Israel Coronavirus Image via Pixabay
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1.930, February 14, 2020
SUMMARY: Pavlovian opposition to government action to lower the COVID-19 infection rate in Israel reaches the point where politicians and citizens are deliberately undermining public health for political ends disguised as civil rights.
In the modern world, pandemic conditions are essentially changing the laws of nature. The worst scenario is a loss of control over the spread of morbidity. Any society threatened by such a scenario needs a consensus on the extent to which public health considerations must replace basic protection of civil rights.
No clear protocol to combat COVID-19 has emerged, although the World Health Organization might be expected to formulate one. Instead, each country had to develop its own set of advantages and disadvantages, mostly through trial and error. It has now been about a year since the pandemic broke out and we can confidently say that countries with authoritarian regimes have been able to take decisive and extreme measures to get out of the pandemic as soon as possible. These measures, while draconian, have no doubt proven reliable and effective.
When the pandemic broke out, many in the West mocked the actions and lack of transparency in these countries, but China’s impressive recovery from the first wave of the virus is exemplary when compared to the distress, confusion and inability of the free world to act in accordance with logic.
The tension between the threat to health and the values of democracy and civil rights exists in countries around the world. It is extremely difficult to override, let alone sacrifice, democratic norms, which are sacred values, the foundations of our way of life. The effectiveness of government interventions must be carefully weighed against violations of civil rights, including loss of privacy.
It is no surprise that rebellion, suspicion and denial have resulted from attempts to enforce such interventions, which in turn have led to an underestimation of the severity of the health threat – so much so that the crisis is being dismissed by some as a tool that leaders are trying to deal with. to consolidate their power.
The Israeli context is even more complex because of the ongoing political crisis that includes protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the demands of his trial. Resistance to government action to reduce the rate of infection is creating a backlash to the point that citizens are deliberately undermining restrictions on fighting the virus, despite recommendations from experts at the Ministry of Health rather than the Prime Minister’s office. It even tries to sow doubts about Israel’s formidable vaccination drive, which appears intended to limit or perhaps even stop it. An Israeli business newspaper said on January 12th: “Vaccination – only if Netanyahu goes!”
This cultivation of public distrust is reinforced by the exaggerated role of the Israeli legal institution and, in particular, the failure of lawyers to internalize that this is an existential crisis. The requirement to subject every government decision to legal scrutiny seems separate from reality. Logic certainly means disenchantment, and the sooner the better. Given the needs of the hour, faced with a health challenge the world has not seen in a century, one might have expected full legal support for government action.
The lawyers’ insistence to obsession with upholding the “right to demonstrate” is especially surreal, as if the pandemic is doing the thousands of protesters a favor by exploiting a legal loophole for their own ends. The strict restrictions on open air prayer colleges, religious funerals, or street gatherings of more than 10 people hardly coincide with enjoying mass demonstrations because “it is legal”. That anomaly must now fend off the much more deadly British variant of the virus, which these lawyers believe will likely “bypass” protesters (though not necessarily the cops protecting them).
Given the intensity of the pandemic and the extraordinary measures that many governments have taken to counter it, the key to success is maximum public willingness to sacrifice some values of freedom and privacy for public health. The compromise advocates the principle of saving lives. The willingness to make sacrifices and comply with regulations will literally save lives.
This is an edited version of an article published in Bamahlekah Rishona on February 1, 2021.
View PDF
Dr. Raphael G. Bouchnik-Chen is a retired Colonel who served as a senior analyst in the IDF Military Intelligence.
Comments are closed.