The vaccine has arrived at just the right time for the Israeli PM
For Israeli critics of Benjamin Netanyahu, myself included, these are rather difficult times. It’s hard for us, or anyone, to deny that he appears to be leading the world in vaccinations against Covid-19. In less than four weeks, two million Israelis — my parents and many friends among them — have received their inoculations. A project spearheaded by the Prime Minister himself promises a return to almost normal life. I’m under 50 and have no underlying illnesses, but am still confident of getting my own vaccine in a couple of weeks.
Our world-beating jabbing speed means we have covered 20 per cent of the population. Britain, which has made far more progress than any other European country, has covered less than 5 per cent. The world’s eyes are on Israel because of what happens next: will Covid hospitalisations now start to fall as fast as the models suggest? ‘We’re literally at the moment of truth for the world,’ says Professor Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute. ‘If the vaccine acts in the way Pfizer has said it does, at the end of this week we’ll start to see in Israel the proportion of serious cases in the over-60 group begin to go down. This is the money-time.’
For Netanyahu’s diehard supporters, the ‘Bibistim’, this is just further proof — not that any was needed — of King Bibi’s magical powers. Only he could have personally phoned up the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna to secure early shipments of the vaccines to a small country in the Middle East. The numbers don’t lie, they cry, as they post the latest graphs on their social media accounts, showing Israel on track to emerge from the pandemic months ahead of the rest of the world.
At this rate, most Israelis will have been inoculated from the plague by the end of March, perhaps earlier. Netanyahu’s many detractors, the small majority of Israelis who voted in the past couple of elections for the hopelessly divided parties of the opposition, see also another date around that time: 23 March, election day yet again. How convenient for the embattled Prime Minister, who is currently lagging in the polls.
Typical Netanyahu. After ten months of his government’s shambolic handling of the coronavirus — for part of which Israel was the world leader in the daily infection rate — and three nationwide lockdowns (we’re still in the third) the vaccine has arrived just at the right time to revive his political fortunes. The rollout is coinciding perfectly with his election campaign. Lockdown means no election rallies — but every day he visits vaccination centres across the country. He greets the latest shipments from Pfizer at the airport.
Read the article by Anshel Pfeffer in The Spectator.