Stone Contrasts Israel’s Pandemic Response with Our Own. (Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
Our nation, along with the rest of the industrialized world, is at a crossroads—and the fate of our citizenry hangs in the balance. March 2021 marks the first anniversary of the coronavirus pandemic. The tumult endured by our society, the destruction wrought upon our lives, and the decimation of our population all pose as sobering reminders of the precarity of human life. They also raise a critical question. Will we heed our scientists’ advice by acknowledging the minimal threat the virus poses to society with proper hygiene and mask-wearing? Or, will we as a society continue to cower in fear, refuse to accept reality, and remain ambivalent towards progress?
It seems as though our government has chosen to embrace the latter option, making America out to be a cautionary tale of endless restrictions, emotional despair, and economic damage even as vaccine distribution is becoming far more widespread across the nation, and strong efficacy rates have led to sharp declines in sickness among inoculated citizens. President Biden posits that American society may return to some semblance of normalcy within the next few months while continuing to dismiss his predecessor’s crucial role in curtailing the coronavirus pandemic via Operation Warp Speed. We are told to “obey the science.” Yet, many around the world continue to defame Israel, a nation on the precipice of normalcy, due to its success against the virus.
While America and most Western nations have succumbed to fear, Israel, with its swift and data-driven response to the pandemic, has emerged as the envy of the free world. In January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ensured Israeli citizens a mask-free celebration of Passover, citing Israel’s role as a “model country” for testing Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine and aptly noting that Israel’s “health system is among the most advanced in the world.” Only recently did Biden’s Center for Disease Control begin to lift its blockade upon normalcy, with director Rochelle Walensky permitting small, undistanced indoor gatherings for fully-vaccinated Americans. While all Israelis — Muslim and Jewish, young and old— will be free to embrace their loved ones and patronize local businesses in the coming weeks without fear of retribution, Americans will remain confined by draconian political stunts aimed to appease those who benefit most from our imposed limitations.
As early as January, when vaccine distribution was beginning throughout most parts of the industrialized world, Israel led the globe in per-capita inoculation rates—close to 10% of the total population—and prioritizing the populations made most vulnerable to the coronavirus. Through a distribution system arranged by the Israeli government, reliant upon centralized practices between the nation’s four predominant semi-private health management organizations, doses of the vaccine were swiftly introduced throughout the country without particular regard to ethnicity or income strata. Israel has rapidly disseminated vaccines: current tallies place the nation’s per capita distribution rate far ahead of those of any country in the world, with nearly half of the total population fully immunized against the deadly coronavirus and with the nation’s five-millionth vaccination occurring in mid-March.
Meanwhile, the global left-wing forces have maintained their unwavering criticism of the Jewish state. A recent opinion piece in Haaretz, a left-wing Israeli newspaper, claims that Israel is complicit in “vaccine apartheid,” arguing, “While we are in the respectable first place worldwide in inoculating citizens and residents – the fact remains that Israel has excluded some 4.5 million Palestinians from the population it inoculates, although they all live under its rule.” Quizzically, the author asserts the autonomy of the Palestinian populations of Gaza and Judea and Samaria while simultaneously imposing a burden upon the Israeli government to universally immunize the Palestinian population, a threat supposedly justified by the presence of “4.5 million people … in the Palestinian population registry controlled by Israel.” Marc Lamont Hill, an academic specializing in media studies and urban education, contends that Israeli distribution protocol poses an express “denial of Palestinians of the right to or access to the vaccine” as well as an abdication of “international law.” (As if supernational governing bodies like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice do not maintain rich histories of targeted and deliberate anti-Israel practices.) Arguments like these, which attempt to frame Israel’s revolutionary medical advances as arms of a nonexistent apartheid movement, overshadow the Israeli system’s efficacy.
The ingenuity of the Jewish state amidst the coronavirus pandemic must become the focal point of the grand Israeli experiment to rebrand the conversation surrounding Middle East policy, a topic long defined by poignant Palestinian propaganda and poor Israeli messaging strategies. Besides Israel’s emergence as a counterweight to the quixotic tendencies of her Arab neighbors, her promotion of democratic values, and her preservation of sacred religious sites, no greater justification exists for a worldwide embrace of the Israeli cause than the nation’s remarkable response to the virus. When leftist cultural outlets such as NBC’s Saturday Night Live deliberately imply that Israel is an apartheid state, using flagrant conspiracies as pretexts for antisemitic rhetoric, they show themselves to be inept at discerning fact from fiction on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
As if afflicted with Stockholm Syndrome, the global left sides with those who espouse values antithetical to their own while disavowing the genuine and tangible impacts of Israel’s regional technological superiority. They would extol Israel’s scientific prowess if truly guided by reason or science but are blinded by leftist orthodoxy, unable to examine the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship thoroughly.
Like the crazed emperor Nero, who fiddled as Rome burned to the ground, America’s ascribed leftist “thought leaders” cower at the degradation of our cherished institutions. Businesses remain shuttered as the national unemployment rate continues to linger at around 6.9%. Future doctors, lawyers, and scientists sit in quiet repose behind dark screens. Simultaneously, teachers’ unions reap dividends and impart corrosive notions of critical race theory upon our young scholars. A generation of young Americans is bound to their phones while fewer and fewer public school students opt to attend virtual classes, mental illness spirals out of control, and big tech perpetuates blatant falsehoods. With our social framework continuing to rot, are we really in any position to relinquish our bona fides and excoriate Israel’s distribution strategy?
We conservatives must dispel the American left’s baseless intersectional myths surrounding Israeli vaccine distribution, reject the global community’s obsequious embrace of the Palestinian narrative, and weed out the dangerous cultural ramifications of antisemitism. No longer may we in good faith sit by while these casual incitements strike at the heart of our people. An honest dialogue with our adversaries can only be achieved when grounded in Israel’s recognition as a moral, righteous, and compassionate nation. Anything otherwise would be an affront to our shared values as Americans and an utter disservice to our most cherished ally in the Middle East.
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