An update from my last post: my post-Covid moodiness and brain fog is clearing, at least somewhat. That is a relief. Our lives have settled in considerably. My phone is working again, we bought a second car so K and I are not always figuring out who is going where when, and we have a weekly grocery delivery from the Jerusalem shuk, supplemented by daily trips to one of the three makolets ( little grocery/convenience stores) within a few blocks of our house.
Also, we are finally settled into our new apartment, and we have finished purchasing the myriad small but essential items one needs for a functioning household: lamps, cereal bowls, rugs, light bulbs, toilet bowl cleaners, extension cords, tape and marker and scissors and all the other things the rest of us just have in our homes because at one point or another they become necessary.
This final purchasing spree was intensified by the onset of lockdown #3. Officially, it began on Christmas, which is for the most part a non-holiday except in places like Nazareth and other places where there are larger Christian communities. All schools, including elementary schools, shifted back to zoom. But despite the stated lockdown, apparently many people didn’t take the government seriously.
K told me a joke yesterday that an Israeli colleague told him. Two men, an American and an Israeli, die and are assigned to hell, but they can choose if they want an American hell or an Israeli hell. In the American version, they will be stuck in a prison cell with limited contact with others, and in the Israeli hell, they will be plunged into a pit of hot oil. The American man chooses the American hell.
The Israeli chooses the Israeli hell.“Why would you choose that?” asks the American, incredulous. “A pit of burning hot oil seems much worse than a prison cell!”The Israeli smiles. “Ah, yes, but they said this will be Israeli. So the oil will probably be water, and it won’t be that hot, and the pit will probably be small and cramped. So if hell is a hot tub, I’ll take it!”
Given the Israeli disregard for rules, the infection rate here has continued to rise rapidly. Last week, the government decided it needed to redouble the effort to curb contagion by supplementing the first closure with teeth: fines, and checkpoints on highways and busy streets that cause enormous traffic jams and hopefully incentivize compliance. While Israel is known internationally for its policy of imposing checkpoints on Palestinians, Israel has rarely utilized this technique on its own citizens. I passed a checkpoint yesterday, and watched the cars slow to stop for several miles as policemen blockaded the highway and stopped each driver individually to ascertain if he is allowed to be on the road. Most Palestinians experience checkpoints as humiliating, invasive, and exasperatingly time consuming to pass through. Many Israelis are now feeling the same pain. Whether not they are effective I don’t know.
What is clear, however, is that the spread of Corona here in the last few weeks has been palpable, and a strange flashback to life here in late September, just before the second Seger.
After several months of relatively low cases, Israel has again spiked from under 1,000 new cases a day to almost 10,000. And at 10,000 new cases a day, Corona feels everywhere. In part because it’s a small country, and everyone knows someone personally who is sick. In addition, the national tracing system means that if you come into contact with someone who is contagious, you are sent to two weeks of bidud (quarantine). T’s class alone had 5 children who were in bidud because a family member had Covid. All of I’s friends had to go into bidud for two weeks because someone at their youth group tested positive. Even my mother is in bidud.
Everyone compares their bidud stories–I met someone who has been in bidud five times since Covid started, although she hasn’t had Covid herself. One can’t help but feel like we are living in an era of the fulfillment of the Biblical practice of sending people outside the camp for punishment. The main difference, however, is this time around it has a particularly random feel to it, as the contagion often happens between strangers in a grocery store, restaurant, school or on the street.
My personal experience suggests that while Israelis are in general frustrated with the lockdowns, and wish the government advocated a more moderate path with less devastating economic and social impact, people are surprisingly compliant with bidud, and recognize that they don’t want to be the guy who inadvertently infects others just by being out and about. I think there is the fear of some sort of monetary fine for breaking bidud, although I don’t know what that is.
However, despite all the ins and outs of bidud and the mask wearing, Israelis are not very good at social distancing. In fact, I’d say they are very good at NOT social distancing. It is very common here to see people crowding in supermarket lines and chatting in large groups, their masks under their nose or chin. Many people who are not high risk are just not afraid of getting it.I think a lot of this fearlessness comes from national history. The country is surrounded by enemies. Its citizens have fought four wars and suffered through hundreds of terrorist attacks. Every family sends their girls and boys to the army. So people who are not high risk feel like if they get sick, they get sick.
Given this, it is not surprising that Israel is currently 3rd in the world at the rate of new infections. A doubtable honor, to be sure. By contrast, the statistic that Israelis are proud of, and that one hears about nonstop on the news and radio, is that Israel is currently the world leader by a wide margin in percentage of the population that has been vaccinated. Vaccines started here in late December, and by January 10th, 18% of the country, including the large majority of the 10% of the country that is over 65 and all health care workers received their first shot. The goal is to reach 5 million of the country’s 9 million citizens by March. This is 55% of the total population, and only 72% of the country is over 15, so it’s really 76% of the adult population (I think). Counted among the already vaccinated are my parents, my husband, and the high risk friends that I know.
The question that I am most interested in is why is Israel outpacing the rest of the world in speed of vaccine distribution?
First, Israel is a small country. Out of the 235 countries in the world, it is 100th. Vaccinating the whole country is much easier with 8.7 million people than if you are India, China or the United States.
Second, Israeli culture has a deeply ingrained David Complex. It sees itself as the small country that can defeat its larger and more powerful enemies, or at least show them up. For Israel to be able to showcase itself as Exhibit A in how to end the plague resonates with the national desire to be recognized on the international stage for something other than its relationship with its Palestinian neighbors.
Third, the one Jewish value that almost all Israelis agree on is the sanctity of life. Despite endless political bickering about the best strategies for coping with the pandemic, people understand that with each day, more and more innocent people die, and it is the shared responsibility of the government, the HMO’s, and individual citizens to do whatever they can to stop the plague. While there is a vocal minority who express fear and conspiracy theories around the spread of the vaccine, most Israelis seem willing to set aside their doubts for their own health and the common good.
Fourth, Israel has an operational advantage. All four nationalized HMO’s have unfurled distribution strategies with awe-inspiring alacrity and technical precisions. Everyone, Jews and Arabs alike (24% of Israelis are not Jewish), is required by law to be a member of one of the four independently run HMO’s. With just a few clicks, they identified older and high risk citizens, and requested them to schedule vaccines in seven minute intervals. At the beginning they literally dosed them out 24/7, I think they may have decided to give healthcare providers a break on the weekends now that the high risk populations are vaccinated but they still are chugging along at a breathtaking clip, and anyone who is not high priority can still show up late in the day and get vaccinated with whatever is left of that day’s supply.There are a number of interesting articles about the challenges and successes of the effort in the English media press, including here. They started with health care workers, and then added people over 65 and then people over 50. It sounds like next week even people over 40 will be invited to show up.
Fifth, Bibi has personal motivation to be a hero. Since the government was not able to approve a budget, the fourth election in two years is scheduled for late March. That Bibi would be motivated to defeat the virus in advance of the elections is not surprising. In the fall, Netanyahu made aggressive campaigns to secure enough vaccinations to inoculate the country. While some understood this effort as a cynical ploy to curry favor among his base as well as within the half or so of the country in the “anyone but Bibi” camp, the fact is, that he was successful, and the population, myself included, is grateful.
And sixth, Passover starts March 28th. In public announcements, the Prime Minister has tried to galvanize public support to schedule inoculations with the carrot that this year, every Israeli should get to celebrate a proper Passover Seder among friends and family. As someone who has spent almost all of my life living as a Jewish minority, to hear the Prime Minister talk about the primacy of celebrating Seder with family as a national goal is both jarring and endearing. I actually think it suggests something profound about Israeli life.
This is a very family focused culture. Kids come home from the army every weekend. Everyone whose family is within the country lives with an afternoon drive. Families, religious and secular alike, generally eat Friday night dinner together. Its not unusual to see two or even three generations out on hikes together. It was very traumatic for individuals and the country to have to observe Passover alone last year, and the government knows that another Passover lockdown would just not be tolerated.
Sending love to all of you, and wishes for a speedy return to normalcy around the globe.
SHB
Pomegranate Dreams 