Yonatan Sindel/Pool Photo via AP
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accompanied by members of his Likud Party in masks, delivers a statement before entering the District Court in Jerusalem, May 24, 2020.
The first Saturday night in March, I nearly canceled my flight home to Israel.
I was living in a short-term rental in New York during a one-semester gig teaching at Columbia University, and I’d planned to go home for spring break. But my wife emailed advice from a friend in Jerusalem, a top pulmonologist: With coronavirus spreading, he said, don’t lock yourself up in the closed quarters of an airliner with strangers. And the latest news from Israel said the Health Ministry wanted to add New York to the long list of coronavirus hot spots from which arrivals had to go into 14 days of quarantine—meaning that I’d be unable to fly back to teach my next class. Best not to go, I thought.
Then, on the screen inside my mind, a warning message appeared in red letters:
You have a ticket and a passport to a land with national health care.
If you wait, there might not be flights at all.
Your travel insurance will expire.
If you get sick in America, and you live through it, you will be bankrupt.
I decided to fly—and not come back.
I called a Columbia dean and asked to teach the rest of the semester online. It took only minutes to get the OK—warp speed for an academic decision. The university had already made contingency plans for Zoom instruction. Unlike the federal government, it was looking ahead.
Most of the passengers on my El Al flight belonged to a remarkably nonchalant group from the American South. I’d expected that the gates of Israel would already be closed to U.S. tourists. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had resisted the Health Ministry’s recommendation to bar entry from the United States to all but returning Israelis, and to require Israelis arriving from America to self-isolate. Netanyahu was afraid of upsetting President Donald Trump. Once you’ve made yourself a vassal, it occurred to me, you have to avoid the wrath of a mad emperor.
After some dithering, however, Netanyahu decided to bar entry to non-Israelis from anywhere in the world, to avoid singling out the United States. Inexplicably, though, the ban on tourists wouldn’t come into effect for three more days. The quarantine requirement for returning Israelis, on the other hand, was immediate.
At home, I moved into my tiny basement study. I registered on the Health Ministry’s website as a returning citizen in quarantine. I got a call from the ministry; a polite voice checked that I had a separate room, and that meals were prepared for me without me touching anyone else’s food. I didn’t mind being called. It meant that the government was, in fact, trying to keep people from being infected.
I read news nonstop. There’d been 50 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Israel the day I left New York; there were 75 when I landed the next day. They’d all caught it abroad or from someone recently returned. News sites published the itinerary of every patient over the previous days, so that anyone who might have passed through their breath could be tested.
Israel is functionally an island. Nearly everyone entering it comes through a single airport. Despite Netanyahu’s hesitations, it closed itself to outsiders early in the spread of the disease. For once, living in a tiny, semi-isolated country rather than some immense superpower seemed downright lucky. The vassal state was safer than the empire.
The news from America looked different. President Trump had made a garbled announcement of an impending ban on flights from Europe. Americans boarded planes to get home. JFK was packed with incoming passengers, standing close enough to feel each other’s warm breath, waiting for hours. Some were sick.
Israel has about nine million people, slightly more than New York City. For a few days after the pandemic began, the figures looked about equal; then the lines diverged. A week after I landed, there were ten times as many new cases per day in New York City than there were in Israel.
Measured against the admittedly low standard of the Trump regime, the government here responded sensibly to the epidemic. Netanyahu did not deny science. His style is not to insist that everything is wonderful because of him. Instead, he insists Israel faces terrible threats, from which only he can protect it. This time, there was a terrible threat, so he was half right.
Even so, he moved too slowly. On Purim, a carnival holiday in mid-March, synagogues and bars were both packed. A week and a half later, cases were climbing steeply. For years, as finance minister and then prime minister, Netanyahu underfunded the national health system. There were too few doctors, ventilators, beds.
Then again, there was a national health system. (The country’s founders, who assumed that a government’s duty included providing health care, had seen to that.) A week after I’d arrived, my daughter flew in. Then her flatmate called from New York to say she had the virus. My daughter made a phone call to the national emergency number. A gray-haired man in an army uniform—a medic called up for reserve duty—showed up on our patio, put on a full protective suit, and tested her. The negative result liberated her early from quarantine.
For those who tested positive but had mild or no symptoms, the government rented whole hotels so that they’d be neither at home nor in hospitals. It took over more hotels for those who’d been exposed to a carrier or had returned from abroad and didn’t have a separate room at home where they could self-isolate.
On March 20, an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor became the first Israeli to die of COVID-19. That day, the virus caused 23 known deaths in New York City. My quarantine ended. That evening, the national lockdown began. Under emergency decrees, people not classified as “essential workers” couldn’t go more than 100 meters from their homes except to buy food or medicine. Some people broke the rules. To the best of my knowledge, no one demonstrated against the rules’ existence. Again, historical good fortune: The country was founded without a myth of the rugged individual. The myth that kids learn is of the rugged collective.
No one in government predicted the plague would end by Passover, which began April 8. The emergency rules said that the seder, the ritual dinner on the first night of Passover, would be restricted to nuclear families who lived together. Seder is normally a clan affair; a table with fewer than 15 people is forlorn. Before seder night, police put up roadblocks. We had only three people at our table. Word had spread on social media: At 8:30 that night, we would step out onto our balconies to sing the traditional Four Questions. The song rose from around my neighborhood, from buildings we couldn’t see, from strangers, now all part of our clan. We were not so alone.
The hospitals filled but did not collapse. They did not run out of respirators. People died, and each was a whole world lost. As I write, 281 people have died of coronavirus in Israel, about 32 out of every million in the country. That’s less than one-ninth the rate for the United States. The rate for New York City is at least 77 times higher than in Israel.
There are multiple explanations for why Israel has come through this far with relatively few deaths—the lockdown, the contact tracing, that fact that Israel’s population is unusually young for a developed country.
The epidemic also had a strangely positive effect. Israeli crises are normally military, and they “increase tensions and exacerbate preexisting animosity” between the Arab minority and the Jewish majority, to borrow words from Israeli Arab activist Afif Abu Much. This time was different. Doctors and nurses, not soldiers, were on the front line. The crisis suddenly made everyone pay attention to what has been happening for years: The health system has been Israeli Arabs’ path to the educated middle class. This time, the heroes of Israeli society are Arabs and Jews working together to save us all.
For once, the rugged collective really included everyone in the country. And for a moment, it seemed possible that politicians could learn from the doctors and nurses.
For once, the rugged collective really included everyone in the country. And for a moment, it seemed possible that politicians could learn from the doctors and nurses.
Just as the pandemic reached Israel, we had our third election in a year. It was a referendum on Netanyahu, who faced indictment in three corruption cases. The parties opposed to him won 62 of the 120 seats in Parliament. Benny Gantz—ex-general, neophyte politician, and leader of the largest opposition party—could form a government only with the support of the Joint List, overwhelmingly backed by the Arab minority. That required breaking an old, loathsome taboo of Israeli politics—a governing coalition can’t rest on the support of Arab parties. For those who advocated a new kind of Israeli unity, the hospitals provided an inspiration and a hope that proved all too evanescent.
The hope evaporated in part because of a handful of defections from the opposition, in part because of Gantz’s inexperience at brinkmanship, most of all because Netanyahu successfully exploited the fear created by a pandemic. After a late-night meeting with Netanyahu and before a crucial Knesset vote, Gantz declared he was joining a “national emergency government” with Netanyahu in order to “take on the health crisis.” His party split. Gantz agreed to Netanyahu serving another year and a half as prime minister. After that, Gantz is supposed to take over—assuming that Netanyahu does not create or exploit another crisis to prevent it.
The new government has 36 cabinet members, more than any in Israeli history. More ministers means that each has less power, and that Netanyahu’s dominance is greater. The day the government was sworn in, the number of new coronavirus cases in Israel was down to ten. The emergency had faded. Netanyahu remains.
If I stick strictly to news about the pandemic, I’m not just relieved to have gotten on that plane. I’m half hopeful about my battered country. But compulsively, I return to the political bulletins. They are reports from an ICU about a political system’s dire illness.
I’m living inside of separate stories. Factually, they are linked. Emotionally, they don’t allow for each other. They divide my soul.
