PM Netanyahu announced on Sunday that Israel is set to “purchase or produce 36 million vaccines in the next year.”
If you wonder why a nation of 9 million people that already gave half of its population two doses of the Pfizer vaccines needs 36 million vaccines, the answer is devastating: the mass vaccination campaign may help Netanyahu to secure his victory in the coming election but its long term impact on the nation’s health is ‘unknown,’ to say the least. To be slightly more realistic, it may be catastrophic. During the press conference Netanyahu admitted, “the vaccines we have, no one knows how long they last…We need to prepare for the worst scenario. The worst scenario is that we have to vaccinate (twice) every half year.” That would mean acquiring as many as 36 million vaccines, assuming that all 9 million Israelis require two doses every six months.
For one reason or another, the Israeli regime has managed to reduce a particularly healthy nation that saw very little deaths in the first Covid-19 wave (about 30 people altogether in between 1st March and 1st June) into a ‘Vaxi-Nation’: people who are dependent on a constant supply of life-sustaining mRNA substances.
Netanyahu also predicted that “the entire world will compete for those vaccines …I am again determined to bring Israel to the top of the list.” He vowed to make the Jewish state into a “vaccine empire.
The truth of the matter is that Covid-19 and the way it is being handled in Israel brings to light every problematic aspect in Jewish Diaspora life, culture and attitude which Early Zionism vowed to eradicate or at least to amend.
Zionism’s ideological forefathers promised to make Jews “people like all other people.” Zionism swore to bond the new Hebrews with nature. The early Zionist thinkers were repulsed by the Diaspora Jewish ghetto life and culture. They looked to establish a harmonious relationship between the new Israelites and their environment. This is the mantra that led the early Zionists to seek redemption through Labour and in particular by means of agricultural life.
In 2021 not much is left out of that precious search for an authentic bond with nature. The contemporary Israelites (or at least their leaders) do not trust nature or the ability of the Israeli people to bond harmoniously with their own bodies. The contemporary Israelites are actually tormented by nature and especially the viruses that come with it. Instead of searching for peaceful terms with Covid, the Israelis are recruited as ‘a nation’ to join an all-out ‘war of annihilation’ against the little menace.
In its fight against Covid-19, Israel has repeated every mistake it made throughout its short history. Instead of seeking coexistence, it aims at annihilation. Israel doesn’t just protect its elders and the vulnerable while investing in natural herd immunity, it plans to vaccinate the entire population including children and pregnant women up to four times a year. And like in their war against countless enemies, Israel fights the little Corona monster ‘by way of deception’ a.k.a mRNA inoculation. They insist on tricking the little viral menace but so far, they have only managed to trick themselves on a colossal scale. In the last 8 weeks of Pfizer mass vaccination, Israel doubled the number of Covid-19 deaths it had accumulated throughout the previous 10 months of the pandemic. It is hard to imagine a bigger blunder. Although the Israeli experiment is presented to the world as a ‘success’ by the compromised media, in Israel mainstream outlets are not convinced by the success of the Pfizer experiment, especially considering that the ‘R number’ is back at 1 and likely to rise further.
Zionist founding fathers (such as A.D Gordon, Dov Ber Borchov, Katznelson and even David Ben Gurion ) believed that transforming Diaspora Jews into authentic Israelites wasn’t just a possibility but an essential existential transition. Zionism offered the Jews a new beginning. Many Jews, including my European family and even myself, were excited by this spiritual offering. Many Jews left the Ghetto behind, they made Aliya and became agricultural workers in new collective societies known as Kibbutzim. At this stage, those Israelis who openly oppose the Pfizer/Netanyahu ‘experiment’ and are fighting authoritarian state interference with their private and intimate health affairs are probably the last real Zionists. Unlike Netanyahu, who claims to be an ardent nationalist, those Israeli dissenters insist to reconcile with nature and be people ‘like all other people.’
Zionism as an ideological ethos didn’t survive for much time. It didn’t take too long before some Jewish dissidents were brave enough to admit that Zionism didn’t solve what it identified as the ‘Jewish problem,’ it instead just moved it to a new location. The first Israelis quickly developed animosity towards the indigenous people of the land who quickly became the new Goyim du Jour. This animosity evolved in less than two generations into a conflict with the entire region that is known as the “Israeli-Arab Conflict.” While Zionism was determined to crash the Ghetto walls, Israel has surrounded itself by walls higher than any ghetto’s in Jewish history.
Yet, the Israeli Arab conflict is not exactly a local or a regional battle between two remote foes; it has quickly morphed into global chaos. It’s no coincidence that America, Britain and France have found themselves more than once fighting Zionist imperialist wars in the region. It isn’t a secret that America is invested in the conflict and practically operates on behalf of Israel as a remote subservient colony. If Herzl had a dream to diminish the influence of Jews on world politics, AIPAC in the USA, the CFI in the UK, the CRIFF in France prove the opposite. As I am writing these words Israel and its lobby are invested in pulling the world into a conflict with Iran. It isn’t hard to see that Israel is also investing a huge effort in pulling the world to follow its suicidal path in its war against Covid by means of global mass vaccination and green passport policies.
Zionism promised to make the ‘timid Diaspora Jew’ into a fearless warrior. Israel’s early military victories (1948, 1956, 1967, and even 1973) conveyed the image that such a transformation was indeed possible. But the Israeli army hasn’t won a single battle for decades. The Israelis aren’t the warriors they promised to become. On the contrary, the Israeli approach to Covid reveals that Israelis are once again as timid as their Diaspora ancestors. They are enthusiastically buying into the Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Pre-TSD) that made Jewish history into a chain of horrific disasters. The Israelis, like their Diaspora ancestors, are tormented by a phantasy of a future annihilation. They act upon it and actually make such an imaginary destructive scenario into the reality in which they live.
As far as I can tell, the Israeli Pfizer “experiment” encapsulates the total defeat of the Zionist dream. The Israelis admit to the world and more importantly, to themselves, that this promised bond with nature, authenticity and the Biblical epic narrative didn’t happen after all. If Zionism vowed to make Jews people like all other people, the Vaxi-Nation are actually people like no one else. All the rest of us must do at this stage is to make sure that this is how things stay. We must defy any attempt to make us join the ‘Vaxi-Nation’. We must invest instead in learning how to live in peace and harmony with our neighbours and more particularly with the universe.
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