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.