No, Israel Is Not Withholding Coronavirus Vaccines from Palestinians

“Palestinians left waiting as Israel is set to deploy COVID-19 vaccine,” ran the headline of an Associated Press report last month. Not to be outdone, the notoriously anti-Israel newspaper the Guardian carried a story on Sunday under the headline “Palestinians excluded from Israeli COVID vaccine rollout as jabs go to settlers.” While it is indeed true that the Jewish state has vaccinated its citizens against the coronavirus at a record rate, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas—like many governments—have not yet begun to do so, framing these facts as an injustice done by Jews to Arabs is misleading to the point of slander. Lahav Harkov explains:

You have to get halfway through the Guardian story before you reach the following: . . . “the [Palestinian] Authority has not officially asked for help from Israel. Coordination between the two sides halted last year after the Palestinian president cut off security ties for several months.” In other words, the Palestinian leadership refused even to talk to Israel when the latter was ordering vaccine doses, let alone coordinate a complex rollout operation.

Here are some other pertinent facts: the Oslo Accords, though a group of interim agreements and not a final-status peace treaty, are widely considered a legally binding agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. They stipulate that the Palestinian Authority is responsible for healthcare, including vaccinations, for Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and Gaza. The PA has been keeping its end of the bargain on that front for nearly 30 years, something that news outlets whose reporters constantly quote the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s reports of damage inflicted by Israel surely already know.

Also a fact: Israel is actually already vaccinating Palestinians—the ones in east Jerusalem. [Moreover], Israel’s vaccine operation has run in predominately Arab areas in Israel from day one.

Why have so many supposedly respectable outlets gotten this story wrong? . . . In this particular case, it looks like some reporters are being led by the nose by activists with a certain point of view.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Coronavirus, Media, Oslo Accords, Palestinian Authority

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF