How Israel flattened the coronavirus curve with tough lockdowns and intrusive technology
In the very mixed picture created by the impact of coronavirus in the Middle East, Israel appears the outlier. At the beginning of April, the country faced pandemic and lockdown and the possibility of uprisings in the Arab territories, a situation compounded by a bizarrely tangled political crisis. Yet by a tough lockdown, clearing all public places of worship, and a track by phone app and testing system – orchestrated initially by the internal intelligence agency Shinbet – Israel passed through the peak of the epidemic in little more than three weeks.
The greatest anxieties were focused on the Palestinian communities in Gaza, where the threat of pandemic added to the mood of hopelessness. Earlier this month, the Israel Institute for Security Studies carried out a war game on “The Coronavirus in Gaza.” They then published a summary of conclusions. Unlike a similar exercise, “Op Cygnus”, in UK in 2016 whose reported outcome was classified, the short report on the corona war game by Noa Shusterman and Udi Dekel was distributed throughout Israeli media.
In a worst case, they calculated there might be some 8,000 deaths from virus by the end of May – out of a population of 1.8 million resident in Gaza. The game foresaw a situation, in a chilling echo of the terrible Black Death which devastated 14th century Europe, that “the Gaza population is unable to keep up with fatalities and bury them.” With rioting and worse including border attacks into Israel, the Hamas government wouldn’t cope and might be forced to go into coalition with the Palestinian Authority headed by the Fatah movement on the West Bank. Israel would try to provide aid, if only in its own security interest.
The report then states bluntly: “There are no means available to Israel or any other party of stopping the spread of the coronavirus in the Gaza Strip …. Even were hundreds of ventilators supplied. The existing situation in the Strip, already comparable to an incurable disease, is now compounded by the coronavirus pandemic.”
The report ends with five paragraphs of eyewatering common sense. It says Israel should dump as much aid as it can on the border with Gaza. It should support a combined effort led by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and get as much international buy-in that it can. It shouldn’t provoke and undermine the PA with its plans to annex yet more of the West Bank – which both leaders of the incoming coalition in Jerusalem want. Benny Gantz of the Blue and White alliance as well as the comeback, but indicted, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu are for once on the same page.
The threats unleashed by the coronavirus crisis has led to feats of political cooperation which seemed all but impossible just three months ago.
As things stand at the end of the third week of April 2020, Israel has recorded 14,592 Covid-19 cases, with 191 dead from the disease. On the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority, 480 have been diagnosed positive, of whom two have died. In Gaza, after three weeks, 17 cases only have been diagnosed, of whom eight have recovered. Numbers on ventilators have declined this week, and the number of recovered has exceeded that of new cases reporting. More than 11,000 are now being tested daily – out of a population of 8.8 million.
Israel’s regime of tough love, lockdowns and egregious intrusion into privacy and individual rights by phone apps and Shinbet raise a great many questions. But what Israel is doing and has done is of increasingly compelling interest to Europe, and the UK, as they grapple with Coronavirus – 19 and its political, medical and ethical implications.