Thousands of vaccines are being administered by Israel in illegally occupied territories, but only to settlers. The Palestinian people, meanwhile, remain excluded.
If there is one country stealing the global spotlight with its vaccine rollout plan, that country is Israel. The number of people vaccinated is already approaching one and a half million, and within a few months the entire population of the country could be covered. And yet, while the Israeli model is being praised and others seek to replicate its modus operandi, thousands of people remain excluded for purely political reasons. These are the Palestinians living in the occupied territories, forgotten until now by the Netanyahu government's vaccine plan — a government that is, however, sending thousands of doses to the Israeli settlers living on their land.
Just over a week after the vaccine day on 27 December, Israel had already given the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to around 1.4 million people — that is, more than 12 per cent of its population. This figure is far ahead of that of other countries around the world: by 5 January, Germany had reached only around 250,000 people, Italy was at around 150,000, and France had not even reached a thousand.
Israel's success stems from the speed with which large quantities of vaccines were purchased, as well as from the highly centralised manner in which the state is managing the rollout, and from the country's advanced technology and digitalisation — including that of its healthcare system — which is making processes faster. Around 150,000 people per day are being vaccinated in the country, with marquee tents remaining open in town squares day and night without interruption, keeping the whole machine running at a swift pace. The government's stated goal is to achieve full immunisation of the population by spring, just when elections will be held and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be able to reap the rewards of what he has sown in recent months.
And yet, the state that everyone today would aspire to emulate — which in just a few days has become a symbol of healthcare efficiency and citizen health protection — carries with it a series of political shadows. While thousands of vaccine doses are being shipped to illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian territory, the Arab people who legitimately live there remain excluded from the vaccination campaign — proof that the Israeli model is anything but a model.
In recent days, Israeli lorries loaded with vaccine doses have arrived in the West Bank and towards the Gaza Strip, where the rollout promptly began for the approximately 400,000 settlers who illegally occupy the territory. The 2.7 million Palestinians — neighbours and the rightful inhabitants of these areas — have instead been denied access to the vaccination sites, leaving them effectively without coverage for a period that risks becoming indefinite.
The Palestinian government, with its limited control over the territory and its perennial financial difficulties, is, as one might imagine, far behind in terms of vaccine procurement. Doses could arrive through the Covax partnership led by the World Health Organization, which works specifically to help poorer countries with their vaccination plans and has committed to distributing doses to 20 per cent of Palestinians. But the process is very slow, given that authorisation has not yet been granted and, above all, it will only be able to cover a small fraction of a population that today watches thousands of doses pass through its territory every day — doses it cannot access. Israeli officials have stated that they bear no responsibility for the health of the Palestinian people, but the charge levelled at Israel by the Palestinian Authority and, more broadly, by the international community is that it is evading its moral and humanitarian obligations in a territory in which, by United Nations resolution, it is an illegitimate occupying power.
That there is a problem of ethics in vaccine distribution is not, however, a new discovery. In recent weeks it had emerged that 53 per cent of vaccines had already gone to just 14 per cent of the world's population — the wealthiest — while many developing countries remain without supplies to this day. The estimate is that while in industrialised countries every citizen could have access to up to 5 doses of vaccines, in the poorest nations ten people will have to share a single dose. A solution to this problem could come from Cuba, where vaccine projects against Covid-19 in the clinical trial phase already number four, all sharing the same characteristic: they are publicly owned and, when and if they are approved, will be distributed free of charge on the Caribbean island. They would then be extended to the rest of the world, targeting precisely those developing countries that, like Palestine, cannot gain access to the prohibitively expensive doses produced by pharmaceutical multinationals and are at the same time left to fend for themselves by those who, like Israel, could help them.
