Israel’s Vaccine Apartheid | Left Voice
▻http://www.leftvoice.org/israels-vaccine-apartheid
he vaccine rollout in the United States and other imperialist countries has been a disaster. Amid all the bad news, one country has stood out: Israel. Under the extreme right-wing and notoriously corrupt government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has been vaccinating about 1 percent of its population per day. As of two days ago, more than 1 million people in Israel, 12 percent of the country’s 9 million citizens, had gotten a first dose of the vaccine. The U.S., in contrast, had jabbed only 4.2 million people by the same day — just over 1 percent of the population.
Yet these statistics ignore an inconvenient fact: 5 million Palestinians live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. They have their own administration, yet their borders are controlled by Israel, making Gaza an open-air prison. The Israeli army maintains a permanent occupation regime that is also responsible for collecting — and withholding — taxes.
Almost 500,000 Israeli settlers live in Palestinian territories, not including East Jerusalem. These settlers might live just a few meters away from Palestinians, but they enjoy completely different rights — which the old regime in South Africa used to call apartheid. This applies to the pandemic as well, as the Guardian reports:
#Israël #ethno-nationalisme #vaccin #covid_19 #nationalisme_sanitaire
