This is the latest edition of our special coverage newsletter on the COVID-19 crisis in Palestine featuring dispatches directly from our Palestine correspondent Yumna Patel on the ground in Bethlehem. This newsletter is published Tuesdays and Fridays.
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In the past few days we have watched the number of coronavirus cases climb in Palestine; and it has become ever more apparent that this crisis is going to get much worse before it gets better.
There was a hope that the virus could be contained within Bethlehem and other major cities like Ramallah and Nablus, where local authorities are better equipped to deal with an outbreak or enforce a lockdown.
But as we see more and more cases being reported in towns and rural villages, that hope has dwindled and has been replaced with a sense of dread — that more people will continue to get sick, and the government will fail to get it under control.
As of Tuesday, there were 117 confirmed cases of the virus — 10 in the Gaza Strip, and 107 in the West Bank.
The number of West Bank cases nearly doubled over the past week, as hundreds of Palestinian laborers who were working in Israel flooded back into the West Bank.
The majority of the new cases have been reported in a cluster of villages in the central West Bank district, west of Jerusalem city, known as the “Biddu enclave,” and are believed to have originated from sick laborers who were working inside Israel and Israeli settlements.
Despite being in Areas B and C of the West Bank, the cluster of villages are trapped beyond the Israeli separation wall, severely affecting the ability of the PA to contain the virus in the villages.
Watching the virus spread in villages like Biddu, Beit Iskaria, and al-Qubeita have served as a harsh reminder that the negative effects of the occupation have not ceased to exist with the coming of the coronavirus; and in the case of the Biddu enclave, the occupation has only served to exacerbate the crisis.
People are frustrated, angry, and outraged at the videos circulating on social media showing Israeli soldiers dressed in protective health gear raiding Palestinian homes across the West Bank, and spitting on Palestinian cars and homes as they patrol the streets during their raids.
But in the same breath, the people are all too familiar with the even more frustrating reality that the Palestinian Authority is heavily dependent on the Israeli government when it comes to fighting this virus.
Over the past week, health and government officials alerted people to the quickly dwindling number of test kits and swabs in the West Bank, and appealed to the international community to send aid to the occupied territory.
At the end of the day, however, it was the PA’s shadowy intelligence agency that secured the arrival of more testing kits on Monday, just days after Israel’s Mossad brought hundreds of thousands of new testing kits into Israel.
Contributing to the rising frustration is the sobering reality that the majority of the population, both in the private and public sectors, are out of work, and whatever little savings they have left are running out.
The PA announced austerity measures over the weekend amid expectations that government revenues are going to decline by more than 50 percent but maintained promises that public sector workers like healthcare workers, teachers, and security forces would be paid in full for the month of March.
In the meantime, private-sector workers have been promised 50% of their salaries for the months of March and April.
While the announcement of salary payments offers much-needed relief for the community, particularly in places like Bethlehem where people have been out of work for a month now, it feels like a bandaid being slapped on a growing wound.
A huge sector of the population who relies on work in Israeli settlements and inside Israel, as well as people who are not steadily employed by the government or by the private sectors, are being left in limbo, as the government has no budget to compensate them.
But just like the rest of the world, where the government fails, ordinary citizens have stepped in to ease the pain being felt by their community.
Organizations in Bethlehem’s refugee camps, where unemployment rates are higher than in the rest of the city, continue to pool their resources to provide essential food assistance to the community in the absence of aid from the government and UNRWA.
Many local shops are honoring their longtime customers by allowing people to purchase essential items on an open tab, to be paid back whenever they can.
A shoe factory in Hebron has turned itself into the only mask-making factory in all of the West Bank, putting their financial losses aside in an effort to assist the faltering healthcare system.
In Gaza, a major clothing factory has stepped up to produce masks and protective gear for the territory’s health workers. The company, which has suffered under decades of Israeli wars and blockades, has even sent its masks into Israel, where the demand for such items has surged.
When sharing fears and anxieties with Palestinian friends, the following sentiment always comes up, in one form or another: “we’ve survived a lot worse than this before.”
https://www.juancole.com/2020/03/advantage-dictatorship-palestinians.html
“The Israel Gov’t is taking advantage of Pandemic to Heighten Military Dictatorship over Palestinians” Informed Comment, March 31, 2020 by Asa Winstanley
“The populations of many countries the world over are right now living under unprecedented quarantine measures and restrictions on movement.
“The threat of the rapidly spreading coronavirus pandemic has changed the world for the foreseeable future.
“It is true that most people who contract COVID-19 (the disease caused by this new coronavirus) will suffer only mild symptoms and will soon recover.
“It is also true that the number of deaths from those contracting the disease is low in percentage terms (current estimates range between 1 and 6 percent).
“However, the threat from COVID-19 is its alarmingly high infection rate, and the rapid speed with which it had spread around the world.
“At the beginning of the current national emergency in the UK, people close to the prime minister talked about aiming to reach ‘herd immunity’ – a crackpot, borderline psychopathic idea in my view.
“This thankfully now-abandoned plan at one stage was actively aiming for as many as 60 per cent of the UK’s population to contract the disease.
“If this had been seen through, it would had led to unimaginable suffering, with deaths in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
“The UK’s population is more than 66 million. 60 per cent of that would have meant 39.6 million Britons contracting COVID-19. Even a 1 per cent mortality rate of this would have meant just under 400,000 deaths.
“Mortality of 6 per cent would have meant 2.3 million dead.
“Either chilling scenario would have almost certainly led to the collapse of the NHS.
“Thankfully, there was a sharp reversal of policy, and a national lockdown has now been imposed. We can only hope that this is not too little, too late.
“With such alarming figures, it is no wonder that people around the world have accepted unprecedented curtailments on their individual liberty and freedom of movement in order to
urgently curb the spread of the virus.
“Israeli measures to curb the virus are no different in this regard.
“But Israel’s coronavirus policies are quite different this way: they are accelerating and heightening their military dictatorship against the Palestinians.
“For example, the limited number of Palestinian workers who are permitted jobs outside the West Bank – with virtually no rights and protections inside “Israel proper” – are being made to separate from their families for two months. Their families are not permitted to live in Israel due to their apartheid regime.
“In one particularly shocking incident, seen in a video passed around social media earlier this week, Israeli occupation forces expelled a Palestinian worker, and dumped him on the side of a road in the West Bank near a checkpoint.
“Israel’s regime of military occupation continues unabated, with attacks on the Palestinian civilian population, night-time arrests, killings and other abuses. The only change to these seems to be that the soldiers are now wearing masks.
“It is not as if any of these measures are being put in place to protect the public health of either Palestinians or Israelis.
“Indeed, several Palestinian prisoners – forced to live in dire and abusive conditions in Israeli dungeons – have been reported by human rights groups to have been put under quarantine due to contact with Israeli prison workers who have tested positive for COVID-19.
“With multiple national crises in progress around the world, and an unprecedented global pandemic raging, authorities everywhere instinctively understand that this a good time to bury bad news, and to escape scrutiny.
“With major new government powers in place, could Israel now have an even freer hand than usual to expand their illegal military occupation of Palestine?
“As I wrote in my last column, one Israeli liberal recently accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of instigating ‘the first coronavirus dictatorship.’
“This was perhaps rather hyperbolic, and in any case, Israeli liberals have never shown the slightest concern for the real-life military dictatorship that Israel has imposed on Palestinians since 1948.
“As of this week, Israel’s political deadlock after its recent third election, now appears to be over. The main Israeli opposition list is to split, with the faction led by its leader Benny Gantz
to join an ’emergency’ unity government led by Netanyahu.
“Gantz had previously sworn not to join a government led by the brazenly corrupt Netanyahu, who had been due to go on trial at the beginning of March.
“With Netanyahu’s power once again cemented, what could he do under cover of the coronavirus crisis?
“A little noticed private member’s bill put forward in the Knesset earlier this month gives a chilling indication. The bill has been crafted by politicians from Netanyahu’s Likud party.
“It calls for the annexation of large parts of the West Bank. The new Israeli government appears to clear the way for this bill to pass.
“In 1948, Israel forcibly expelled some 800,000 Palestinians from Palestine.
“They used the cover of the war against the neighbouring Arab states to distract from these crimes (despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had already been expelled by Zionist militias before 14 May 1948 when the Israeli state was declared, the day before the Arab armies finally intervened).
“Under cover of the 1967 war too, Israel expelled more Palestinians and occupied vast new swathes of Arab land.
“Let us hope that they are not able to get away with more such new crimes during the current crisis.”
Important Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_kcBWxmXus&feature=youtu.be
“Palestine Is Occupied, Segregated, And About To Face COVID-19”