LRB. Vol. 43 No. 6 · 18 March 2021
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/the-paper/v43/n06>
SHORT CUTS
Medical Apartheid
Mouin Rabbani
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/contributors/mouin-rabbani>
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The Israeli defence minister, Benny Gantz, said on 25 February that
Israel was suspending an initiative to provide nineteen countries with a
hundred thousand surplus jabs from its stock of Covid-19 vaccines. The
gesture by Benjamin Netanyahu had not been part of Covax, the global
initiative to ensure more equitable access to inoculations. Rather, it
was conceived as a bribe: a plan, as the/Times of Israel/put it, to
‘exchange vaccines for diplomatic support’. Identified beneficiaries
included Guatemala, which followed theUSin relocating its embassy to
Jerusalem, in explicit violation ofUNSecurity Council Resolution 478;
the Czech Republic and Hungary, which have opened diplomatic missions in
Jerusalem; and Mauritania, with which Israel is seeking to establish
formal relations.
At the same time, Israel is withholding vaccines from the approximately
five million stateless Palestinians living under its rule. As Nathan
Thrall demonstrated in the/LRB/of 21 January
<https://www-lrb-co-uk.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/the-paper/v43/n02/nathan-thrall/the-separate-regimes-delusion>,
Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories are in effect governed
by a single political regime: Israel is responsible for the residents of
the West Bank and Gaza Strip, just as South Africa’s white minority
regime was for the inhabitants of Transkei, Venda and the other
Bantustans. On 14 January, theUNcalled on Israel to ‘ensure swift and
equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines for the Palestinian people under
occupation’. Yuli Edelstein, the Israeli health minister, rebuffed this
with reference to the Oslo Accords, which give the Palestinian Authority
oversight of public health. The result, in the words of the Palestinian
doctor and activist Mustafa Barghouti, is ‘medical apartheid’.
Barghouti’s assessment would remain valid even if one were to maintain
that Israel and the Occupied Territories are in fact governed by
separate regimes. Article 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention begins:
To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying
Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the
co-operation of national and local authorities, 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 preventative measures
necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics.
Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out
their duties.
Speaking to theBBC’s Andrew Marr in late January, Edelstein claimed that
Israel is no more responsible for the Palestinians than the Palestinians
are for the ‘dolphins in the Mediterranean’. He insisted that it is not
Israel’s ‘legal obligation’ to vaccinate Palestinians, although he
admitted that it would be in ‘our interest’. Israel, he said, had to
take care of its own first; getting vaccines to the Palestinians is the
job of the Palestinians.
Yet just as the plan to reward foreign governments with surplus jabs
gave the lie to the scarcity pretext, so Israel’s initial refusal to
allow the transfer of two thousand vaccine doses to the Gaza Strip –
thePAhad independently acquired ten thousand doses of Russia’s Sputnik-V
– made clear who holds ultimate power. It was the Israeli not the
Palestinian parliament that spent two days last month debating the
propriety of distributing vaccines to Gazans, with the Co-ordinator of
Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) informing journalists
that a Palestinian request to transfer the desperately needed vaccines
was ‘waiting for a political decision’ from Israel. No such
deliberations were required when Israel decided to pay $1.2 million to
purchase vaccines for Syria in order to secure the return of an Israeli
woman who was being detained in Damascus.
Last December, after the Israeli Ministry of Health determined that
prisoners as well as their guards were a priority group for vaccination,
the public security minister, Amir Ohana, instructed the Israel Prisons
Service to exclude ‘security prisoners’, of whom nearly all are
Palestinian, from the inoculation campaign. Several weeks later, after a
number of additional infections and a widespread outcry, Israel
announced that they would be vaccinated after all. The hundreds of
thousands of residents of Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank,
including Jewish non-citizens, have full access to the Israeli
government’s vaccination programme. It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say
that West Bank Palestinians have none. On 28 February, Israel approved
plans to inoculate the 130,000 or so Palestinians who have permits to
work in Israel and the settlements (the plan has just been suspended
until further notice). In a further act of noblesse oblige, just as
Palestinian hospitals reported that intensive care units for Covid-19
patients had reached 95 per cent occupancy, Israel pledged a ‘symbolic
quantity’ of five thousand doses for Palestinian medical personnel.
Fewer than half that number have so far been delivered.
The/Nieuw Israëlietisch Weekblad/, the house organ of Dutch Zionism,
recently ran an article by its editor-in-chief, Esther Voet, under the
headline ‘Unique Offer: Vaccination Holiday in Israel’. ‘Thanks to our
intimate co-operation with the Israeli authorities,’ she wrote, ‘we can
proudly offer a unique vacation in April...choose the Pfizer vaccine and
get a certificate for your second jab in the Netherlands, or the
Johnson&Johnson vaccine that requires only a single dose.’ A ‘Druze
lunch’ was also part of the package. When contacted by a journalist for
clarification, the travel agency identified in the article dismissed the
offer as a ‘Purim joke’.
No country has vaccinated a larger proportion of its citizens than
Israel. Its compact size and relatively small population, its largely
centralised and digitised health system, and its experience with
logistics in times of crisis, tell only part of the story. Last year,
Israel signed a deal with Pfizer for the BioNTech mRNA vaccine developed
in Germany. In exchange for a guaranteed supply of ten million doses by
the end of March, the Israeli government agreed not only to pay premium
prices – reportedly double those paid by European buyers – but also to
share vast troves of patient data. As any Palestinian could have
predicted, Israel has also been the first state to introduce
colour-coded identification documents to distinguish between those who
have been vaccinated and those who haven’t.
As with other Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, the practice of
medical apartheid is enabled by international support or indifference.
It has been left to activists, and comedians, to expose its hypocrisy.
On/Saturday Night Live/, Michael Che joked: ‘Israel is reporting they’ve
vaccinated half of their population – and I’m going to guess it’s the
Jewish half.’ In response, Jonathan Greenblatt, theCEOof the
Anti-Defamation League, and others went into overdrive, pointing out
that Israel is vaccinating Christian and Muslim Palestinians who are
also Israeli citizens, but failing to mention the stateless Palestinians
under its control. Accusations of anti-semitism against Che piled up.
Israel’s apologists also got the better of Anthony Fauci, who became a
superstar for refusing to indulge Trump’s ravings about curing Covid-19
with anti-malaria drugs or lethal doses of bleach. Now Biden’s chief
medical adviser, Fauci was asked during an interview with the/Times of
Israel/whether Israel ‘should help’ vaccinate Palestinians. ‘You’re
asking me a political question,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want to go there.
That only gets me into trouble.’ He hailed Israel’s vaccination strategy
as ‘a model for the rest of the world’.
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