As Israel’s COVID war reaches critical stage, Bennett has many dilemmas but few answers

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Israel is at a pivotal moment in its campaign against COVID-19. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who gave one of his most detailed press conferences yet regarding the pandemic on Wednesday, had little concrete information for Israelis.

Would there be a fourth lockdown during the High Holy Days? He’s totally against it. “A lockdown will destroy the future of the country,” he said with passion. It is his job “to protect your health and to protect your livelihoods. Livelihood and economy are also lives.”

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Bennett doesn’t have to convince anyone that he’s anti-lockdown. But he wasn’t entirely convincing on whether there actually would be one. The government “is carrying out tens of actions that maybe, maybe, will allow us to refrain from a lockdown.” Those were two maybes.

Then there was the crucial question for parents and children: Would kids be going back to school on September 1? Here as well, Bennett was emphatic, saying that “your children shouldn’t have to spend 200 days staring at Zoom, as they did last year.” But he wasn’t clear whether or not those Zoom sessions were indeed a thing of the past.

The government has very detailed plans regarding schools, including for high schools, which are supposed to be going back to lessons as usual if over 70 percent of kids are vaccinated. Primary schools where children aren’t vaccinated will have mass testing.

But will enough of the high schoolers be vaccinated? Can millions of tests be carried out weekly at the schools? If not, there’s still Zoom. Or perhaps the new school year will be postponed anyway to October 1 – after the High Holy Days. Bennett wouldn’t say.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett removing his mask prior to talking to the press about the COVID situation in Israel, this evening.Jonathan Zindel / Flash 90

It’s hard to expect more definite answers from the prime minister. Israel is in a rather unique moment of epidemiological doubt. The number of new COVID cases, hospitalizations, serious illnesses and deaths have been rising for the past seven weeks. The government’s public health experts predict the numbers will continue to increase for weeks to come.

But there are positive indications as well. The R infection rate has started to go down, and there is evidence that the Israelis who have received their third “booster” vaccination shot – over a million of them now – have indeed significantly improved their protection against the virus and it’s already beginning to have an impact on the number of serious cases among the over-60s. Which is why, as Bennett said, “within days” those over 40 will also be offered their third shot.

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The question is whether the third dose will be effective enough to curb the rise in cases before the hospitals are overwhelmed. Or does the delta variant have more surprises in store? Israel is in the fog of plague. On Wednesday, the government’s coronavirus czar, Salman Zarka, said Israel is “at war” and that the next couple of weeks are critical.

Multiple factors make the fourth COVID wave very different to the three previous ones, especially in Israel. It is not just the delta variant’s greater level of infectiousness. This is the first wave to arrive with a majority of the population fully vaccinated, though the effectiveness of the vaccine at this point may be waning due to Israel’s early uptake.

Israel’s higher level of resistance – both via the existing vaccination program and the relatively large proportion of Israelis who have recovered from the coronavirus – are major factors. So is the availability of stockpiles of vaccines to continue fighting it. All these factors increase the options at hand for the government, as well as the dilemmas.

Beyond the epidemiological factors, there are social ones as well. The vaccines have so far enjoyed a high level of trust among Israelis, and the success of the third shot in fighting this wave is crucial for safeguarding that trust and convincing the relatively small, though disproportionately vocal, number of skeptics to get vaccinated as well.

But there is an additional political factor that makes things different this time around. Israel faced the three previous waves not only under a different prime minister, but effectively under a different form of government. Benjamin Netanyahu concentrated all of the decision-making under him, bypassing his ministers and the civil service and using instead a tiny circle of trusted advisers.

For the first six months of the pandemic, he refused to appoint a coronavirus czar to coordinate COVID policy. And even after the first in a series of government coordinators was appointed, he often ignored him. And of course, when it was to his advantage, Netanyahu also made himself the face of the national campaign, in nightly televised briefings that he monopolized.

Bennett’s approach is very different. By political necessity, as a much weaker prime minister with a diverse and fragile governing coalition, he has to rule by cabinet consensus. And by nature, he is also a much more collegial leader, willing to listen to his ministers and senior civil servants and, most crucially, to the experts, and to share the limelight with them.

In effect, under Bennett, Israel has returned from being run by a de-facto presidential administration to the parliamentary system it is by law supposed to be. There are both advantages and disadvantages to either style of government when facing an unpredictable pandemic.

Disregarding the civil service and most of the public health experts, as Netanyahu did, allowed him to make bold decisions – on lockdowns and, critically, on the vaccines. But his attitude was disastrous when it came to more detailed matters, such as setting up contact tracing and mass COVID-testing systems. It literally took up until a few weeks ago, under the new government, for there to finally be an efficient testing center at Ben-Gurion Airport.

Not to mention the way Netanyahu’s decisions were also tainted by his own political considerations – such as the disastrous delay in ending flights from the United States at the start of the pandemic at the request of the Trump administration, and the lack of any real enforcement of social distancing and lockdown in the ultra-Orthodox community.

A 90-year-old Bedouin man receiving the COVID vaccine, in southern Israel on Monday.Eliyahu Hershkovitz

Bennett’s way of governing is a bit slower, but tends to be more methodical and grounded in evidence.

The premier and his ministers are fully aware that he’s embarking on a calculated political gamble. If the start of the new school year – whenever that is – isn’t too chaotic and if Israelis celebrate the new Jewish year not under lockdown and with the infection numbers starting to go down, Bennett will have received a major political boost.

If that doesn’t happen, then Bennett’s political fate will be the least of Israelis’ worries.