Israel prepares refrigerated mortuaries eight months into the pandemic

The trajectory of the coronavirus in Israel raises the question: how did it get there?

Israel is known as a country that can deal with a crisis – usually of a military nature – quickly and effectively.

The country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic in its early months has been praised by the international community, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once boasted that “the world is learning from us”.

Now that Israel has become the country being singled out by the same international community, Israel is stuck in one of the worst scenarios with this second wave which does not seem to be showing any signs of slowing down.

On Thursday morning, the country’s Ministry of Health reported a record level of nearly 9,000 cases of VIDOC-19 in the last 24 hours – far more than the 300,000 in the United States in proportion to their respective populations.

Hospitals are filled to capacity and threaten to close, and the government has significantly tightened restrictions for the second containment, which began on the feast day of Rosh Hashanah on 18 September.
Israelis are now restricted to travel within one kilometre of their homes.

The most macabre scenes are now appearing.

Last week the Israeli media reported that Haifa’s Kadisha chevra, a ritual burial society, was preparing refrigerated shipping containers in which to store the bodies of the dead until they could be buried, and that other cities were preparing to do the same.

How did Israel arrive at this catastrophic scenario?

Many factors can explain the boomerang effect. A weak government could not act decisively

In March, Benny Gantz, the man who nearly toppled Netanyahu in three consecutive elections in less than a year, laid down his proverbial weapons and reached an agreement with Netanyahu to finally form a governing coalition.

Gantz, whom some have called patriotic and others politically naive, was appointed as the “emergency” unity government and declared that it wouldfight the coronavirus and look after all Israeli citizens”.

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The two main parties in the government – Netanyahu’s Likud and the Kahol lavan, Gantz’s white blueberry coalition – have been working against the tide since the beginning.

They argue over almost every decision to be taken and have not been able to vote a national budget for 2020 .

If a budget is not approved before 23 December, a 4th election is to be expected.
And Netanyahu is not against it, for several reasons. In the agreement he signed with Gantz, he agreed to resign to allow Gantz to become Prime Minister after 18 months. Netanyahu would like the agreement not to last that long and to keep his grip.

The Gantz coalition, as mentioned, is also in kit form, leaving Netanyahu with less weight when it comes to significantly consolidating his power in the next elections.

Meanwhile, the government has become ineffective.

Several senior civil service positions, including the prosecutor and police chief, have not been replaced.

Ronni Gamzu, head of the coronavirus bureau, was appointed without the basic authority he needed to implement his programmes, and his plans have been weakened by the government’s constant flexing of its muscles in the face of pressure from different sectors of the public.

“The same government that appointed [Gamzu] has no problem overturning or eroding some of its key recommendations and watering them down,” said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute.

Rather than functioning as it should, the coalition in many ways acts as a caretaker government and functions as if it were “sliding into an election campaign,” Plesner added.

Netanyahu’s gaze is elsewhere, even in the midst of demonstrations at home.

Israel began to emerge from its first confinement in early May, opening businesses, restaurants and schools. It has had four months to prepare for the challenges of any second wave.

But in addition to domestic politics, Netanyahu was also concerned about larger movements that he believed would add to his diplomatic legacy.

He flirted with the idea of annexing parts of the West Bank before 1 July, an idea that has drawn criticism from an unusually wide range of stakeholders including the Trump administration and even some settlers, whom Netanyahu has been successfully courting for years.

Then in the autumn, with the help of the Trump team, Israel signed normalisation agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, two of Israel’s Arab neighbours. Netanyahu attended a signing ceremony for the Abraham Accords in Washington, DC just days before the start of Israel’s second round of confinement, giving it the right points to organize a new election campaign.

There would, of course, be other points to counterbalance, such as the anti-Netanyahu demonstrations which increased during the summer and autumn.

Protesters against the Prime Minister’s policies have gathered every Saturday evening in front of his home in Jerusalem to loudly and clearly express his mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis and his government while he was indicted for corruption.

Demonstrations have grown to include disparate segments of Israeli society and have sometimes resulted in violent clashes between police and demonstrators.

This week, the government adopted severe restrictions on demonstrations as part of its response to the pandemic, ending the weekly public demonstration of resistance.

The economy has opened up too quickly

The seemingly successful rapid reopening of the Israeli economy that has received so much praise has proved to be dangerous, and all parts of the government have admitted this.

Israel began to emerge from its first confinement in early May.
Some outlets have been allowed to open, with a limited number of customers at a time. Schools then reopened, followed by hotels, shopping centres and gymnasiums, then restaurants, cultural venues and event halls, all operating below full capacity.

But in July, some restrictions – notably on gymnasiums, public swimming pools, event halls, bars, clubs and cultural events – were re-imposed as coronavirus cases began to rise again.

The Israelis had headed for the beaches and restaurants, without masks, far too early, encouraged by a government that thought it had defeated the virus.

In the hours before the beginning of Yom Kippur, Netanyahu acknowledged that the country had opened too fast after the first confinement. “Have we made mistakes in the past? Of course,” Netanyahu said in a Hebrew-language video posted on social networks. “Our decision to open rooms to celebrate events was too quick. Maybe also the decision to reopen all schools“.

Gantz agreed, arguing that the country was also too slow to implement widespread contact tracing. On Saturday evening, in an interview on Israeli Channel 12, Gantz apologised, saying the government had been too involved in political wrangling to do its job.

COVID 19 is now out of control, there is still strong opposition to a second strict containment, by Gamzu himself.

Gamzu said last week that he preferred the idea of “a slight tightening of the containment to avoid serious damage to the economy”. He called the government’s decision to introduce total lockdown “disgusting”, adding that he would have to take an “anti-nausea pill”.

Schools continue to be the ideal culprit

When Israeli schools first reopened in May, things did not go very well.

The announcement of the opening of the schools was made a few days before the planned reopening date. A patchwork of policies and guidelines left administrators confused.

Hundreds of teachers, students and their families quickly contracted the virus. In less than two weeks, dozens of cities closed their school systems.

Yet while many Israeli parents are fed up with home schooling and supervision, calling for their children to be sent back to school, Education Minister Yoav Gallant insisted in July that the next school year should start on time on 1 September – and it did, despite widespread objections.

It didn’t last long either. Almost immediately afterwards, epidemics were associated with schools and classrooms, and even entire schools were quarantined.

While students were grouped in “capsules” to limit exposure to each other, teachers moved between the capsules, which could spread the disease.
(The country had too few teachers to reduce class sizes and tried to recruit quickly). The situation became so serious that schools eventually closed before the second general containment of Rosh Hashanah.

The focus on getting students back to school meant that little attention was paid to what would happen if they needed to learn again from home.

“I think we made a mistake and missed an opportunity to develop the components of distance learning,” said Zimra Vigoda, a parent whose daughter’s school switched to e-learning earlier in September when there were too few teachers to work in the classroom.

“The administration and teachers have worked hard to develop module-based learning and have added a multitude of interesting courses, but here in Israel, a country of apparent perpetual optimism, no one wanted to believe that a return to the classroom would not be possible this year“.

The Haredi Orthodox have shaped the response

Last month, the government designated some 40 towns and villages, mostly Haredi and Arab Orthodox, as Red Communities – or areas with higher infection rates that would be subject to individualised and stricter restrictions than the rest of the country. This system of categorising “traffic lights” has been used successfully in other countries and Gamzu is a proponent of it.

But after Orthodox religious politicians threatened to abandon Netanyahu and his government coalition because of traffic light rules, which would have included strict confinement, these communities were given only night-time curfews. Without any notable results.

The incident highlighted how politically important the Haredi Orthodox have become to Netanyahu and how he is willing to bend the rules for them.

He also showed how COVID-19 has spread further in some Orthodox communities, where continuing to gather in large groups to pray and celebrate has taken precedence over precaution.

This is a trend in Orthodox communities around the world, including in Brooklyn, where local authorities have threatened to crack down on highly orthodox neighbourhoods with high infection rates.

A symbol of this tension was Yaakov Litzman, the former Haredi Minister of Health. He resigned from the post in April after reports claimed he contracted the virus from participating in a prayer group that his ministry had banned.

Litzman became Minister of Housing, but he also resigned from that post in protest at the new containment restrictions imposed on Rosh Hashanah for major holiday prayer services.

However, not all Haredi Orthodox have distanced themselves from health rules. For example, Aryeh Deri, Israel’s Interior Minister who also heads the Sephardic Orthodox Shas party, compared ignoring the confinement rules to murder.

And the Shas Council of Torah Elders on Tuesday called for prayer services to be held outdoors only and in accordance with current regulations on coronaviruses.

At present, Haredi Israelis account for 40% of new cases, although they represent only 12% of the population. This proportion has continued to provoke criticism from more secular Israelis as to why the whole country is locked down. But even without these cases, the country would still have an infection rate higher than public health experts consider safe.

“We are not pigeons” – the psychology of the Israelis

The word “spawn” in Hebrew roughly translates as “pigeon” – someone who is taken advantage of. Avoiding being a spawner, pigeon is a top priority in Israeli culture today – a concept that is a far cry from the socialist kibbutz culture that prevailed in the early days of the country.

In the context of the pandemic and social distancing, the anti-fraud line of thinking is: why should I adhere to coronavirus restrictions when I see my neighbours and friends breaking the rules? Why can they enjoy the economy and life without a mask and I can’t?

This culture may affect Israel’s ability to contain the virus. In Haaretz , Anshel Pfeffer wrote that Israelis have been “too busy demanding equal rights” “rather than thinking about not being infected”.

In the Jerusalem Post , Liat Collins wrote: “The time has come to fear the spread of the virus, for fear of being considered a ‘spawner'”. In other words the Israeli would rather be infected by the virus than be taken for a pigeon; his notion of “equality” will be detrimental to him.

There is also the psychological disadvantage of this reputation for success in coping with a crisis. More Israelis have died from COVID-19 than from terrorist attacks, but with illness and death hidden in hospitals, the pandemic does not provoke the same reaction, these deaths are less spectacular.

Israelis can sometimes be a little too resilient,” said Alison Kaplan Sommer, a journalist in Haaretz, at a recent round table. “Our threshold of fear is very high. We have lived through all these traumas and all these wars and it has affected our ability to take this virus seriously. … National psychology is a big part of our history.

Source: Alliance Mag

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