Israel says vaccine equally available to all citizens. But is that really the case?

Everyday people around the world are getting vaccinated against the coronavirus, providing small glimmers of hope after a year of lockdowns and quarantines. 

As more and more countries begin vaccinating their populations, even more eyes turn towards one country, which is largely being hailed as an exemplary case of a successful COVID-19 vaccine roll out. That country, of course, is Israel. 

Israel has already vaccinated 20% of its population of 9 million, with 1,870,652 people already receiving the first jab of the two-dose vaccine — by far the highest vaccination rate in the world. 

Israeli officials recently reached an agreement with the Pfizer pharmaceutical company, which will see hundreds of thousands of new vaccine doses arrive in Israel each week. If this plan holds up, Israel estimates that by March it will have vaccinated 5.2 million citizens against the coronavirus.

The country has gone so far as to say that it will release data on its COVID-19 vaccine roll out in order to use a model for other countries on how to successfully inoculate their populations. 

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.”

A pervasive problem

The lack of accessibility to vital COVID-19 information and services for Palestinian communities in Israel is not a new problem. In the early months of the pandemic, Adalah filed a similar petition regarding the Israeli Ministry of Health’s failure to provide COVID-19 statistics and updates in Arabic. 

The group also sounded the alarm over the government’s failure to provide an adequate number of COVID-19 testing centers and testing kits in Palestinian communities. Those kinds of issues, Zaher said, have persisted throughout the pandemic. 

“In the beginning of the pandemic we had to petition because the state refused to provide internet in the unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Naqab (Negev desert), where there are 35 villages the Israel refuses to recognize,” Zaher pointed out. 

Without internet access, hundreds of children and teenagers in the unrecognized Bedouin villages were left without proper access to distanced learning following nation-wide shut downs of schools.

“We also petitioned for the court to establish drive-in COVID-19 testing centers in Palestinian areas, which the state did not even think to provide in Arab Bedouin communities in the south,” she said. 

The discriminatory practices that organizations like Adalah have witnessed since the beginning of the pandemic, Zaher told Mondoweiss, are now starting to manifest in other ways during the vaccine roll out. 

When it comes to misinformation on the vaccine, Zaher says they are already starting to see the effects in the unrecognized Bedouin villages in southern Israel, where vaccination rates are incredibly low compared to the country’s national average. 

“Based on information that I received, I understood that in the unrecognized villages where you have a population of 90,000 people that live there, only 100 people had been vaccinated,” Zaher said. 

“There are only 14 health clinics in these 35 unrecognized villages,” Zaher said, many of which  have not been given doses of the vaccine by the Israeli government. “So even if you do have a clinic in your village, or can access one, you likely can’t even get the vaccine.”

According to Zaher, the government is operating under the assumption that Palestinians are less likely to get vaccinated than Jewish communities, and therefore have not provided clinics in Bedouin villages with significant amounts of the vaccine for fear that people won’t come to get the shot, and the doses will go to waste — a method of reasoning that Zaher says is completely illogical. 

“If you’re not raising awareness and providing information about the vaccine in the community, how can you expect people to come get vaccinated?” she asked. “Even if people are not willing to get vaccinated, the state health clinics have the legal obligation to provide this service, so that people who want it will be able to get it.”

To put it simply, Zaher made the following comparison: “Imagine people don’t want to go to a gynecologist for some reason, and the Ministry of Health says ‘okay there is no reason to provide a gynecological expert in that clinic.’ This is absurd.”

The government should not be responding  to community trends and adjusting their policies as such, Zaher said, but should be actively trying to change them. 

“They should initiate and provide correct information and adequate campaigns to enable people to make informed decisions on whether they want to be vaccinated or not.”

All of these trends, Zaher said, are “implications of a long term system of systemic racial discrimination.”

Lack of vaccination centers in East Jerusalem

In occupied East Jerusalem, where 350,000 Palestinians are considered “permanent residents” (but not citizens) of Israel, Adalah has also documented similar policies of discrimination and lack of accessibility when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccine. 

Unlike its subjects in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has made the vaccine available to Palestinians in East Jerusalem — a territory that was illegally annexed by Israel in 1967. But, in many cases, Palestinians must travel significant distances out of their neighborhoods in order to get the vaccine. 

Back in March, Adalah filed a petition over Israel’s failure to provide COVID-19 testing center for 150,000 Palestinians with Israeli-issued Jerusalem ID cards living in Kufr Aqab, the Shuafat refugee camp, and the adjacent neighborhoods.

Now, almost a year later, Israeli authorities are making the same mistakes, and have failed to make the COVID-19 vaccine accessible to the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have Jerusalem IDs, but live on the other side of the Separation Wall (Kufr Aqab, Shufat Refugee Camp, and surrounding areas). 

“These communities are at high risk due to overcrowding,  which makes it harder for the community to protect itself against the virus,” Adalah attorney Suhad Bishara told Mondoweiss. “Having said that, no vaccine centers have been established in any of these areas.”

With no vaccine centers in these neighborhoods, which lie on the West Bank side of the Separation Wall, Palestinians in places like Kafr Aqab and Shufat camp must pass through military checkpoints in order to travel to a center in Jerusalem city to get the vaccine.  

“Such travel is very problematic in terms of time and risk, especially for women, children, and the elderly,” Bishara said, highlighting not only the lack of sufficient public transport between the neighborhoods and the city center, but also the health risks that come with using any forms of public transportation during a pandemic. 

“What we are demanding is that Israel opens a vaccine center in these areas that will enable the community to get the vaccine in places close to their homes,” she said. “Israeli authorities have the obligation to fight the pandemic and offer vaccines equally to all of their citizens and residents, including those under occupation. Such an obligation cannot be disputed”

By failing to provide access to vaccine centers in Palestinian communities, equal to that of Jewish communities, Israel “is failing their obligation under both international human rights law and Israeli law,” Bishara said. 

Echoing the sentiments of her colleague Sawsan Zaher, Bishara said that she believed these policies and trends were “not a coincidence.”

“The discriminatory and aggressive policies to Palestinians in East Jerusalem is not something new,” she said. “And the treatment of the coronavirus and now the policy vis-à-vis the vaccine is no exception in this regard.”

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