Torn on Israel’s COVID response, Bennett may end up going against his instincts

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Two months after the government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid was sworn in, the leader of the opposition has at last found something to sink his teeth into. This week, Benjamin Netanyahu focused his attacks on the government’s hesitant dealing with the fourth wave of the coronavirus epidemic in Israel. In a video clip he posted on Wednesday, he sharply attacked the remark by Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked that Israel will have to learn “to accept serious cases of the disease and to also accept deaths, because this is a pandemic and in a pandemic people die. This is happening all over the world now.”

“Naftali and Ayelet, have you both gone crazy?” Netanyahu asked his former aides in the clip, deliberately using a tone of familiarity to remind people of who should be the real boss. Fortunately for Bennett, the behavior of his predecessor in office is borderline weird, and his comments don’t seem to resonate as much as they did in the past.

The other headline that Netanyahu provided this week came from his bizarre visit to the Dan Carmel Hotel in Haifa. His stay there included a summit meeting with a forgotten actor and a failed PR stunt, which ended with Netanyahu shooting himself in the foot. It turned out (as reported by Michael Shemesh on public broadcaster Kan) that he had been given a large reduction usually given to celebrities and that his wanderings between hotels is actually due to a petty dispute with the state over paying for the repair of an air conditioner in one of his homes in Caesarea.

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Netanyahu’s attempt to rewrite history, as if he himself had coped spectacularly with the previous waves of the pandemic, conveniently omits the deaths of about 6,400 people from COVID-19 on his watch. His main achievement lay in the quick import of the vaccine, which put a stop to the third wave last January. But lately it has become clear, in light of the spread of the delta variant, that even though the inoculations are still effective in preventing serious disease, their effectiveness against infection has declined significantly.

Netanyahu added insult to injury when it turned out that after scolding Bennett, he’s flying to more temperate regions. He’s off on a private visit to the United States in the midst of the fourth wave, and after his successor urged Israelis to refrain from making unnecessary visits abroad. As usual, it will be interesting to find out who will help pay for the trip and under what conditions.

Benjamin Netanyahu at the Knesset, earlier this month.Ohad Zwigenberg

But the fact that Netanyahu is still Netanyahu, only a bit more off-the-wall, doesn’t spare Bennett his own troubles. Shaked isn’t likely to win an award for her display of human sensitivity, but at least she spoke the truth. At the moment, the government is aiming to live alongside the virus and not to clash with it frontally. Despite the steep rise in morbidity, and the number of dead and seriously ill, which has started to multiply again, no final decision has been made to impose a lockdown during the September Jewish holidays.

Bennett himself is torn. He knows that the effectiveness of the lockdowns is steadily decreasing. He is also far more aware and sensitive than his predecessor to the 200 billion shekels (approximately $58 billion) that was lost without a trace because of the imposition of frequent lockdowns and paralysis of the economy over the past year and a half. On the other hand, the prime minister is concerned about the moment the hospitals reach incapacity. With more than a third of the population not vaccinated, including more than a million Israelis aged 12 and up who are entitled to get the shot, the virus has plenty of room to spread.

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According to the experts’ estimates, Israel will likely have about 1,000 seriously ill coronavirus patients by the end of August. At the peaks of the previous waves, the number of seriously ill stood at about 1,200, and a concrete decline was felt in the quality of the treatment of COVID-19 patients and as well as others. In these circumstances, and under the relentless pressure of some media outlets, Bennett might act contrary to his initial instinct and declare a lockdown.

Chinese syndrome

The substitute that the prime minister is presenting in the meantime, in the hope of slowing the headlong thrust to a lockdown, is two-pronged: reinforcement of the health care system and of its ability to treat seriously ill patients, along with ramping up the vaccination efforts among those who haven’t yet been inoculated and providing a booster shot to the 60-plus age group. (Bennett hopes to lower the age for the booster to 40 soon.)

Naftali Bennett at a cabinet meeting, earlier this month.Emil Salman

During the year and a half of the pandemic, Israel did very little to beef up the hospitals’ medical staff and upgrade their intensive care units. Bennett now hopes that by integrating hundreds of medical workers – from here, there and everywhere – he will be able to change the situation and raise the incapacity level to 2,400 seriously ill patients.

He abandoned a more complicated mathematical model, which calculated the overload according to the number of those on ventilators, and decided to focus on the number of the seriously ill. In the redeployment, Bennett is also counting on an expected reinforcement from the Israel Defense Forces: an alignment of army medics and paramedics will assume responsibility for hundreds of patients in home hospitalization. Still, it’s clear that even reinforcements of that type will entail compromises in the quality of treatment, and that there will still be a shortage of competent personnel.

At the same time, the government is having a hard time getting through to the unvaccinated, especially among the Arab population, which accounts for about half of those who have not been inoculated. Last week Bennett met with young online influencers, with the aim of encouraging vaccination among the youth. And not until this week was a logical idea examined: making appointments for young people to be inoculated by the health maintenance organizations, which will presumably induce at least some of them to show up for the shot.

Apparently the panicky statements by some ministers and a few commentators on television, which seemed to imply that the vaccine isn’t effective against the delta variant, contributed to the public’s confusion. The wacky minority of anti-vaxxers flooding the social networks with negative responses for every report in favor of vaccination has received a surprising reinforcement as of late. Some of the leading activists of the Balfour Street protest against Netanyahu are apparently finding themselves at loose ends, without a new challenge, and are now making every effort to thwart the government’s moves, even though the present policy in regard to the pandemic is more balanced and restrained than its predecessor’s.

Like the prime minister, the government, too, is split about the coronavirus. Education Minister Yifat Shasha-Biton is waging a damaging rearguard battle against inoculations in the schools, while another minister from her party, Zeev Elkin, is pushing for tougher enforcement measures. The confusion within the government, which grew more acute because of the surprise at the severity of the blow dealt by the delta variant, brought about a delay in the approval of measures which should have been introduced a month ago: the return of the Green Pass and its enforcement, a reduction in gatherings in closed spaces and rigid enforcement of isolation for those entering Israel from abroad.

Even now, the start of the school year in ultra-Orthodox schools without any restrictions, and the insistence on starting the new school year in the other schools in September, irrespective of the mounting incidence of illness (instead of waiting until after the September holidays), look like unnecessary mistakes.

Just like Donald Trump insisted on calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” in order to cover up his failures, Bennett is trying to draw a distinction between the coronavirus and the delta variant, which he’s describing as a completely different virus. His implicit message: there’s no comparison between the challenge that’s facing him and what his predecessor had to cope with, all the more so because the public is already exhausted after a year and a half of decrees.

But Bennett also knows that it’s in coping with the coronavirus that his first great test lies, as long as he doesn’t have to fight a war in Lebanon or the Gaza Strip. Like Netanyahu, he too is speaking with world leaders a great deal. In some cases, the woes of the virus crisis occupy most of the conversation. His counterparts are telling him what he has already grasped for himself: The way they handle the coronavirus – which most countries are failing to cope with – will determine their political future and will dictate the way history will remember them.