Thread by @ShMMor

In a time of heightened anxiety, it's natural for all us to seek comfort in things that make us feel most safe, most at home, most ourselves.

For the @guardian, that means running a piece of gross antisemitism masquerading as progressive anti-racism.

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theguardian.com/world/2021/jan…

This is a sub-genre that the @guardian particularly excels at: the false story of Israeli medical malpractice which is supposed to prove the innate moral rot of the Jewish state.

It always has the same three elements:

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1) Crazy Jewish doctors doing something fishy
2) Broad hints that their motivations are racist supremacy
3) Heroic humanitarians bravely standing up to the nefarious Jewish plot.

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Previous examples include 2009 "Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs" (for which they ran a very dodgy & partial correction), 2013 lies on "forced contraception" of Ethiopian women by Israeli doctors, 2014 on "confirmed targeting" of hospitals in Gaza...

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...2010 reporting on Jenny Tonge's lies about an Israeli rescue team harvesting body parts of Haitian earthquake victims that never clarified she was lying but makes sure we know she is not antisemitic.

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Even by those standards, this is a remarkably dishonest article. The headline makes it sound like Israeli authorities are out distributing vaccines but actively "excluding" Palestinians, presumably blocking them at the schoolhouse door or something like that.

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Vaccines don’t just get tossed from the air or delivered in the post. Governments procure them; various agencies distribute them; clinics, hospitals, old-age homes inject them — and all this is done in a regulatory environment that by necessity has to prioritize...

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...at-risk people and essential workers, decisions based on data that vary country by country.

In Israel this has been done with astonishing efficacy through four non-profit health funds which run fully digitised services for all Israeli citizens by law. The state paid...

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...a high premium to drug manufacturers and the ministry of health employed a simple standard for prioritising senior citizens. The funds use their vast data systems to locate at risk members and tightly stack appointments in existing clinics and purpose-built facilities.

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Every single Israeli citizen is by law a member of a health fund, and all citizens, Arab and Jewish, have had equal access. When vaccination rates were lower in the Arab community last week, no less than the Prime Minister himself visited a clinic in an Arab village...

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...and had TV cameras record him saying in Arabic (the pronunciation of which he mangled) “go and get vaccinated.”

There are many elements to the Israeli success story, and this is not the place to summarise them all. Suffice it to say that the background conditions play...

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...a big part, and this is why it would be so difficult to replicate elsewhere. An actual journalist, rather than a hack parrot of activist talking points, would have seen fit to research this and report it.

Except this article was never meant to be about public health.

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This piece of “journalism” doesn’t just fail to report on the Israeli side; it fails to report on the Palestinian side too. The Palestinians are just props for a projection of anxieties and racist fantasies about Jews.

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In fact, there is very little to report on the Covid story in the Palestinian territories, so this story reports on a nothing added to a nothing on top of a nothing.

The covid situation in the West Bank & Gaza is far from crisis proportions.

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In terms of both infections and fatalities, the situation is significantly worse in Israel, and much worse in the UK (also slightly worse in Lebanon & Jordan). Many reasons for this, but one is that the Palestinians have one of the better health systems in the region.

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That’s the 1st nothing. The 2nd nothing is the vaccinations. Not many have occurred yet, but this is equally true in almost every single country in the world, including many in western Europe. The PA secured a commitment from Russia for the Sputnik vaccine, ...

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...but the delivery has been delayed. Also not extraordinary in the world. It will also receive vaccines from the WHO’s COVAX program, which the article only mentions at the end.

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There’s a third nothing: Israel’s role. Israel has not impeded in any way deliveries of vaccines to the West Bank or Gaza. It has facilitated them throughout the autonomy years and before, even in the peak periods of conflict.

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There is absolutely nothing to indicate that Israel will fall short of its obligations once covid vaccines start arriving. Nothing. Not a hint.

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Moreoever, Israel has offered to help the PA on this issue, but these offers have been (publicly at least) rejected, as the @guardian story gets around to pointing out somewhere also near the bottom.

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What obstacles do exist in the Palestinian Territories are of a more prosaic sort, not unique to the Palestinians at all, and have nothing to do with Israel, so they simply merit no attention. These include a Palestinian decision to not work with the Pfizer vaccine,...

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...because of concerns about the cold storage requirements, and a high rate of vaccine skepticism in Palestinian public opinion (something which surely wouldn’t be helped if it was Israelis making the injections).

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The legal obligation of the Palestinian Authority, not Israel, for administering health & vaccinations is mentioned in a briefly dismissive way referencing “1990’s-era interim agreements.” These would be the international accords that are the entire basis for the existence..

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of a Palestinian government. A bit like saying the House of Commons legislations is based on “an early 18th century act of union.”

In typically revisionist style, the article continues, “those deals envisioned a fuller peace agreement within five years, an event...

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...that never occurred,” without mentioning that this is because the Palestinian side rejected multiple peace offers & preferred to pursue suicidal terrorism instead, throughout which it had the unwavering support and understanding of the Guardian’s reporters & editors.

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Nothing on nothing on nothing. No extraordinary covid crisis in the PA. No special story relating to vaccination. No Israeli action that has an even minimally adverse effect.

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And yet, for the obsessive theological haters of Israel, a social media outcry, which evolves into press releases from sundry “activists” and organisations, which turns into a banner @guardian story.

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So what is the story here exactly? Not something happening in the Palestinian territories. Not something Israel has done. It’s a moral outrage at something Israel has not done, which is bizarre, because nearly everyone in the world has not done the exact same thing.

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And it’s worth walking through what doing it would mean and whether that would be met with any equanimity either on the ground or in global public opinion.

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What Israel didn’t do was implement a vaccination program in the West Bank and Gaza similar to the one that its domestic health care system allowed it to administer at home.

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It did not send its army into Palestinian cities, towns, and villages, occupy clinics, commandeer private medical records, and gather Palestinian citizens and inject them them one-by-one with needles that are said by Israeli authorities to contain a vaccine.

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It is surely a comment on what the “Palestinian cause” does and means for its western adherents that the hue and cry on this was bubbling on social media all week not from Palestinians or their officials but from assorted activists and bigots in the west...

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...suffering under the intense stress of watching Israel do something good and not knowing how to reconcile that with the burning theological commitment they have to the proposition that everything Israeli is touched by sin.

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Inevitably the Palestinian leadership will come around and adopt this approach for propaganda purposes, but it is still interesting to see what they were saying before, like this from a month ago.

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No doubt the writers of this story, like the editors who ran it and the self-satisfied Guardianistas reading and tweeting it, feel that this article is a strike for social justice, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.

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But the belief that Israel is an inherent evil and that everything it is and does — its food, its art, even its medicine — is tainted by an ineffaceable sin, is not a politics. It’s a theology.

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This is what stands behind such a shoddy piece of reporting like this article. This is what stands behind the recurrent defense of anyone public figure accused of antisemitism, a defense offered to figures accused of no other kind of racism.

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This is what stands behind the almost conspiratorial nuttiness behind the attacks on the IHRA definition, a forum for which is provided for no other kind of bigots.

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This is what stands behind the sudden obsessive hounding of the EHRC members only once they began antisemitism, when before there was never an issue.

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And this is the reason for the recurrent appearance of particularly untalented columnists who flaunt their Jewishness as a shield for outlandish claims against Israel and the UK Jewish community, a type of tokenism never undertaken for any other British minority group.

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As I have written before, no mainstream outlet has done more than the @Guardian in the past 30 years to normalise the view that the Jewish state is uniquely diabolically evil, and...

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...that Jews who object to this postulate aren’t genuinely concerned, but rather part of a concerted effort to halt the march of justice and righteousness in the world.

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This article is only the latest instantiation.

It, the “journalists” who wrote it, and the newspaper which published it are a disgrace.

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