Israel inches closer to COVID precipice as September nears

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The government is navigating its coronavirus policy like a car at the edge of an abyss – an educated gamble that paid off and saved the government from falling in recent weeks. But the worsening COVID numbers, combined with the intention to open the school year with virtually no restrictions on September 1, leaves the car near the abyss ahead of the Jewish holidays that start a week from Monday evening.

The delta variant apparently started to spread in Israel in the waning days of the previous government and was identified on a broad scale immediately after the swearing-in of the new team in mid-June. Benjamin Netanyahu declared a resounding victory over the coronavirus and a return, the first in the world, to a full routine thanks to the vaccination campaign he spearheaded. His successor, Naftali Bennett, opted for a complacent approach for the first few weeks of his term.

What wasn’t fully grasped at the time was the combination of the more infectious strain and the decline in the second shot’s effectiveness five months after older people were vaccinated. The appraisals from May about Israel’s alleged achieving of herd immunity turned out to be completely false as the delta variant spread.

The new government reacted too slowly to this development. But it acted well at the beginning of August with its accelerated campaign to provide people 60 and over with a third dose. By the end of this week, nearly 2 million of Israel’s 9 million people have received the third shot.

For two weeks, significantly fewer people in that age group have been contracting COVID-19 (and the second shot still seems quite effective in preventing hospitalization and serious illness). This trend has prevented the collapse of the hospitals, and the forecasts of 1,000 seriously ill COVID-19 patients by the end of August appear wrong. Also, efforts to get the unvaccinated to have the first shot were renewed, and in the past month about 180,000 people have done so, many of them adolescents.

The major stumbling block is expected to be the schools. The plan that was chosen looks fragile, ridden with holes and too dependent on positive thinking. Considering the high number of daily infections (around 10,000, second in the world per capita), ill children are likely to be found in many classes, sending their friends and families into isolation. With less than a week of school before Rosh Hashanah, the question is whether the effort to return to routine is worth the risk.

Meanwhile, a COVID outbreak among children could have indirect implications for the load at the hospitals. If the classrooms become COVID incubators around the time of the family gatherings during the holidays, the children might infect the minority of older people who haven’t had the third shot. An overload, which was stemmed thanks to the third dose, could thus happen for another reason, even if this time the percentage of seriously ill patients among the total number of patients is relatively low (because most are young).

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For disabled Israeli children, nothing. For army pensions, $340 million

As with the third inoculation, the government seems to be shutting its eyes during the leap over the abyss in the hope of a soft landing on the other side. But the plan for opening the school year could turn out more complicated. Still, two things can be said for the current government compared to its predecessor.

First, in contrast to Netanyahu, Bennett’s decisions are hardly tainted by ulterior motives. Bennett won’t grant the ultra-Orthodox sweeping exemptions because he doesn’t need them for his political survival and the delay of legal proceedings against him. Second, he’s employing a more sober approach: trying to strike a balance between health and the economy, aware that the situation in Israel is still a lot better than it was in the previous waves, thanks to the vaccine.

In his defense, Bennett often notes that Israel’s friends in the West face similar difficulties with delta. And it’s not only the United States and Britain, which sustained far more damage than Israel from the pandemic. It’s also countries initially touted as models for the entire world in tackling the virus.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern holds a map of New Zealand during a COVID-19 update press conference in Wellington, New Zealand on Monday. Robert Kitchin/Pool Photo via AP

New Zealand is an interesting case. Not only has that country been seen in recent years as the dream of liberals and social democrats the world over, its uncompromising policy during the pandemic brought the infection rate and deaths toward zero and let the country’s citizens lead a pretty normal life for most of the period.

But the length of the crisis and especially the delta variant put things in a different light. New Zealand is cut off from the world, is making it hard for its citizens abroad to return home and, with every local outbreak, imposing sweeping lockdowns with a China-like determination. With delta, the outbreaks have become more widespread in recent weeks. The incidence of illness there is still low, but because the vaccination campaign has been sluggish, it’s hard to see the exit strategy.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, admired by left-wingers around the world, has looked like she’s in a dystopian parody created by a crafty right-wing screenwriter. Last week she called on New Zealanders not to stop and speak with their neighbors if they run into them, so as not to spread the virus. There’s no doubt about it. We live in strange times.

Pyrrhic victory

The upper ranks of the Israel Defense Forces were shocked at an original maneuver by the Finance Ministry. As part of the psychological warfare between the IDF and the treasury, the latter hired a company to poll young career personnel. It turned out – big surprise – that most of them prefer to receive a salary increase now and that their pension status doesn’t especially interest them at the moment.

But the treasury’s financial experts are waging a rearguard battle. The IDF triumphed in this campaign (let’s hope the army shows similar determination on the battlefield). The club of current and former defense ministers – Bennett, Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Defense Minister Benny Gantz – gave IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi what he wanted and left the treasury officials with a small consolation: probing articles in the financial papers and social media posts sniping at the IDF.

Part of the achievement is related to Gantz’s special status in the cabinet. He’s constantly projecting bitterness, with one foot probing the situation outside the coalition. His partners in the government prefer to placate him rather than vex him and thus endanger the coalition.

When the coronavirus crisis erupted, I mistakenly thought the gravity of the expected years-long economic damage would force the political decision-makers to reorder their priorities and boost the health, education and welfare budgets at the expense of defense.

But Kochavi stuck to his list of goals, regardless of the state of the economy. In recent weeks he has notched up a few achievements: a significant increase in the defense budget, which will let him set in motion, albeit late, his multiyear program; a new arrangement preserving a nice chunk of the pension increases he wanted; and the curbing of the plan to shorten men’s conscription by two more months.

To the public, the Achilles’ heel of those accomplishments is the pension issue. The army’s insistence on not touching its people’s retirement conditions is reasonable. The state can’t backtrack from its commitments to retirees.

IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi and Defense Minister Benny Gantz, last month. Tomer Appelbaum

But keeping the mechanism giving the chief of staff sizable authority to increase the pension mechanism for those who will retire in the future is highly problematic. The 2016 state comptroller’s report was witheringly critical of this procedure that swelled from a 6 percent increase to 15 percent on average; the comptroller recommended that it be changed. (At the time, Haaretz called this the “great pension robbery.”)

It seems that now, too, the IDF isn’t showing enough willingness to examine other ideas that would reduce spending on pensions and come up with solutions for outstanding young career people.

What was done now reduces spending for the chief of staff’s increases, but it’s far from canceling them outright. One result of the social justice protest of 2011 was to raise the public’s awareness of the retirement benefits for career army people and of the unduly small distinction made between the rights of combat officers and those of rear-echelon people. The IDF took plenty of flak, and then-IDF chief Gantz, almost every time he visited field units, heard complaints from career officers about the atmosphere in Israel against them.

This reached a peak in a skit on the TV satire “A Wonderful Country” – it deeply offended the top of the IDF. In the sketch titled “The Efficiency and Slashing Directorate,” a paratrooper doing his mandatory service asks a master sergeant in the career army for a lift, and the sergeant refuses; he has just bought a penguin (sitting next to him on the car seat) via Hever, the discount club for career army people. The sergeant has no room for combat soldiers in the vehicle.

A senior officer told Haaretz this week that the army is concerned about the change against it in the media, an atmosphere he calls “one-sided, infuriating and offensive.”

“The IDF is a place of total, demanding service. People stay in the army out of a sense of commitment and mission. The moment you promise a pension benefit only to combat troops, you’ll harm a large contingent of auxiliary personnel and even those who serve in the rear, without whom the military engine wouldn’t be able to perform.

“There is no theft of the public coffers here, as the newspapers and the treasury claim. The allegation that the pension for career army retirees comes at the expense of the salary for conscript combat soldiers is an attempt to drive a wedge into the units that could ruin their cohesiveness. No one will profit if conscript soldiers lose trust in their commanders and if the public’s trust of the IDF is affected. We need those things the way we need air.”

Strong words. In the long term, they probably won’t be able to blur the disapproval of the IDF that the pensions affair is stirring among the public.