Motti Millrod/Pool via AP
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, center, and his health minister Yuli Edelstein, second from left, attend the arrival of a plane with a shipment of Pfizer coronavirus vaccines, January 10, 2021, at Ben Gurion Airport, near the city of Lod, Israel.
Israel now leads the world in the percentage of its population vaccinated, and according to a new study, there is a 94 percent drop in COVID cases in the first 600,000 people to receive the vaccines. Just under half of all Israelis have now received at least one dose, compared to around 11 percent in the U.S.
How did Israel do it? First, it’s a relatively small country of some 8.7 million, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acted early to spend whatever it took to buy adequate vaccine supply. Second, Israel has an effective, universal health system, so distribution has been efficient.
Third, this is about survival, a subject that has vexed Jews since biblical times. In Netanyahu’s case, he faces re-election on March 23 against the background of corruption charges, and he grasped that a vaccination success was key to his own survival. His Likud Party leads in the polls.
Netanyahu is what we might call a competent autocrat. As political scientists brought up to cherish democracy, we like to believe that autocrats tend to make catastrophic mistakes because they are vain, impulsive, and not accountable.
But it’s more complicated than that. Some are competent and some aren’t.
Hitler was quite competent in preparing for war. But then his vanity got the better of him and he made catastrophic errors in delaying the invasion of a nearly helpless Britain and invading Russia instead. Stalin was every bit the brute that Hitler was. But Stalin was ruthlessly competent.
Netanyahu, despite his vain impulsivity and tyrannical aspirations, is politically accountable because of the sheer complexity of Israel’s multiparty system and the chronic need to negotiate coalition governments. Barring an unlikely criminal conviction, the vaccine success could help propel Netanyahu to victory.
This brings us to incompetent autocrats. With the possible exception of Caligula, Donald Trump wins the all-time prize.
When Trump thinks of survival, he thinks of lawyers, strategic bankruptcies, TV extravaganzas, and saving his own skin. The public’s health doesn’t even make the list.
Because of the sheer incompetence of Trump’s COVID non-policy, several hundred thousand Americans gave their lives to spare the rest of us a second Trump term.
Had he managed the pandemic with even modest competence, Trump would have sailed to victory.
Netanyahu, a right-winger, is living off the legacy of the era of competent governance by Israel’s Labor Party, which built a superb health system as well as world-class science. Trump might have benefited from the legacy of one of the crown jewels of America’s public sector, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But he was too busy trashing the “deep state” that could have saved his bacon.
Despite these contrasts on vaccination policy, Israel and the U.S. do have something in common—a shameful double standard when it comes to vaccinating long-subjugated people.
In the U.S., vaccination rates of Blacks and poor people have lagged far behind rates for affluent whites. There has been far too little outreach to overcome that systemic bias. Vaccination sites in poor African American neighborhoods, such as in Southeast Washington, D.C., report influxes of white people at the expense of locals who may not have the computer access to sign up for appointments.
And in Israel, despite the fact that Netanyahu’s security policies have reduced Palestinian sovereignty over the nominal Palestinian state to a joke, Netanyahu has treated vaccine supply as a Palestinian problem.
Although Israel effectively controls the occupied territories, Israelis come first. Only last week, in response to an international outcry, did the Israeli government provide a token 2,000 vaccine doses to the Palestinian Authority.
In this common disgrace, Trump and Netanyahu are soul mates. But Trump is mercifully gone. Now it’s up to Joe Biden, not just to get vaccine production and distribution on track, but to make sure vaccines are allocated with a greater sense of justice.
