

But this sort of winner-takes-all logic of corona-capitalism means that there are lots of losers. News consumers who read beyond headlines will discover in the second paragraph of the ABC article that, by numerical coincidence, there are also five million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza - who, as usual, have nothing to be celebrating.

In a case of massive criminal negligence, Israel has refused to vaccinate Palestinians in the occupied territories, despite being obligated to do so under the Geneva Conventions. After donating a mere 2,000 doses of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine to the Palestinian Authority, Israel has now charitably agreed to vaccinate Palestinian labourers who work - surprise surprise! - in Israel and illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The negligence is even more criminal in the context of Israel’s ongoing crippling blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has long thwarted the import of critical medical equipment and driven the coastal enclave’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse. Even before the onset of the pandemic, Gaza was effectively unable to breathe. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Pandemic reflections on a year of being still

 Al Jazeera English

On March 10, 2020, I arrived in the Mexican state of Oaxaca for what was meant to be a two-week stay. I had just spent three months in San Salvador, which was the longest I had remained in one place over a decade after abandoning the United States in 2003 in favour of a life of manic itinerancy.

In the months preceding El Salvador, for example, I had gone from Turkey to Italy to Croatia-Bosnia-Croatia-Bosnia-Croatia-Bosnia to Turkey-Albania-Greece-Spain-Georgia-Armenia-Spain.

When the coronavirus pandemic put a stop to the mad dash, I was in the Oaxacan coastal village of Zipolite. My world promptly shrank to a matter of kilometres. Checkpoints were installed around the village and I was issued an ID that enabled me to travel once a week to a nearby larger town to get groceries.

One of the checkpoints was placed directly in front of the apartment I had rented, and entailed an ever-present assortment of volunteers, policemen, and soldiers. The sense of claustrophobia was only enhanced by the fact that I had to step over a rope every time I went outside – and that I was not permitted to enter my house without a facemask, despite my desperate appeals to logic.

Of course, it was rather horrifyingly insensitive to whine about being stuck at the beach while the rest of humanity confronted the apocalypse. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

My Year of Sedentary Existence

 Jacobin

Halfway through Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis’s narrator receives a letter from “a mountain somewhere in Tanganyika,” sent by an old schoolmate named Karayannis. Formerly a professor of theology, Karayannis had absconded to Africa after hooking up with a female student. Sitting alone on a stone in Crete, the narrator reads the letter and reflects: “Once again I felt flashing inside me the urge to leave, not owing to any need — since I am fine on this seashore where I comfortably fit in and lack nothing — but owing to my compelling desire to see and touch as much sea and land as possible before I die.”

At the start of the quarantine, I had decided to reread Zorba in an unimaginative tribute to the fact that I was supposed to have traveled to Greece in May. The golden sand and crashing waves of Zipolite served as the backdrop for my reading-slash-mental-boomeranging between other lands and seas, even as I lacked nothing on this seashore aside from immunity to periodic eviction by Mexican soldiers and police. In my case, the seeing and touching of everything was also a convenient way to postpone sorting my shit out or committing to a single identity, as the constant motion enabled a suspension of conventional reality and the illusion, at least, of an elongation of time, into which I endeavored to cram as much land and sea as possible between myself and mortality.

Since the onset of my travels in 2003, I had become more comfortable with the idea of one day ceasing to exist, a prospect that had disproportionately preoccupied my childhood in Washington, DC, and Austin, Texas — to the extent that I would remain awake at night calculating the number of years/hours/minutes I might reasonably have left based on current American life expectancy. In the evenings, I could be found lying in rigid petrification on the living room rug, imagining myself inside a coffin while my parents watched the newscast. It’s possible that I simply associated death with failure in the prevailing context of cutthroat capitalism; after all, I could not be the best, most successful student and person ever if I was dead. At any rate, the peripatetic urges that were to consume me later in life would provide a welcome distraction from morbid fixation. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.