Having spent most of the pandemic in Israel, I’ve been able to compare its attitudes with those expressed in Britain.
Until a couple of months ago, Israel’s assumption was that its world-beating vaccination programme had cracked the problem. The country opened up, ending many of its Covid-19 restrictions.
Then disaster struck through the vastly more infectious Delta variant — against which the vaccine has proved less effective. It’s unclear if that’s due to the variant’s properties or because Israel vaccinated so early that the protection this offered has waned, as Pfizer warned it might.
With around one million Israelis remaining unvaccinated, the virus stormed out of control. The Israeli government is currently struggling to avoid imposing another draconian lockdown as the number of serious cases — far fewer than among the unvaccinated, but still problematic if infections carry on increasing exponentially — continues to rise towards levels which may overwhelm the hospitals.
Other countries have been struggling with the virus and its unpredictable qualities. But there are some notable differences between attitudes in Israel and Britain. Clearly, policy to deal with the pandemic involves invidious choices between balancing the threat to life and health against damage to the economy from social restrictions.
In Britain, however, significant groups of people have from the start dismissed this dilemma. To them, all restrictions and the vaccination programme are an assault on freedom in a plot by Boris Johnson — of all people — to seize dictatorial control over their lives.
This attitude is more than a little perplexing. In part, it can be explained by the fact that many of these objectors are minimum-staters who fetishise the free-market and view the world through an economic prism. Such hostility is even more extreme in America, where millions harbour an innate distrust of the state as an incipient threat to the interests of the citizen.
There’s room for disagreement and doubt about attempts to contain the pandemic. Many objections, though, descend into paranoia about state control and cherry-pick scientific studies to support conspiracy theories — even claiming, against demonstrable evidence, that the vaccine has proved to be useless because it’s failed to provide total protection.
These attitudes are virtually unheard of in Israel. True, some Israelis won’t get vaccinated. Some say they oppose compulsion. Some are worried about possible risks to their health from a vaccine that they fear hasn’t been sufficiently tested.
Israelis are more ill-disciplined than the Brits; more Israelis are ignoring restrictions which have seemed throughout to be incoherent, ineffectual and contradictory. They viewed with contempt the former prime minster, Benjamin Netanyahu, for using the pandemic to boast of his indispensability to the health of the country; and they view with contempt the current PM, Naftali Bennett, for using the pandemic to boast that he’s totally different from Netanyahu. This also saps compliance.
However, there isn’t the kind of pushback over freedom that’s heard in Britain. Partly that’s because of the stratospheric priority Jews place on saving life. Partly it’s because Israelis have a different and more benign view of the state.
Regardless of their boundless contempt for politicians, there’s a general acceptance that the state has the interests of the citizen at heart. This is because it’s almost totally geared towards security and the saving of life against Israel’s enemies. Covid-19 is merely an internal enemy.
So to the vast majority, vaccination is a no-brainer. Now the Israelis are giving a third booster shot to the over-50s and stepping up the vaccination of young people and children over 12.
From Britain’s Covid contrarians issues the cry that the Israelis are riding roughshod over their discovery of a rare heart problem caused by the vaccine among the young. But researchers have said this problem is minor and vastly outweighed by the risks to the heart posed by the virus.
Israelis generally accept this from their experts; many in Britain would not. These Brits seem incapable of differentiating between authoritative scientists and charlatans, of whom there are many from Britain and America holding forth on social media. Maybe there aren’t so many charlatans in Israel to bamboozle people.
Maybe also in Israel there’s an overriding sense of community and commitment to the welfare of all, in contrast to to the hyper-individualism of British and American society. Judaism enshrines liberty within laws and rules. Freedom is important to live a good life, not as an end in itself.
Moreover, imprinted upon Israeli DNA is the knowledge of what a real threat to life and liberty actually means. The country was reborn, after all, from the ashes of the Holocaust and faces murderous foes without remission.
So those in Britain who are screaming that the restrictions are “fascist” or “Stasi” are viewed in Israel with utter astonishment. Worse, some of these British individuals, aware of Israel’s vaccination programme for children, are now claiming Israel has “gone all Nazi”.
It really has come to something when Britain is crazier than Israel.
Melanie Phillips is a Times columnist
