Vaccine for Holocaust survivors living in other countries but not for Arab Israelis & Palestinians living under Israeli occupation?

Israel is planning to provide Coronavirus vaccine shots to Holocaust survivors living anywhere in the world. Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Omer Yankelevich on 12th January announced this new policy. Erin Ben-Moshe in her article Israel explores plan to provide free vaccines to Holocaust survivors worldwide reports Yankelevich's statement:

“During this global crisis, we have an opportunity to support Holocaust survivors whose resilience continues to guide and inspire humanity today,” said Yankelevich. “It is our collective obligation to safeguard this treasured yet vulnerable population in the spirit of mutual responsibility.”

“Now is the time for all of us, Jewish institutions and leaders from across the world, to come together in this operation,” she said. “Together, we can ensure that Holocaust survivors are efficiently vaccinated, wherever they live.”

However, Ben-Moshe also informs that there are no definite plans yet on how to manage vaccination of around 130,000 Holocaust survivors outside Israel (around 200,000 are Israelis):

As of now, there is no definite plan to finance and manage the vaccination project, including the involvement of Jewish philanthropic networks. Solutions for other expected hurdles, such as obtaining permits from foreign governments and the purchase of vaccines by the ministry, are also being examined. The statement also notes that vaccines for this initiative will be acquired separately and in addition to Israel’s current supply.

Nathan Jeffay in his The Times of Israel article, Israeli group sparks debate with plans to vaccinate world’s Holocaust survivors, has collated other questions raised about this scheme. The first objection is from the agency that is supposed to distribute the vaccine:

Shalom Corps was set up a few months ago by Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry and the Jewish Agency. While Diaspora Affairs Minister Omer Yankelevich has waxed lyrical about the plan, the Jewish Agency only learned about it through the media, and has not echoed her enthusiasm.

“It’s quite an undertaking,” a Jewish Agency spokeswoman told The Times of Israel on Wednesday. “We weren’t aware of it and haven’t had a chance to properly look into whether it’s feasible.”

Haaretz cited an anonymous source familiar with the Jewish Agency’s reaction saying that officials in the organization were “shocked” and “outraged” when they saw a story on the idea, which they called “abhorrent.”

 

... the source who spoke to Haaretz regarding discussions in the Jewish Agency said it would be “unfeasible, illegal, immoral, diplomatically disastrous and an absolute impossibility” to interfere with the way individual countries distribute vaccines by creating special provision for Jewish Holocaust survivors.

Strict regulations, which vary from country to country, govern medical procedures, and while experts say some do permit private vaccination for select individuals, the plan could run into legal issues in other jurisdictions.

While Israel is planning to vaccinate Holocaust survivors that are citizens of other countries and most of them are most likely vaccinated by their governments in the next few months (most of the Holocaust survivors live in the rich Western countries, which have advanced health systems and already secured large amounts of vaccine doses, and are prioritizing vaccination of their older population, which also includes Holocaust survivors), it has shown far less concern about Palestinians under its occupation or even its own Arab Israeli population:

In the midst of the fanfare surrounding Israel’s vaccine campaign, Palestinian activists and rights groups have criticized Israel for not offering the vaccine to the millions of Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. 

Under Article 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel is required as an occupier to “ensure the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics” — in this case, the COVID-19 vaccine. 

Israel has deflected such criticisms, saying the obligation to vaccinate Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza lies in the hands of the Palestinian Authority (PA). 

Meanwhile, Israeli leaders insist that they are vaccinating all Israeli citizens, regardless of race or ethnicity, equally and fairly — including the state’s 2 million Palestinian citizens. 

But that just might not be true, human rights advocates have pointed out. 

While Palestinians citizens of Israel qualify, just as Jewish Israelis do, to receive the vaccine and would not be turned back at a clinic simply because they are Palestinian, rights groups are claiming that there are other sinister mechanisms of discrimination at work when it comes to Israel and its distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine. 

Adalah — The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel has slammed Israel’s emergency medical service for failing to provide vital COVID-19 information, including facts relating to the vaccine, available in Arabic. 

The website of Magen David Adom (MDA), the emergency service responsible for informing the Israeli citizenry on everything from COVID-19 guidelines and updates, how and where to get tested, and vital information regarding the vaccine, currently only provides information and updates in Hebrew and English.

This, Adalah says, is unacceptable, and marginalizes millions of Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 20% of the population and primarily speak Arabic. 

“In Israel, Magen David Adom is basically the equivalent of the Red Cross,” Adalah attorney Sawsan Zaher told Mondoweiss. “All of the essential information that they provide is not available at all in Arabic.”

Zaher told Mondoweiss that she believes, as someone who has been documenting and fighting against discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel for years, the failure to provide vital information regarding COVID-19 and the vaccine in Arabic is “not a coincidence.”

“There is a policy of systematic racial discrimination against Arab citizens in Israel,” Zaher said, and the failure of official bodies like MDA to cater to all citizens is just one small example of that policy. 

Zaher pointed to Israel’s 2018 Nation State Law, which among other provisions declared that only Jews have the right to self-determination, as a template for discrimination against Palestinians “on all levels.”

“Having the Jewish Nation State Basic Law… which stated that Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people, excluded the Palestinian citizenry from the preamble and the definition of who the citizens are,” Zaher said.

“This exclusion is providing constitutional legitimacy to discrimination of Palestinians on all levels,” she said, including, for example, “not providing a very important website in Arabic which is vital.

“Unfortunately this [discrimination] is seen not only on high level policies, but basic policies and decisions like providing information in Arabic or making sure all campaigns on COVID-19 awareness are provided equally in Palestinians and Arab towns,” Zaher said. 

The implications of not having accurate COVID-19 information in Arabic are potentially devastating and far-reaching for Palestinian communities in Israel, where reports have indicated widespread misinformation regarding the virus and the vaccine. 

With no official Arabic-language platforms to educate people on the vaccine and combat existing misinformation, advocates fear that it could lead to significant cases of Palestinians in Israel refusing to get vaccinated, therefore putting the community at greater risk. 

The implications of such discriminatory practices when it comes to the coronavirus, Zaher says, are “a matter of life and death.” (Israel says vaccine equally available to all citizens. But is that really the case?)

What is Post Zionism?

Before we define post-Zionism, let's talk a little bit about Zionism. Zionism is Israel’s national ideology. Zionists believe that Jews have a special relationship with Zion, a synonym of Jerusalem in the Bible. Zionists define Zion broadly as the area of the (Mandate) Palestine. They claim that Judaism is not only a religion but also a nationality, so Jews deserve their own state and because of their special two millennia-old connection, Zion should be that state. Zionists discount and disregard the presence and majority of Palestinians in erstwhile Palestine before the creation of Israel. The slogan, "A land without a people for a people without a land" explains the Zionist idea.

If Zionism is about particular -- a particular land for a particular people at a particular time -- post- Zionism concerns universal -- humans coming together after acknowledging their differences and idiosyncrasies. If Zionism is based on denying Palestinians existence, suffering, and exclusion, post- Zionism is known for acknowledging Palestinians' trauma and called for their inclusion. If Zionism is about hegemony, post-Zionism cherishes harmony. If Zionism gave birth to Israel, post-Zionism was, many intellectuals thought, to give it maturity. If Zionism prefers the tribe, post-Zionism promotes trade-offs. If Zionism is about Jews who can fight for their own rights, post-Zionism prioritizes Jews that can fight not only for themselves but also for others. 

Zionism rose to prominence is the 1890s; post-Zionism became a thing, hundred years later, in the 1990s. There is no agreed definition of post-Zionism. Most of its detractors and some of its proponents claim that it is not much different from more than a century old anti-Zionism. However, while anti-Zionists are by-definition against Zionism, many of the post-Zionists are not. A large number of post-Zionists appreciate the necessity of Zionism for bringing Jews together and for creating the state of Israel. What unites most post-Zionists is the belief that Zionism has well past its expiry date. 

While the heydays of the post-Zionist movement were the 1990s and 2000s, its origin can be traced to the late 1960s. For instance, publicist Uri Avnery published a book in 1968 titled Israel without Zionists. Others have associated post-Zionism with the 1940s and 1950s cultural movement of the Mandate Palestine Jews who dreamed of a "Hebrew" nation, a nation that would be composed of Middle Eastern people (both Arabs and Jews), who have rejected their religious (Islamic and Judaic) pasts. Post-Zionism started as an academic movement. Its first proponents were Israeli academics who are usually referred to as “New Historians.” These historians, in the 1980s, used Israeli government declassified documents, interviews, and objective rigorous research to unpack and highlight the massacre and dislocation of the Palestinians before but primarily after the 1948 War. Tom Segev, Ilan Pappé, Benny Morris, and Avi Shlaim were prominent New Historians. Gradually, in the 1990s, these revisionist historians became the pioneers of a much larger movement. However, this movement never became popular. Ordinary Israelis continued to believe in the official nationalist ideology of Zionism.

Source: Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006)

Journalist Neri Livneh, who was part of the movement, defined post-Zionism in her Haaretz's article Post-Zionism Only Rings Once (September 20, 2001):

In the wider sense, if the term post-Zionism is meant to describe every attempt to examine the injustices perpetrated by Zionism and to reassess Israel's history from a standpoint that is different from the standard version, all those who are identified in this article as "post-Zionists" will undoubtedly agree to be included in the list. 

But in the narrower, and more precise, sense, post-Zionism is a political attitude that recognizes the legitimacy of Zionism as a national movement of Jews, but specifies a certain date, a kind of watershed, from which point on Zionism concluded its historical role or lost its legitimacy because of injustices it did to others (not only to Arabs but also, for example to Holocaust survivors from Europe, Yiddish speakers, Jews from Arab and Islamic countries, ultra-Orthodox Jews and women). 

This viewpoint also gives rise to a political conclusion, according to which Israel must disengage itself from its Zionist elements, which are the foundation of its Jewish character, because they are preventing it from being a democratic state. In the eyes of its opponents, this conclusion by the post-Zionists places them in a saliently anti-Zionist camp.

Livneh explicates that many scholars, who are identified as post-Zionists rubbish the label. Professors Raz-Karkutzkin and Shenhav do not want to be called post-Zionists, although they were called post-Zionists. Poet, novelist, and essayist Yitzhak Laor self-identified as an anti-Zionist also did not like the term:

"Post-Zionism," says Dr. Amnon Raz-Karkutzkin, from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be'er Sheva, "is actually a kind of general term that was invented in order to stuff into one basket and denounce everyone who does not identify completely with the establishment, or who has anything critical to say about the way history is taught in Israel, or who see the huge damage that Zionism has done to the Palestinians or the Mizrahim" - referring to Jews whose origins lie in Middle Eastern countries. 

"Post-Zionism is an empty label," asserts Prof. Yehouda Shenhav from Tel Aviv University. "I think we have to stop using the category of `post-Zionism,' because people invoke it confusingly. Not everyone who calls for an end to the occupation is necessarily a post-Zionist. People who want to return to the 1967 lines can be Zionists through and through, because they are convinced that nationhood cannot exist without borders. On the other hand, you could say that the settlers are post-Zionists, because their very existence is harmful to nationhood within clear boundaries." 

"Post-Zionism is a term I abhor," Raz-Karkutzkin states. "I am absolutely not a post-Zionist..." 

"Post-Zionism is a kind of convenient bag into which all kinds of people can be stuffed," he[Laor] says. "On the one hand, it allows anti-Zionists to come out of the closet without calling themselves anti-Zionists, and on the other hand, it allows all the ideological establishment Zionists to throw them all into that bag so they can kick it around."

Professor Uri Ram, in his book Israeli Nationalism: Social conflicts and the politics of knowledge (2011, 118), contends that post-Zionism has a great impact on Israeli academia, art, and culture:

In fact, the post-Zionist critique on what may be called “nationalist epistemology” (or nationalist point of view) is felt today in all disciplines of knowledge and creative arts in Israel (even if not always explicitly under the post-Zionist heading). This is the situation in the field of history, where the “new historians” or “revisionist historians” had a lasting impact on history writing and on historical memory...The presence of post-Zionism in Israeli culture in general and of post-Zionist studies of Israeli society in particular is pervasive and unequivocal.

Ram also identifies many branches of post-Zionism. Feminist post-Zionists, for instance, argue that post-Zionism is about rejecting the nationalistic, militaristic, and masculine traits of Zionism which reinforce each other. Diasporic post-Zionism is more concerned about the effects Zionism on non-Israeli Jews and aims to "de-Israelize" the Jewish diaspora.

For Zionists, there is not much difference between anti-Zionists and post-Zionists. Scholars, such as Shlomo Avineri and Meyrav Wurmser, who ascribe to the official Zionist paradigm, unpack the negative and disastrous agenda of the post-Zionists in the following section:

Avineri notes that post-Zionists contend that Zionism is a colonial phenomenon rather than a national movement in conflict with another national movement over their claim to the same territory. “At the same time,” he says, “those who are careful not to accept the Zionist narrative sometimes accept the Palestinian narrative without question. To them it is clear that there is a Palestinian people, that what happened in 1948 is exactly what the Arabs say happened, and that in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there is, on the one hand, a Zionist ‘narrative,’ and on the other, ‘facts’ that are precisely identical to the Palestinian narrative.” Avineri calls this “absolute folly...” 

[Wurmser argues] At its essence, post-Zionism holds that the State of Israel is an immoral phenomenon because it was established on the basis of the destruction of another people—the Palestinians. It presents the problem as transcending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967; hence, its solution does not lie in a simple Israeli withdrawal from those territories. To the contrary, post-Zionists now tend to disparage left-wing Zionist groups for what they refer to as the “Peace Now Syndrome,” a cherishing of the period before 1967 as flawless while attributing all of Israel's wrongdoing to the 1967 occupation. Post-Zionists are much more radical: from their perspective, the problem has to do with the very existence of Israel. They deem Zionism a colonialist, racist, and evil phenomenon that stole another people’s land by force and continues to oppress them... 

Avineri says that “post-Zionists are simply anti-Zionists” who believe “that there is no Jewish people, that Zionism is an ally of imperialism and that the Palestinian Arabs are victims of Zionist aggression….They do not see Zionism and the State of Israel as a reality that has come to pass, but rather as something that is not legitimate from the outset and that must be eliminated down to its very foundations.” 

Wurmser observes that the intention of post-Zionists “is wholly negative; not to improve Zionism but to destroy it. Post-Zionist writers openly aspire not to create a new Israeli historiography free of all ideological biases, but rather seek to inject an anti-Israel bias into them.” (Zionism: “New Historians” and Post-Zionists)

These views are, of course, rejected by the post-Zionists. They claim to love their country and assert that they are trying to save their country from an impending disaster.