Battling the virus in Israel’s bars

Half the Israeli population has already had at least one dose and about forty percent are fully vaccinated. But public health experts are worried that the reopening is premature.

“What’s happening now is a race between the depth of vaccination and the rate of infection,” says Professor Doron Gazit, who heads the Hebrew University’s pandemic monitoring team. “The green passport is an important element which we’ll need in the long-term to make vaccination work but by opening places up now, we risk squandering some of the gains we’ve made through vaccination. I’d be a lot more confident if we had waited a bit longer until we had the infection level beneath R0.9 and half the population was already a week after its second vaccination.”

The infection rate began slowly inching down this week, despite fears that Purim would cause another outbreak. So far, it seems that the vaccinations, combined with the large number of Israelis (especially among the strictly-Orthodox community) who have already recovered from Covid-19, is preventing a new outbreak. Whether or not the same is true of this week’s reopening will be seen only in another week or so, by Election Day.

Small survival fight

l While the epidemiologists are trying to predict whether the virus or the vaccine will win the pandemic race, the psephologists trying to do the same for the political race have a less enviable task.

With a week and a half to go to the election, a third of the parties running (that is the parties with an actual chance of winning seats, not the many bizarre lists few Israelis have even heard of that are officially on the ballot as well) are teetering above and below the traditional electoral threshold of 3.25 percent.

The fight for survival forces some parties in to increasingly impossible contortions. Meretz, for example, which is on the brink, is finding its traditional progressive left field encroached upon by a rejuvenated Labour (which itself was not long ago under the threshold in the polls) under leader Merav Michaeli.

In search of the missing votes, Meretz has put a more radical emphasis on the Palestine-Israel issue, with party leader Nitzan Horowitz calling the occupation of the West Bank “apartheid” and welcoming the International Criminal Court’s investigation into allegations of Israeli war-crimes. The party is also canvassing heavily in the Arab-Israeli sector, which in the past has saved Meretz from the threshold but can also be an ideological minefield.

On Monday, Meretz candidate Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi said in an interview with an Arab-Israeli channel that she would abstain on a law prohibiting “conversion therapy” for young LGBT people “out of respect to my conservative community”. The clip was immediately translated into Hebrew and posted on social media, scandalising Meretz’s core constituency. Not only is Meretz historically the party that has fought hardest for gay rights, it has in Mr Horowitz the only openly gay party leader in Israel. The anti-conversion-therapy law is his own proposal.

Ms Rinawie Zoabi immediately recorded a “clarification,” in both Hebrew and Arabic, in which she promised to vote for the law in the next Knesset (assuming she gets in). But damage was done.

It’s not only the small endangered parties which are wary of the threshold. The large parties are mindful of it as well. Yair Lapid, whose Yesh Atid is now clearly the second-largest party, making him a key challenger for the top job, has been running a relatively low profile campaign. Which has been working well for him so far, as Yesh Atid has slowly but consistently risen in the polls. One of the reasons he isn’t trying to make more waves is his awareness that if Yesh Atid is too successful it could come at the expense of Meretz, Labour and Blue and White, which are at risk. If one or two of them fall by the wayside, the reallocation of votes could be enough to ensure Benjamin Netanyahu has a majority in the next Knesset.

Despite the vaccination success, Mr Netanyahu’s Likud is still struggling in the polls and, while the opposition’s fragmentation gives him hope, he’s working hard to boost his own numbers among Arab-Israeli voters as well. A timely photo opportunity with a major Arab leader could help there.

Bibi gets his trip

l Seven months have passed since the original joint statement between Israel, the UAE and the US that kicked off the “Abraham Accords”. In all this time, however, there hasn’t been one high-level public visit by an Israeli minister to any of the four countries — until this week.

Israeli diplomats explained there is a directive that prime minister Netanyahu is to be the first cabinet member to make such a visit.

There are multiple reasons for the delay, such as the original signing with the UAE and Bahrain being held under Donald Trump’s auspices in Washington and the Covid-19 lockdowns in Israel, during which Mr Netanyahu decided that a foreign trip would play badly with voters.

In the last few weeks, as Likud continued to stagnate in the polls, a trip to Dubai or Abu Dhabi returned to the agenda.

Speculation was fuelled by a sudden series of long-range test-flights carried out by the new prime ministerial plane, a 21 year-old Boeing 767 that once flew in the Qantas fleet which, despite having been purchased and refurbished for VIP travel at a cost of over £125 million, has yet to fly the prime minister abroad, a year after the project’s completion.

The original plan was for Mr Netanyahu to visit the IDEX defence industry show in Dubai last month, where Israeli companies exhibited their wares for the first time. But the visit was cancelled after the Shin Bet did not have enough time to put the necessary security arrangements in place. He didn’t give up and continued to push for a short visit to UAE and Bahrain before the election.

The latest delay is largely due to a lack of enthusiasm from the Emirati hosts, who hitherto have been eager to host Israelis.

Why the sudden reticence? According to diplomatic sources, the Emirati leadership has balked at being party to such a blatant campaign stunt, less than two weeks before the election. Even for the Gulf monarchs, not noted for an affinity for parliamentary democracy, this is a step too far.

A last minute push, spearheaded by Mossad Chief Yossi Cohen, seems to have finally secured a meeting in Abu Dhabi with Crown Prince and de-facto ruler Mohammed bin Zayed.

As the JC went to press, there had not yet been an official announcement of the visit, expected to take place this Thursday. But Likud headquarters had been ordered to cancel four campaign rallies which had been scheduled for Mr Netanyahu. If everything goes according to plan, they will be replaced by one campaign photo opportunity.