Is Israel Practicing Vaccine Leadership or Medical Apartheid?

Photograph Source: Talmoryair – CC BY 2.0

The media is abuzz these days with headline s such as “How Israel Became a World Leader in Vaccinating Against Covid-19.” While the U.S. has vaccinated only 1.67 percent of its population against COVID-19 so far, Israel has already given the vaccine to more than 16 percent of its citizens. In explaining this, the media cites Israel’s highly digitized and “socialized” health care system, along with the fact that the country is small but wealthy (allowing Israel to pay $28 a dose, compared to the $19.50 the U.S. is paying per shot for a Pfizer vaccine). But beyond the headlines celebrating Israel’s vaccination rates, lies a far darker story about health inequality.

Israel has a population of around 9 million. About 20 percent of Israel’s population are Palestinian citizens of Israel. These people can vote in elections, have representation in the Knesset, and are being vaccinated against COVID-19. But, there are another around 5 million Palestinians who live under Israeli rule, without rights, and like the rest of the world, are suffering from the pandemic.

Since 1967, Israel’s settler population has ballooned to more than 500,000, with Israeli settler regional councils controlling 40 percent of West Bank land. Despite the U.S.-facilitated normalization deals with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco that occurred during the latter half of 2020, and were supposed to have halted Israel’s annexing of the West Bank, 2020 has seen the “highest” number of settlement unit approvals since the settlement watchdog group Peace Now began tracking the figures in 2012, according to an article by Al Jazeera.

Despite the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas supposedly being the official governments of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is really in charge. Israel controls the borders, currency, central bank and even collects taxes on behalf of the PA. It maintains the right to carry out military operations on Palestinian land and controls the amount of freedom, or lack thereof, that Palestinians are granted. Even in areas like Ramallah, which are supposedly under the complete control of the PA, Israel reserves the right to enter the city at any time, to close streets and shops, to burst into homes, and to make warrantless military arrests.

Israel’s distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine is far from the country’s only system of inequality. Israeli elections do not include the approximately 5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. While the Palestinians in East Jerusalem can vote in municipal elections, they cannot cast ballots in national elections, such as the one slated to take place in March 2021(the fourth in two years).

Perhaps Israel’s most flagrant demonstration of having two sets of laws for two groups of people is its court system in the West Bank. While Israeli settlers, residing there illegally according to international law, are subject to Israeli civilian law, their Palestinian neighbors live under Israeli military law. This makes them subject to statutes such as Military Order 101, which even bans peaceful protest.

According to the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, the PA is solely responsible for the health care of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. However, those deals were part of the vision that contemplated a more complete peace agreement being signed within five years. Almost three decades later, this larger peace agreement still hasn’t happened and Israel has entrenched its settlement enterprise occupation while flouting international law and dodging its moral, legal, and humanitarian obligations as an occupying power. Providing the COVID-19 vaccine to Palestinians is one of these obligations.

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza direly need the COVID-19 vaccine. As of January 7, there were 145,252 active cases and 1,536 COVID deaths in the Palestinian territories. The infection and death rates are climbing dangerously. The situation in Gaza is particularly worrisome. Gaza suffers from electricity cuts that last for 12 hours a day. Thanks to Israel’s air, land, and sea siege, as well as multiple military assaults on the crowded enclave, there is a severe shortage of medicine and medical equipment in Gaza along with significant poverty and unemployment. Quarantining and maintaining sanitation in Gaza is extremely difficult.

A World Health Organization-led partnership has set-up the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax) Facility, which is aimed at assisting impoverished countries, and “has pledged to vaccinate 20 percent of Palestinians,” according to the Guardian. But Covax vaccines don’t yet have the necessary “‘emergency use’ approval by the WHO,” the Guardian article added. Gerald Rockenschaub, head of the WHO’s office for the occupied Palestinian territory, who was quoted in the Guardian article, said the vaccines that are part of the Covax scheme aren’t likely to be available for distribution in the Palestinian territories until “early to mid-2021.” According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, the territories have been in a financialcrisis, leaving them next to no funds to purchase vaccine doses. Even when they were able to find the money, the vaccines they attempted to purchase from Russia could not be procured as Russia informed the PA that they did not have enough doses to sell, according to an article by NPR.

In the first week of 2021, the Palestinian Authority began to inquire if Israel would help them obtain the vaccine. So far, Israeli officials have said that they might offer whatever they have leftover to the West Bank and Gaza after vaccinating Israeli citizens and East Jerusalem Palestinians. If that isn’t medical apartheid, I don’t know what is.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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