Speaker 1 00:00:05 Hi, everyone. Welcome to identity crisis. A show about news and ideas of interest and importance to Jewish life. I'm excited to share. Now more explicitly that identity crisis is now produced and distributed in partnership between the shell apartment Institute and the Jewish telegraphic agency. A really exciting development that we hope will help us reach more audiences and bring more people into conversation. Um, you hit a Kurtzer president of shell apartment is to North America. We're recording on January 15th, 2021. Many of us think all of us are still reeling here in America from the capital insurrection and by ongoing political turmoil and uncertainty here in America. This episode will come out just a couple of days before inauguration and I can speak personally. That's what most people are thinking about and talking about at the same time, nothing over the past year, including this most recent news is separable from the specter of the pandemic, which has been hanging over all of us for nearly a year.
Speaker 1 00:01:00 I think one of the stories where we can see this intersection was seeing multiple members of Congress testing positive for the coronavirus after the Capitol insurrection in part, because they were crammed into close quarters with other people, some of whom, other members of Congress refused to wear masks. We started this show identity crisis weirdly enough, the week that we originally went remote, that was totally a coincidence. And so even though we've tried through this show to engage a broad set of questions facing Jewish life, the pandemic has continued to be a through line. And so this week we're actually going back to the battle against the pandemic itself with some hope on the horizon. The beginning of the vaccination process in my own home, my wife, who's a head of a day school by virtue of being an educator was able to get her first shot this week in America and my parents.
Speaker 1 00:01:48 Thank God, got their first shot, as well as we know, the vaccination process has been fast in some places and slow and others. And as a result, it's been inviting a whole bunch of really interesting threads and angles for the Jewish community to consider in watching what's happening now and how it portends to the future. So to help untangle these threads, I'm really excited to be joined this week by two excellent journalists. Isabel Kershner is a correspondent from the New York times who has written a series of really terrific pieces about the vaccination process in Israel and all of its various complexities who joins us from Jerusalem and Ben sales covers anti-Semitism as well as American Jewish affairs for the Jewish telegraphic agency is joining us from a less interesting place in New York city. Thanks both of you for being here and identity crisis.
Speaker 0 00:02:36 It's about
Speaker 1 00:02:37 Let's start with you. I would love for you to help us paint principally for our American Jewish audience, a picture of this vaccination process, which is major news all over the world because of the success of what's taking place in Israel. I'm curious to know about the mood, especially since weirdly this vaccination process is happening at the same time as a major lockdown, the numbers are very high, but the vaccination is started in. Then after that we can get into why Israel is such a unique story right now.
Speaker 2 00:03:04 Well, yes, it is rather strange. We have this contradiction in our lives practically. One of the only reasons you can go out beyond a thousand meters from your home is to go get a vaccination, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. So it's made this lockdown very different to the others. We're hearing that, you know, the coal country or enough of the country could be vaccinated by the end of March for Israel to begin slowly, to go back to some kind of normality. So obviously that makes this lock down and this wave much more bearable for people. They're very much hoping this'll be the last one. And we are being told it will probably be the last one having said that, yes, the pandemic is raging outside and we've seen consistently in the last week or two, about 9,000 new infections a day in a population of 9 million and the hospitals COVID wards full fuller than they've ever been serious cases on the rise.
Speaker 2 00:04:08 And people are very eagerly watching the early data coming out, actually, which is really fascinating to see what effect the vaccine is having, you know, at least the first dose, because most of the people who have received a vaccine so far have just received the first of the two Pfizer doses. And there are some, you know, interesting statistics beginning to come out. Two of the health funds came out this week with their very initial data gathering and research. And one found that a couple of weeks after the first dose, the infection rate had dropped by about two thirds. Another health fund found that it had dropped by about one third. So I think the discrepancy shows we're still in the early days, it's too early to conclude very much, but it is very interesting. And in fact, one of the reasons that Netanyahu was able, we can go into this in more detail later if you want. But one of the reasons he was able to get Pfizer to bring forward deliveries when it looked like we might be running out of doses was apparently reaching an agreement on sharing data. So that's a really fascinating aspect now beyond the actual program that Israel could actually, because of the speed of the program and the size of the population could actually become a very interesting test case for this whole thing.
Speaker 1 00:05:36 Isn't that fascinating? You know, that the state of Israel of all places is now once again, you know, the city on the Hill that the world is watching, but single country where Pfizer's going to study all of this, that transpires. If you are a conspiracy theorists who say, of course it is, of course that's where the Jewish state is. I reminded of Mati Friedman's pieces a few years ago saying like, why is the world's always focused on this country? And this is actually more like a prosaic version of that story. I would love to know like why you unpack this a little bit in some of your times pieces, but why do you think it is that this country has managed to generate this kind of momentum towards vaccination? I can tell you as an American, I have no idea when I'm going to get vaccinated.
Speaker 2 00:06:16 Right? My 84 year old mother in England is still waiting for her first dose. So I hear you and I feel a bit bad because I've already had one. I have to say, you know, just on your Mattie Friedman point, it's never been so easy to get the health minister on the foam. And this last couple of weeks, usually you can sing, you can jump up and down, you can stand on your head and you can't get any spokesperson at the health ministry to tell you anything. And suddenly the last couple of weeks, it's like, Oh yeah, whatever you need. Here's the health minister. So this is obviously a story that Israel is pleased to be at the center of attention of, although of course, we'll get on later to some of the other less flattering sides of it, but why, why is Israel become this beacon of the vaccination campaign?
Speaker 2 00:07:06 There are various reasons. One obviously is just that it is a fairly small country, 9 million people. It's a fairly young country age wise. So the fact scenes were never tested on sixteens and under, so they're not going to get the vaccine at this stage. So if you lop off Israel's 16 and under age group, that's already 28% of the country. So you're actually only talking really about 7 million people, which is, you know, a very manageable number geographically. We're a small country. Other reasons Netanyahu to his credit really had foresight and made this a personal project early on when other countries did not believe that we would see a vaccine before the end of 2020. And weren't really doing much about it as a result. He was on the phone with the CEO of Pfizer and Madonna. And, you know, he's been boasting about the great friendships.
Speaker 2 00:08:08 He's built up with them as a result and they're great Jewish souls. And he really got onto this early. I mean, it really was a case according to the health minister of being the early birds and getting in early on closing deals. Aside from that, once the vaccine started arriving here, sometimes, you know, Israel can be a bit of an infrastructure or mess as you know, and for a startup nation, sometimes things go horribly wrong, but we do have an absolutely fantastic set up with the health system. Even though our hospitals have been rather starved of budgets for decades and we're short of hospital beds and short of doctors, jobs, et cetera, et cetera, the health funds, we have four main health funds and are absolutely fantastic. They are actually a leftover of Israel's socialized medicine from the old histor droop days. And these health funds go back decades to before the state by law, there's a national health law.
Speaker 2 00:09:10 Every Israeli has to belong to one of these four funds and pay into it, but it's very affordable. And by law, these funds have to give full coverage health coverage to all Israeli citizens. They are also very highly digitized. We have a very centralized, digitized health system here. So keeping track of how many 65 year olds there are in a particular area, what background illnesses they might have, how many 40 year olds with background illnesses should be called in early? I mean, all of this is just available on the computers there. So all of these things have just really helped. Plus logistically when Israel needs to put on a show, do an operation, do a campaign, you know, Israel can rally, you need fridges for minus 70 degree, cold chains, fine. We'll get them. The army has a few. We'll take them from the army. You know, when you need some help, bring in the home, front from the army front Corps, people have really pulled together and it's just become an exemplary operation.
Speaker 1 00:10:18 I do want to come back. It's both the Palestinian question, but also the political consequences of all of this. One of my favorite things that appeared in your coverage, Isabel was when you quoted ketone levy, this couldn't be a more stride and critic of the state of Israel and it's government policy. And it felt to me a little bit like a sub tweet, that those of us who knew exactly why you were quoting him, where he basically throws his hands up. He's like, okay, I give credit to Netanyahu. But that was like historic. I wanted to bring Ben into the conversation a little bit by opening up the other theater of where in the Jewish world, we're going to have to watch the story of the vaccination or not vaccination. And that is whether or not we're going to see some resistance in parts of the Jewish community to vaccination. Then you wrote a piece, I think in 2019, it felt almost prophetic at this point, which was coverage of an ultra Orthodox anti-vaccination rally. Of course it wasn't the pandemic vaccine, but it was really a wacky story. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about the nature of that resistance, whether you think that's going to map in sectors of the ultra Orthodox community in America, maybe even in Israel, whether you think that's going to recur and what to watch for, with respect to that,
Speaker 3 00:11:26 My mind has come back to that story again and again this year and to the measles outbreak, which is what we were talking about uncovering back then, that was quite an experience sitting in a room, watching an ad diabetics presentation, both by ultra Orthodox leaders and by non-Jewish anti-vaxxers, who came in and capitalized on skepticism and doubt and conspiracy theories in the ultra Orthodox community. You know, I spoke to ultra Orthodox leaders at the end of last year, a few weeks ago. And they said that first of all, the ultra thought community is facing a lot of the same challenges that Americans in general are facing in terms of there being a significant portion of the population for one reason or another, that would be the conspiracy theories or doubts, or just kind of skittishness that don't want to get vaccinated. But there are also unique factors in the ultra-orthodox community that are contributing to this.
Speaker 3 00:12:22 A lot of information is passed around, not through reputable news sites, but on WhatsApp, the messaging system and other places like that. And a lot of misinformation can spread that way. It's actually interesting because this is something that I cover when I cover anti-Semitism. A lot of conspiracy theories are spread through Facebook and through WhatsApp and telegram, and we're actually seeing a similar phenomenon with anti-vax theories as well. So the leaders of the ultra Orthodox community leading rabbis and experts are really trying to give a full-throated endorsement. But as honestly, as we saw with other stuff last year, you know, with mass burning in the street of Brooklyn, there's going to be a fringe that isn't receptive to that. And I think that the challenge is to contain that fringe and also to kind of focus on everyone else who is vaccinating it and try to consolidate there as to whether that can happen in Israel. I think it's about to speak to that better than me, but I do know that virus rates and all these statistics have been particularly high in the author community in Israel, which sees a lot of the same tendencies
Speaker 1 00:13:30 If it stayed in New York for one more second, do you think that a piece of the story also that will emerge, especially for ultra Orthodox Jews in New York is rooted in some sense that these communities have not just suffered enormously through the pandemic, but in effect have a narrative of being disproportionately targeted and scapegoated by de Blasio by Cuomo that these became Supreme court cases such that their perception of how they are treated in the pandemic has been politicized and therefore there's their own skepticism about policies that come out under a Blasio Cuomo and soon to be Biden administration or somehow not in their own self-interest.
Speaker 3 00:14:06 Yeah, exactly. That's definitely a factor. And we saw that again in the measles outbreak from a couple of years ago, and also in any number of other policies, be it in education where there's part of the outdoor rec community, that objects to having educational standards applied to their schools, or even issues regarding circumcision practices. But there's kind of this history of mistrust between local and state government, city, and state government and the community. Honestly, it's less of like a national issue. I mean, you know, Trump and the fandom using gender in the alternate Orthodox community do affect this. But in general, as you said, there's been a lot of deepening distrust between DeBlasio Cuomo and the community. And this also ties in to the, but spiked a year ago, you know, these communities felt particularly that the Blasio wasn't taking them seriously and wasn't doing enough.
Speaker 3 00:15:00 And then you got the 2020, and like you said, they feel that they've been targeted for restrictions and that the government has been kind of heavy handed in policing those violations in Brooklyn. Yeah. That definitely contributed to a sense of mistrust. You know, for really ultra Orthodox leaders told me that what they'd like to see is the city and state kind of working through their institutions to try to reach people because that's how you can create fostered information pathways in the ultra Orthodox community. Whether that's going to happen to me is to be seen, obviously whether that's effective given the history that you talked about also remains to be seen.
Speaker 1 00:15:38 Yeah. And also given the fact that when I talked to my Israeli colleagues, each of them has like a vaccination app from different healthcare providers and the availability of those types of technology, obviously in the Korean community is different. But I guess what's so interesting to me about this is that even in spite of our tendency to see ultra orthodoxy as ultra orthodoxy, whether it's in America or Israel, and of course there are family connections and all of that, but they are actually behaving in very different ways. Well, you referenced this in your coverage, that there was an initial fear that especially because the social distance behaviors have not been abided the same way in the karate community, especially I think there was something like a 20% infection rates in certain parts of the ultra-orthodox community. If there was fear that ultra Orthodox Jews in Israel would also be resistant to the vaccination process. And then I think in one of your pieces, you said, but that hasn't materialized. So it's just interesting to watch in some ways the same identities, in some sense, you know, responding really different to the political climate and to the vaccine climate.
Speaker 2 00:16:37 Yeah. It has been interesting. I mean, basically in Israel's ultra Orthodox community, which as you know, is not homogenous in any way. I mean, you have the fasc deem, you have the Lithuanians, the Sofar dim and et cetera. And then they extremist Jerusalem branch, the Pella gay Rochelle, me who seemed to do the opposite of what everyone else does. But basically largely if you're talking about the mainstream, the so-called ultra Orthodox mainstream in <inaudible> and the Lithuanian community, then basically what Ralph, Ken Yefsky says, goes and RAF can Yefsky who mainly speaks through his grandson. Cause he's pretty elderly and non comprehensible to most people, his grandson was videoed having his vaccination and said that his grandfather said everyone should get vaccinated. So there was a big sigh of relief. Now it didn't come from nowhere, at least one of the senior public health officials here, who's been advising the government on COVID and is one of the senior officials of the biggest health fund here.
Speaker 2 00:17:42 He personally went and debated with one of the leading rabbis there, the pros cons of a new vaccine and risks versus protection, et cetera, et cetera, and effort was put into it. I think the Israeli authorities learned to lesson because at the beginning of the outbreak, partly because as you say, the ultra Orthodox access to information is different. You know, most of them are not walking around with apps on their smart phones or checking and getting Y net alerts every minute. So a different approach was needed to get to the community and to explain and to persuade and to elucidate. And I think, you know, over the year, obviously the authorities and the rabbis have got better at working together on that. And so we're not seeing a big pushback, but we do have, for example, the other big community where we've seen very high infection rates is the Arab Israeli community, the 20% of Israeli Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.
Speaker 2 00:18:46 And there have been very high hotspots of infection and there still are some, and the vaccine centers, there were largely empty of local customers for the first while. What you saw was a lot of Jewish, older people from nearby towns driving in at the end of the day to take advantage of the leftover vaccines because the locals hadn't come to get them. And even now I think the numbers are still low. I think if 70% of the 60 plus population here has been fully vaccinated there, the numbers were 45%. And there are questions of why that is. Is it because of lack of trust in the vaccine and the government, partly, maybe is it because of access problems? Partly, maybe is it because there's not been as good a public information campaign in Arabic as there has been in Hebrew? Possibly. It's probably a mixture of all three, but we're not seeing a huge rejection of the vaccination campaign. It's just slower. And Netanyahu has partly for his own political reasons. And partly for parts of this public information campaign has actually been visiting many Arab vaccination centers to try and persuade the population to both come for vaccine and vote for him.
Speaker 4 00:20:13 Hi, my name is Mihail Baton and I am a scholar in residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute just before the election, as part of our symposium on Judaism, citizenship and democracy, nine of our faculty members, including myself, came together to record short reflections on ideas that matter to Jewish communities today, to see the serious you can go to our website, Shalim hartman.org/context.
Speaker 1 00:20:42 This may be an unfair question for both of you, but I'm still curious what you think about it, which is, I wonder about the long-term ramifications I'm institutionally and personally invested in questions of people, hood and collectivity, and whether we still see ourselves as part of the same infrastructure. And I do feel both in Israel and in America because of the pandemic and because the response to the pandemic, the rise of a discourse around segregation among the Jewish people that I haven't heard in a while, my Israeli colleagues, many of whom are like on the front line of thinking about how do we construct a society around all of its tribes saying things like we should build a wall around Benet Brock and impart it happens because if you can track in detailed ways, where's a red zone and where's the green zone. And you can see exactly where the red zones are.
Speaker 1 00:21:27 It leads to a kind of, we should really think of ourselves as separate and in New York too. I wonder whether after this year, I think it was a year and change ago when there was that rally that UJA Federation created of people marching across the Brooklyn bridge to stand in solidarity with ultra Orthodox Jews because of antisemitic attacks. If they tried to do that post pandemic, are people going to show up and I'm suspicious that they won't, that the pandemic actually altered the ways in which we see ourselves as belonging to the same collective. Do either of you want to share your thoughts and what you think that the long-term result of these behaviors and these orientations are going to be for our sense of collectivity on both sides of the water.
Speaker 3 00:22:05 I think that in New York, I think you're absolutely right. I was thinking of about the March against antisemitism and I can't believe it was only a year ago, a year and change ago. I believe it was January 5th of last year, and I don't think it would happen again. Now, I think that, you know, last year when that string of antisemitic attacks was happening, there was an intention from the non ultra Orthodox Jewish community in New York to try to build bridges to heavy handed metaphor, but to try to build bridges to the Orthodox community in Brooklyn and the March, I believe was seen as kind of the start of those efforts, not the combination of them and then COVID happened. And so any kind of initiative that was going to try to get off the ground and create both in immediate Alliance for Jewish safety and to end that dissect criticism and kind of all sort of built deeper roots between the various parts of the Jewish community in New York stopped in their tracks, all of those efforts.
Speaker 3 00:23:00 And I also want to echo what Isabel said. You said that just like in Israel, they also Residex community in New York is far from monolithic. It's really best spoken of as a spectrum of communities. So we can slap one label at all, but really they have very different behaviors and reactions to all of these different things, both within the communities in between them. I've learned not to predict anything in New York or regarding the Jewish people or really anything. But I think those who are invested in that kind of communal unity are going to have to start from scratch when it comes to this. And not only go back to where they were last January or even two Decembers ago, but we'll have to work on a lot of the damage that was done there over the course of 2020, when those street rallies were happening, street protests really were happening in Brooklyn and there were masks being burdened street and Hashi Tishler, who was a local demagogue, was kind of coming out and riling up the crowd.
Speaker 3 00:23:56 And the crowd actually kind of went that two journalists who are trying to document it. I spoke to Jewish leaders in New York that are outside of those communities and within them about this. And there was a lot of embarrassment. I have a lot of tension and feeling about like, where do we go from here? And by the way, you want to plug my colleague Shira. Now who's done fantastic reporting on everything I just talked about for several months. So everyone should read her work to get a kind of deeper look at that. But yeah, I mean, in terms of anything that affects the entire Jewish community, just speaking about New York, whether it's measures against antisemitism or any other kinds of policy that we see as serving the entire varied community's interest, I don't really see a lot of conversation happening and I don't see a lot of conversation past the point of recriminations about everything that's happened over the course of the past year. So I'm not sure where that's going to go. My sense is that we're going to have to kind of get past COVID or at least get past concerns about rising infections to even have those conversations. But, you know, we'll see what happens over the next few months as vaccines spread.
Speaker 1 00:24:59 Yeah. And I'm curious Israel is about, but maybe you could go even beyond the Curry community and it references back to the fact that Israel is in an election phase. Now, what are the consequences of both the behaviors around pandemic and behaviors now around vaccine for the re knitting together, if such a thing as possible of Israeli society across differences, there's the political angle of this, you know, is the Tania who actually benefiting from this, but there's also a whole bunch of social questions that emerge from the pandemic. When people see Arabs and heart rate him with different rates than their own. And then does the vaccine kind of heal all those ills?
Speaker 2 00:25:34 Yeah. Look, it's a huge question. And a great question. And I think has been says, we're not going to know all the answers for a while till the dust settles, but yeah, this pandemic has really underscored the fault lines. I would say in Israeli society, running through the society. And it's a mixed bag because if we just go back a few months, Israel was waiting for a project or a Coronas are to be appointed when one finally was Ronnie <inaudible>, uh, everyone thought, Oh, this was going to be our salvation. And the undoing of Ronnie Gamson, who is actually the politics and the politicized station of the response to the pandemic, because what happened was he had this traffic light system planned where you could not exactly put a wall up around Benet brag, but you would certainly bring in tighter restrictions in places where the epidemic was raging and allow other places that were green to carry on with more normal life.
Speaker 2 00:26:38 And this proved absolutely impossible for political reasons. Netanyahu needs higher ed ultra Orthodox coalition partners. Now more than ever, they're the only people still sticking with him. And there was no way they were going to allow this to happen. They said over our dead bodies, if there's a lock down on Benet Breck, there's a lock down on the whole country. So what happened was there was a lockdown on the whole country and we've seen this repeated again and again. So, you know, on the one hand, the thing this whole pandemic has highlighted the question of what's going on here. I mean, is this essentially a ultra Orthodox autonomy with a law unto itself where the education system remains open when everyone else's is closed down, even though the infection rates there 40% higher than anywhere else? I mean, it's raised a lot of questions, but at the same time, it's had a huge other impact where many ultra Orthodox are connecting to the internet for the first time, because they want to be informed or need to work remotely or need some kind of contact with the outside world when they're under lockdown for weeks on end in a small apartment.
Speaker 2 00:27:50 So it's a mixed bag, but I think politically is huge. On the one hand, more Israelis have died from COVID than all of Israel's Wars put together. And nobody here can dismiss the fact that this was handled very badly for a long time here, largely because of that politicization and the person responsible for that is the prime minister. And yet he's now of course, taken on very early on the vaccine program as a personal project and deserves credit for getting it going so early and for how it's going. And he's now obviously campaigning on that and trying to capitalize on that finally this week, he actually replaced his Twitter banner, which was still up to, I think, Tuesday or Wednesday this week, him and Trump finally replaced it with a photo of himself getting his vaccines so we can see how important this is now become.
Speaker 2 00:28:51 But yeah, he's definitely campaigning on the fact that this tantalizing prospect of Israel becoming the first fully vaccinated country lights on two nations as a result, and that Israelis will get back to normal life quicker than anywhere else. And he'll be able to get the economy back on track. So it's really a bit of a roller coaster and how it plays out in March. We'll see. But, you know, just so happens that we have a fourth election on the 23rd of March and it just so happens that we're supposed to be fully vaccinated by the 20 something of March. So coincidence, yeah. Say no more
Speaker 3 00:29:31 Isabelle. I actually wanted to ask you, cause something that struck me about all of this is that it's an Yahoo's pitch in the past cycle of elections a year or two ago was, you know, that he's in another league, that he has all these relationships with world leaders, many of them on the national strike, but around the world, right. Trump and Putin and Modi and everything. And I wonder, do you see the way he's talking about vaccine distribution as kind of a continuation of that, you know, where he's talking to the CEO of Pfizer, he's talking to the CEO of modernity, these relationships is that all of a piece. And is that part of his campaign, do you feel like
Speaker 2 00:30:08 It will be, I mean, yeah, that notion of who else could pull this off, who else can speak to the CEO of Pfizer at two in the morning and have 17 calls with him in the last two weeks? So yeah, there is an element of that. Um, everybody else is a dwarf compared to me in terms of their ability to pick up the phone. And, you know, to be honest, there is something to be said for that. He's been in power consecutively since 2009 and three years in the nineties. He's surpassed Ben-Gurion as the longest serving prime minister. He does have a kind of outsized stature internationally for a small country. And yes, I mean, you're right. I think this incredible vaccine story is just going to be feeding into that aura of being in a different league.
Speaker 1 00:31:01 My colleague has a client lav wrote about this. The two Netanyahu's are best encapsulated by this, both the election drama, the turmoil, the corruption, all of this and the story of vaccination and his enduring popularity among the Israeli public for being the person who can basically get it done and keep Israeli safe. Just that mythology that gets augmented here. I want to make sure we do speak at least briefly about this subplot of the Israeli vaccination story, which is the Palestinian non vaccination story it's been reported in wildly different ways about whether Palestinian leadership wanted Israel to provide them with the vaccine or whether the PA leadership did not want Israel to provide them that has to do with interpretations of the Oslo Accords. So Isabelle, if you could give us like a two minute explainer of what's taking place around this right now, it's interesting also by the way that the <inaudible> report comes out this week also declaring Israel to be an apartheid regime. It couldn't be more perfect,
Speaker 2 00:31:56 Right? I will try. And two minutes, this is the dark flip side of the vaccine success story, and it's not all black and white and things have changed in the last few weeks. So when some officials or some opinion, columnists or whatever, say, well, the Palestinians never asked that might've been true a few weeks ago. It might not be true this week. And if you speak to Palestinian officials, you're likely to get different stories from different officials either because they don't know, or there isn't one from position or things have changed since they got the last memo. So it's not very clear cut, but what I can say is there are two sets of values here. One is the issue of obligations and, uh, Oslo Accords, international law. And the other is interest. If we look at the obligations of Israel, yes, under the lower courts, the Palestinian authority has responsibility for its own health system and vaccination programs in normal times.
Speaker 2 00:33:01 But yes, there is a clause in an annex of the Oslo Accords that also says it's a time of emergency or a pandemic that the sides must cooperate and do all they can to help to contain a pandemic. And that can certainly be interpreted as meaning. Well, obviously Israel must help. Israel has all these millions of doses. Why isn't it helping the international Geneva conventions also state that the occupying power has responsibility for the occupied people. And then there's the whole question of, well, do you consider as an occupation or not? I mean, the Likud does not consider this an occupation, but you know, there is nothing that says in any of these documents, there is nothing that says, if you have the vaccines and the Palestinians don't, then you have to give the Palestinians vaccines in parallel to your own citizens or before your own citizens, or only after your own citizens, you know, that kind of resolution and that granular detail obviously is not there.
Speaker 2 00:34:08 So it allows for some kind of interpretation when you look at Israel's interests. Yes. I mean, Israel's interests would be to have everyone between the river and the sea vaccinated because pandemics don't recognize boundaries, borders, or fences or walls. And we do have tens of thousands of Palestinians who cross the 67 line every day to come to work here. If they're not doing that, they're suffering economically, which is also not in anybody's interest. So there are a lot of other areas here of interests beyond just law or Goodwill. And I think the bottom line is that, you know, Israel's, you hear some officials saying it's not our responsibility. The Palestinian authority at the beginning was trying to add certainly an impression of independence. Hey, we've got this, we're in touch on our own with the companies and we're going to handle this because it was a matter of pride and they didn't want to look like they were quote unquote, begging Israel for vaccines, as it turns out, Israel apparently did receive a request from the Palestinians for 10,000 vaccines for health workers.
Speaker 2 00:35:21 Some Palestinian officials say that request was turned down. Others say they didn't get a reply. Israel does secretly seem to have transferred a few dozen, maybe a hundred vaccines for some very frontline health workers, which the PA obviously didn't want advertised. So it's a very mixed bag. I think it's been complicated by the fact that yes, we do have this situation where, you know, Jewish settlers living in the West bank, or would you do you're in some area. However people want to refer to it in settlements are eligible and getting vaccinated. And the Palestinians in the village next door are basically not anyway by now, the PA says it has reached some agreements with getting Sputnik and also the Oxford AstraZeneca. They will be apparently arriving probably in February or March. And one other thing that I'd throw out is that, you know, there are logistical issues as well because Israel is using Pfizer at the moment. Israel's big supplies are all from Pfizer and the PA does not have the logistical capability at this point. I mean, it might be able to get some with help, but right now it doesn't have that kind of ability for that cold chain transport of the vaccine. So what are you going to have Israeli army fridges coming into Ramallah? I don't know. Um, but there's a logistical issue as well, which is why the PA hasn't been trying to get the Pfizer vaccine.
Speaker 1 00:36:56 Yeah. Part of me irrationally wants to blame Pfizer a little bit because Pfizer is interest in being able to use an entire region to be able to do this study. You know, it's not my $350 million, but it would have been interesting for Pfizer to basically make some of the terms of this. We're going to actually vaccinate the entire population between the river and the sea. But that's just speculation. Ben, maybe give us the flip side of this, which is what are you seeing if anything already, since I know you've covered the anti-Semitism beat and the anti-Israel beat, but what do you see as some of the fallout, especially for the reputation of the state of Israel as a result of this Palestinian story, it's a coincidence that the patella report comes out this week, but it feels to me a little bit ominous in terms of how the great story of Israel's vaccination process is going to be read by critics of Israel compared to the failure to vaccinate or to take care of the Palestinian population.
Speaker 3 00:37:48 Yeah. We talked about the Geelong Lavi quote earlier, obviously he's very straight and critical of Israel and he said, I got to hand it to you. I'm seeing less of that kind of externally something. I think, you know, you talk about a lot also you heard the conversation about Israel outside of Israel, right? And to a certain extent, something, especially I found after living there and coming back, is that a lot of it, both words, real examples, it means it's kind of divorced from what's happening on the ground there. So Isabel, we spoke about interests and kind of how the situation is more complex with discourse. For example, between activists and Twitter is not complex. Right. You know, I think people are kind of falling into their camps here where you see critics and anti-Israel activists talking about the Geneva conventions, the things they use spoke about the legitimate actual kind of principles you spoke about, but it doesn't really go beyond that.
Speaker 3 00:38:37 And on the other side as well, you know, Oh, well the cost of me has never asked. And then that's kind of the end of the story on Twitter. I'm saying it's not the actual one. That's kind of what I'm seeing. And it goes beyond Twitter and in op-eds and open letters and everything like that. And the apartheid report that the town put up, obviously it goes well beyond this one issue. I think it's notable that the tell him put out the report because it is a Jewish Israeli led human rights organization, as opposed to one coming from the Palestinian perspective. But it might change minds in the international arena among the people that are kind of already discoursing on this issue. I'm not sure I'm seeing how many minds it's changing on that. I want to come back to one thing I was talking about earlier, that's disconnected from this.
Speaker 3 00:39:16 If I will just add something, I just want to add that just like there was a lot of upset among non-Orthodox Jews toward what they saw going on in Brooklyn. There was a lot of also frustration. I was hearing in Brooklyn about you claim to be against antisemitism, man. All these things are happening to us and the government is discriminating against us and you don't have our backs. And so that's going on. I can kind of tie the circle back in a indirect way to what we were just talking about. I feel like the same thing is happening in the discourse on Israelis and Palestinians, where Isabel, I loved how you laid out all of the factors in this puzzle of international principles and agreements and interests. And unfortunately that nuance and that kind of texture and complexity is missing, unfortunately in a lot of the discourse here.
Speaker 2 00:40:01 Absolutely. I mean, that's partly why, you know, maybe took a bit more than two minutes to just unpack some of the complexity because we're ranging from the defenders of Israel saying this is a terrible blood label against the Jews saying that they're refusing to vaccinate the Palestinians and across to the other end of the spectrum of this is medical apartheid. And there's a very great middle there, but yes on Twitter, I just got after one of my stories about how Israel's vaccination campaign was going so well, I predictably was at the other end of a troll campaign of thousands of tweets saying it's medical apartheid and you've ignored this. And you've ignored that. I think 90% of the people had not read the story, which also did actually address the Palestinian issue. But one of the tweets that kept repeating itself was your horrible racist, apartheid countries refusing to vaccinate Palestinian prisoners.
Speaker 2 00:41:01 Well, yes, Miro Hannah. There was a headline saying somewhere that he was refusing, but it was a very complicated story. What happened was our Miro, Hannah Justice minister has been refusing to vaccinate any prisoners in a kind of power struggle with the attorney general. He was claiming that until all the prison guards have been vaccinated, no prisoners should be vaccinated and it wasn't singling out the Palestinian prisoners. It was all the prisoners in Israel. And in fact, a Palestinian official had spoken somewhere on, I think, voice of Palestine radio or somewhere and said of the Palestinian security prisoners are going to get vaccinated within the next couple of weeks. And he then denied that as part of his, no prisoners are getting the vaccine yet. And that denial became a, your justice minister is refusing to vaccinate Palestinian prisoners. So this is how things get misconstrued and simplified and Twitter fied.
Speaker 1 00:42:01 Well, if anything is an argument for the importance of well-reported serious journalism of long form writing of non Twitter, certainly the pandemic is a piece of that in this conversation as well. And it's just striking also to me that what we will one day look back on is, you know, when you take a philosophy one Oh one class in college, then things like the trolley problem, try to make moral. Decision-making prioritizing this piece of the population versus the other into an exercise that can be answered in a 90 minute exam. But the reality is all of the dynamics that you've both helped to tease out about social behavior, geography, borders, international pressure, political pressure, all of these make for not a 90 minute answer and certainly not anything shorter than that. And for better or worse, the complexity of what this story is unfolding for us tells us, I think more accurate in a more human story about these challenges.
Speaker 1 00:42:53 I have much more to ask you about, but we are out of time. So thank you very much to Isabelle. Kershner the New York times Ben sales of JTA. And thanks to all of you for listening to our show. Identity crisis is a product of the shell department Institute in partnership with the Jewish telegraphic agency. It was produced this week by Devinsky common and Alex Dillon and edited by Alex Dylan with assistance from MIRI Miller and music by so-called to learn more about the show apartment Institute, you can visit us online show, apartment.org. We'd love to know what you think about the show you can rate and review us on iTunes to help more people discover the show. And you can write to
[email protected]. You can subscribe to identity crisis in the Apple podcast app, Spotify, SoundCloud, audible, and everywhere else. Podcasts are available. See you next week, stay safe, stay healthy. And thank you for.
