Israel

Israel has today become the first country in the world to offer a third Covid-19 booster vaccine on a large scale. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that Israel will vaccinate all people over the age of 60 again, with the new Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, and his wife, the first people to receive their third shot on Friday morning. Legitimate concerns led to the decision: the number of new Covid cases in Israel has been rapidly increasing, including among the vaccinated – although to a much lesser degree compared with those who have not been vaccinated. There were 2,143 confirmed cases on Thursday, with 286 hospitalisations.

When you think of the Israel-Palestine conflict, ice cream doesn’t usually come up. But that may be about to change. Ben & Jerry’s has finally broken its silence, announcing yesterday that it will ‘end sales of our ice cream in the occupied Palestinian territory’. Perhaps in the years ahead we’ll come to see this depriving Israeli settlers of Caramel Chew Chew and Truffle Kerfuffle as some kind of tipping point. We won’t, of course, because that’s ridiculous. As is a Vermont-based over-priced ice-cream brand weighing in on far-flung conflicts. But that seems to be where we’re at now – with corporate America in general and with Ben & Jerry’s in particular.

Israel has been the world’s whole-country experiment to establish how, and how fast, Covid vaccination can return life to normal (as much as life is ever normal in a country where there is constant tension over the rights and future of Palestinians). I am in Jerusalem, trying to understand the implications for stability in Israel and peace in the Middle East of a new government where prime minister Naftali Bennett is opposed to any kind of Palestinian state, and the alternate PM Yair Lapid passionately believes a two-state solution is the only answer.

Sipping an iced coffee in a Tel Aviv café this week, it felt like it was 2018 again. Nobody wears a face mask, tables are close together and there’s no hand gel in sight. Very few people one meets even talk about Covid-19. Though a tiny increase in the occurrence of the Indian variant has been noted in recent days, Israel is rightly proud of its vaccination and mass immunity success. It is therefore surprising that Israel’s offer to advance over one million Pfizer vaccines to the Palestinians has been rejected by the Palestinian Authority only hours after they initially accepted the deal. Many countries are still grappling with the ethical dilemma of when to offer their own supply of vaccines abroad to help others; few are expecting such offers to be rejected.

The Gaza conflict is bloody, brutal, and genuinely heartbreaking, but it is also perfunctory. This is a fight in which the military battle is predetermined: Hamas cannot win, and Israel cannot lose. What happens in between is almost balletic in its endless predictability. Hamas fires rockets, Israel fires back; Hamas targets Israeli cities; Israel bombs buildings in which Hamas hides and stores weapons. So what’s the point? Well, apart from Hamas needing to show strength – and Israel needing to, in the words of its security experts, 'mow the grass' by periodically degrading Hamas’ military capabilities – there is a wider battle raging. This fight isn't about missiles or rockets but about narratives; to fight you need a reason.

There are two ways to look at Sir Keir Starmer’s call for the Prime Minister ‘to press for a renewed international agreement to finally recognise the State of Palestine’ at the G7 summit. The first is cynical: that the intended audience was not the government benches or the international community, but the voters of Batley and Spen, currently weighing up whether to elect another Labour MP in next month’s by-election. At the 2011 census, almost one in five residents were Muslim and knowing what we know about how progressives view religious and ethnic minorities, it is not a stretch to assume Sir Keir was merely electioneering.

One of the many reasons I hate wokers is because they indulge so shamelessly in what Bebel coined ‘the socialism of fools’ – anti-Semitism – under the convenient cover of sticking up for the Palestinians. Pretty much all socialism is for fools these days and as we see the Tories ditch misogyny, racism and austerity (Chancellor Sunak ‘Soak the rich!’ – Sir Keir Starmer ‘No!’) we have seen anti-Semitism cross the floor too. This is not the sniggering Jew-hatred of the smug Surrey golf club; this is where the pampered and resentful spawn of the bourgeoise get down to the rapper Wiley, MBE, he of the profoundly inclusive tweets like ‘Jews would do anything to ruin a black man’s life’.