Opinion: Netanyahu does deserve credit for his successes in responding to the pandemic, but as head of the last two governments he is also responsible for the failures and the final death toll, which will be higher than it should have been
Israel has passed the 6,000 benchmark for coronavirus deaths, according to the official count of the Ministry of Health, for contrary to the cheery atmosphere now being felt across the country, we are still in the throes of an outbreak.
Granted, it is being contained and actually on the wane thanks to the vaccines, but it is still here, thereby exposing all the failures of the last two governments.
Even before we count those failures, let’s take a minute to praise what is being done better in Israel than anywhere else: a formidable set of tests that apparently saved many lives and a great deal of money for the economy and a rollout of vaccines that made Israel the most inoculated country in the world.
Both of these things saved Israel from far greater tragedy. The credit for them goes to the excellent health care system, an extraordinary ability to improvise and of course to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recognized the threat of coronavirus long before other leaders.
Netanyahu does deserve credit for his successes, but as head of the last two governments he is also responsible for the failures and the final death toll.
The truth is that a very young country, the youngest in the industrialized West, with an outstanding health care system and emergency preparedness experienced a widespread outbreak that led to excess mortality.
Yes, Israel is a very crowded country with poor populations, but it took drastic measures to suppress the plague, including reducing the number of school days to one of the lowest in the world.
But in terms of mortality per million, Israel’s situation is in no way a success . It is not as bad as Britain or the Czech Republic, for example, but nor is it as enviable as Denmark.
And “no way a success” was exactly the phrase used by A., the deputy head of the Mossad, to describe the management of Netanyahu when it came to the handling of the coronavirus.
Ultimately, A. is the one who put together the Mossad and defense establishment plan to deal with the virus as early as March of last year. And it was the prime minister who shelved the plan as soon as it was presented to him. He was particularly bothered by the very first point – the appointment of a czar manager to handle the response to coronavirus.
“I am handling it,” Netanyahu told Mossad Director Yossi Cohen. It would take months for the prime minister to wake up to the obvious need for someone to tactically manage one of the most difficult challenges Israel has ever faced.
And this was just the start. The failures of the two governments were multifaceted, but unprofessionalism, politicization and complacency was the through line for both.
It was this complacency that led Netanyahu to offer the public to go “have fun,” and allow his government to open the venue halls without supervision.
It was this complacency that led the members of the coronavirus cabinet to pledge that Israel would have to fight its second wave without closures and would be the “first country in the world” to emerge from the pandemic without further lockdowns.
Complacency and populism seeped into the media, constantly browbeating the public with conflicting messages from experts who turned out to be anti-experts: they told the public that the outbreak was over, or that the virus had “run out of steam”, that it was “just the flu”, or that the country had already achieved herd immunity (months before the country’s first vaccine was even administered to Netanyahu).
These confused and erroneous messages created extraordinary mistrust among the Israeli public.
Complacency was accompanied by a lack of professionalism. Whenever the economy shut down, the education system did not prepare for a gradual or full return to school, and the arguments and quarrels over budgeting, capsules and testing usually lasted until the minute the classrooms opened – and beyond.
The lack of professionalism also led to complete blindness regarding Ben-Gurion Airport, one of the major failures of the current Netanyahu government. Israel has become one of the most infected places in the world for the British variant – a highly contagious and perhaps even more deadly strain of the virus.
While Israelis were asked to present a negative test in order to gain entry to Rwanda and the Seychelles, they and foreigners could enter Israel without any tests at all.
And of course, there was the politicization. The correct and effective thing to do was to make an earlier and clearer distinction between areas with high and low infection rates, and not just for the education system. But such measures would have been toxic for Netanyahu’s relations with his ultra-Orthodox political partners, and as such were swiftly rejected.
Indeed, the politicization was the most outrageous failure of all. Netanyahu has never refrained from using press conferences at the beginning of official events to disseminate his party messages. Besides which, about half of the population had very limited trust in the criminally accused prime minister from the outset.
Blue & White under the leadership of Benny Gantz said it was joining a “coronavirus emergency government” to resolve these very failures.
But the party did not present any ordered worldview, did not seek any responsibilities pertaining to the pandemic during coalition negotiations, did not take the health portfolio, and only in the last month have begun to clash with Netanyahu over his approach, and usually only adopting a simplistic “open it all up” agenda.
Senior officials who witnessed the pandemic discussions with Netanyahu describe an unusually sharp and knowledgeable person, who understood better than others the threat posed by the virus and the need for vaccines – and who went all out to achieve his aims.
They also describe Netanyahu as responsible for negligent handling of the outbreak and as obsessively political. This led to unfocused management that thwarted effective collaboration.
The pandemic, we all hope, is in its death throes.
But as to whether the government also effectively preparing for a less positive development such a new outbreak or strain, don’t hold your breath.
As reported by Ynetnews