The dynamic consciousness engineering of those who preach an ideology of "enlightenment" and "anyone but Bibi" will undergo creative mutations adapted to the changing data from time to time.
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The pandemic is running wild, reinventing itself in such a way that it is only natural for it to become a central issue in various parties' platforms. There can be no dispute that the coronavirus decided the fate of former US President Donald Trump in the election.
There can therefore be no doubt that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's opponents will focus their messaging on what they see as a failure to contend with the pandemic, a failure no less grave than the one the country witnessed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, to remove him from power. They will repeat their slogans of political considerations, selective enforcement of coronavirus restrictions, and personal interests. They will minimize any indication of the government's success, whether on a national or international level, and produce selective data that puts Israel on the same level as a failed state. As far as they're concerned, the imposition of a lockdown will forever reflect an admission of the government's colossal failure in managing the pandemic, even though this is an effective means of reining in the spread.
The credit for the incomparable success in ensuring a high-priority vaccine inventory for all of Israel's citizens goes first and foremost to Netanyahu. Even the prime minister's critics have failed in their attempts to minimize his role in the matter and divert credit to Israel's healthcare providers, anachronistic organizations that have nonetheless stood the test of time.
The vaccination campaign, which by all accounts has been a phenomenal success on a global scale, has elevated Israel's role as a model for actively exiting the pandemic. The availability of the vaccines has served as a catalyst for consolidating a national plan to inoculate 5 million Israelis in three months. This goal is not a pretentious one, and given the logistical organization, is feasible. This is a great, big light at the end of the tunnel by any measure.
Yet it is precisely Israel's impressive achievement, which has the potential to set a realistic date for exiting the health crisis, that is the icing on the cake for Netanyahu's rivals. The way they see it, this is something like a move in chess that allows the opponent to scramble its game pieces as part of the aggressive strategy toward his removal from office.
It's no wonder, then, that the strategic advisers see in the success of the vaccination campaign the central weakness they hope to exploit in their anti-Netanyahu campaign. From an operational point of view, their conclusion is that the focus should be on messages that will be adopted in the public discourse, discrediting the vaccines to some extent by having prominent media figures allude to this and that side effect and voicing skepticism as to the motives behind Netanyahu's extraordinary deal with Pfizer's CEO Albert Bourla.
We have already been unknowingly exposed to a systematic and sophisticated campaign that borders on Machiavellianism for this very purpose. This was the case with the investigation by the Central Helsinki Committeev, which authorizes medical research and clinical trials on humans, as to whether the transfer of epidemiological data about Israelis to Pfizer constitutes a clinical trial. This is a well-known method of psychological warfare.
When Netanyahu is quoted as saying, "When the corona[virus cases] increased, we went down in the polls, and when the corona [cases] decreased, we went up in the polls," he was framing the logic of Israel's beginning to exit the pandemic by March 2021, meaning the eve of the election, as something directly related to the vaccination campaign. This is now the target of the "anyone-but-Bibi" crowd that will use any means necessary to torpedo this potential achievement. From their standpoint, the goal is to shift the image of the prime minister as Mr. Vaccines to one of a man who has the blood of thousands of Israelis on his hands.
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