It has to be said out loud: We've been abandoned. The Israeli government, the government of healing, change, and unification, the government that promised it would focus on rehabilitation from a pandemic and a national budget, has simply abandoned us. At the onset of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's tenure, the number of coronavirus patients in Israel was in the single digits. Today, two months later, 6,000 people are contracting the virus daily. We've been abandoned.
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It started promisingly. Publicized visits by the interior and transportation ministers to Ben-Gurion airport, accompanied by the prime minister, all offering mutual praise. They separated terminals between red and green countries. We came to work, they told us, and even I, who adamantly opposed this government, consoled myself that at least they are doing a good job protecting us from the coronavirus. And how have things turned out? That even the previous government, the parity government, did a better job.
There's no reason to cut this government any slack. The coronavirus isn't a new phenomenon that needed to be learned from scratch. The members of this government didn't just happen to stumble upon the fact that other variants exist and that Ben-Gurion airport is their gateway. Everything was already known. Bennett even wrote a book about it, in which he detailed how to beat a pandemic. All of the senior members of this government were more than capable of casting blame, delivering speeches and dolling out advice when they were in the opposition. Who didn't they blame – Netanyahu, the Health Ministry, the Haredim, everyone and their dogs. Yet here we are, two months later, on the precipice of another lockdown three weeks before the new school year, with exponentially rising numbers of new cases and patients in serious condition.
Give us the keys, they asked, and they got them. And what are they doing now? Running away. Abandoning us. We have Avigdor Lieberman and Yair Lapid, a finance minister and foreign minister, (and an alternate prime minister), intentionally missing coronavirus cabinet meetings as if preparing alibis for their all-too-predictable failures. We're left with a virtually non-existent health minister, who has publicly thrown his ministry's senior officials under the bus. We're left with an education minister who just last month claimed the number of infections wasn't really on the rise and is treating vaccinations with a blatant disregard. We are stuck with a transportation minister who isn't even a member of the coronavirus cabinet.
The country's leaders have abandoned us. They are not focusing their energies on the airport or the Arab sector, where morbidity is soaring and vaccination is low; they didn't reinstate the Green Pass system in time, and their plan to reopen schools seems more reminiscent of science fiction. Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked this week chose to jump on the grenade on behalf of this feckless government. She said that from the outset the government had decided to live alongside the virus in the knowledge that vaccinations were accessible while attempting to contain the number of seriously ill and fatalities. This is a miserable statement with catastrophic ramifications.
The infection rate could have been curbed with immediate restrictions, enforcement and an aggressive public information campaign, parallel to a vaccination drive. But with the figures as they currently stand, we are speeding toward a lockdown, and there's only one reason: the Israeli government, which has deserted us.
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