Two men influenced events in Israel more than anyone else during the last year. One Jewish, but not Israeli; the other Israeli but not Jewish; neither of them were known to the overwhelming majority of Israelis a year ago.

Albert Bourla, Greek-American CEO of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, emerged early in the year as the winner in the greatest scientific challenge of the age. Together with biotechnology research company BioNTech, Pfizer led the race to develop a vaccine for Covid-19, and had taken the calculated risk to go ahead with production, even before US and European medicine regulation agencies had approved it for use. His gamble not only created massive profits for Pfizer, it made his personal phone number one of the most sought-after among world leaders, anxious to secure early deliveries.

No leader was more “obsessive”, according to Mr Bourla, than Benjamin Netanyahu, who had called him more than 30 times, finally reaching an agreement to make Israel where Pfizer would conduct early field trials of the BioNTech vaccine.

So many hyperbolic headlines have been written on Israel’s “world-beating” vaccine roll-out that it’s worth going back in time and unpacking what actually lead to the groundbreaking deal with Pfizer.

No one remembers now, but Israel originally didn’t intend to use Pfizer. Early on, when hundreds of companies and institutes around the world embarked on developing a vaccine, Mr Netanyahu was very bullish on Israel winning the race.

The Israel Institute for Biological Research was allocated 175 million shekels for developing the jab and a series of bombastic press releases announced progress on the project. It didn’t matter that the institute’s researchers had never developed a vaccine and even if they were to succeed in doing so, there was no facility in Israel to make the millions of doses. They went ahead anyway.

As the months passed and it became clear international “big pharma” firms would win the race, Netanyahu let the health ministry order a few hundred thousand doses from Moderna and AstraZeneca to begin with. Israel withstood two waves of Covid, thanks to lockdowns, with relatively low death rates, but Mr Netanyahu’s public standing as Covid Commander-in-Chief began to suffer. Then the Kent variant arrived and infections rates spiked sky-high. That’s when he asked to be connected to Mr Bourla.

No one can agree on what clinched the deal with Pfizer. Was it Mr Netanyahu’s obsessiveness? Or Mr Bourla’s Jewish heritage as the son of Holocaust survivors from Salonika? Still, Israel paid a premium price for early deliveries. The fact that Israel, with its universal healthcare system and highly digitised public-health services, could give Pfizer the most up-to-date data on the vaccine’s effect on an entire population, was also crucial. Probably all these factors contributed to Israel becoming the first country to vaccinate most adults and prove vaccines were the best hope of beating Covid.

In Israel, Bourla became a household name; at one point he was on the brink of being invited to light a torch at the national Independence Day ceremony. But any scheduled visit had to be postponed when it became clear that it would be used for political purposes. When the vaccine began to have its liberating effect, Israel was deep into its fourth election season in less than two years and the jabs were at the heart of Netanyahu’s campaign.

 

vaccine race

l The pandemic had played a pivotal role in the third election in 2020, when again stalemate loomed as a pro-Netanyahu bloc failed to win a majority while the opposition, which on paper had a majority, couldn’t unite behind challenger Benny Gantz.

Twice before, after 2019’s two elections, Mr Gantz had stuck by his promise not to join a government with a prime minister who had been indicted for bribery and fraud. But after the third election, with the pandemic’s first wave beginning to spread, Mr Gantz couldn’t allow another election amid such uncertainty. He felt it was his patriotic duty to break the deadlock and agreed to join a national-unity government with Mr Netanyahu, who promised to make way for him as prime minister in November 2021.

The Netanyahu-Gantz government failed on both fronts. Trust broke down almost immediately as it became clear the PM wanted a loophole to get out of the “rotation” deal. Nor was the new government any better at dealing with Covid. Mr Netanyahu kept making most decisions, including on vaccines, on his own. The government lasted six months and fell exactly two weeks after he had his first jab on live TV. No one by then had any doubt it was part of the campaign. He had already made similar visits to Ben Gurion Airport, twice, to greet vaccine consignments. Much of the campaign trail would consist of visits to vaccination centres in key areas. The next three months weren’t just a race between Mr Netanyahu and his many rivals, but a race between vaccine and virus.

Would enough Israelis be vaccinated in time to bring down levels of infection and illness, which would allow reopening the economy before the election?

He ended up winning that race. Thanks to the deal with Mr Bourla, restaurants and bars, concert-halls and sports stadiums began reopening in Israel three weeks before Israelis went to the polls. And as they opened, the public’s approval of his handling of the pandemic began to rise as well. But it was too little and too late for the other race.

 

game on

l The vaccines were only part of Mr Netanyahu’s campaign plan. The positive part. In Likud strategy meetings, he confidently predicted that as the number of vaccinated Israelis went up, so would the party’s share of the Knesset. All the way to 40, a result not achieved by any party since 1992. The second half of the Netanyahu plan had been in place months before.

In the 2020 election, the centre-left opposition had run in just three lists – Gantz’s Blue and White included Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid and a couple of smaller right-wing parties. Labour and Meretz ran together, with Orli Levi-Abekasis’ Gesher. And all four Arab parties remained united in the Joint List. The mergers ensured that no party slipped beneath the electoral threshold and no opposition votes were wasted. The 2021 election would be different.

The three opposition lists from 2020 had split into six squabbling and suspicious splinter parties in 2021, and new parties were springing up weekly. It seemed almost inevitable that some would fail to pass the 3.25 per cent threshold and the wasted votes would give Netanyahu’s bloc a majority.

By pressuring Mr Gantz to enter his government, the greatest threat to Likud’s hegemony had been removed – Blue and White which had challenged its largest-party status split, with Mr Lapid’s Yesh Atid remaining in opposition. Enticing Labour leader Amir Peretz into government with ministerial posts had done the same for the joint Labour-Meretz list. Meanwhile, Mr Netanyahu and his proxies patiently courted the leader of Ra’am, one of the four parties of the Joint List, also causing a split there.

Netanyahu’s super-keen political instincts sensed that the recently elected leader of Israel’s Islamist party, Mansour Abbas, was a unique character. The 47-year-old dentist and lay preacher, who had first entered the Knesset in 2019, lacked the charisma of the more prominent party leaders within Joint List, Ayman Odeh and Ahmed Tibi, or the radical ideology of the nationalist Balad members. Instead, he was a calculating pragmatist, prepared to break taboos of Israeli politics. In his conversations with senior Likudniks, he was very clear. He would be prepared to enter any coalition if he thought it could further the interests of his Arab-Israeli constituency. He proved how serious he was by splitting with Joint List and leading Ra’am into the election independently. For Netanyahu, it was a win-win: if Ra’am failed to cross the threshold, it would shrink the opposition. If they passed, they could become a valuable ally.

Ra’am defied expectations, crossing the threshold to win four seats. So did all the centre-left parties, largely thanks an unofficial truce.

The Netanyahu Plan failed. Israelis rushed to get vaccinated, but their relief at being released from lockdown wasn’t translated into Likud votes. The party lost 20 per cent of its vote from just a year earlier. And no less than 13 parties made it into the Knesset, creating new coalition opportunities. The expectation had been that Naftali Bennett, leader of Yamina, who refused to either rule out a government with Netanyahu or commit to joining one, would become the kingmaker. But once the votes were counted, it became clear that the kingmaker was Mr Abbas.

A week after the election, he gave an eagerly-expected speech in a Nazareth hotel. It was the first time Israeli television had ever broadcasted live a speech by an Arab party leader. Mr Abbas was speaking in Hebrew, to Jewish Israelis.

“I carry a prayer of hope, and the search for coexistence based on mutual respect and genuine equality,” he said. His message was clear. Unlike the other Arab parties, he wasn’t trying to challenge any of the core questions of Israeli identity and history. He was willing to join any government that would address the immediate concerns of Arab-Israelis.

And it was identical to what he told both Netanyahu and Lapid in private – meet our demands on funding, infrastructure and planning permits for the Arab community and Ra’am will join your coalition.

Both politicians were prepared to meet his demands. But that wasn’t enough. They needed to get their potential coalition allies on board, as well. Finally, Lapid had the advantage as the Jewish supremacists of the Religious Zionism list, a key element in the Netanyahu bloc, were never going to join a coalition with Arabs. Naftali Bennett had promised before the election that he would not sit in a coalition with Ra’am as well, but Lapid had grounds to believe he would break that promise.

If necessary, Lapid was prepared to let Bennett serve as prime minister before him.

Though it would take nearly two months of tense negotiations, which were suspended for weeks when violence broke out in Gaza, Jerusalem and on the streets of Israel’s “mixed” cities, it worked. On 3 June, the coalition agreement with Ra’am was signed and two weeks later, three of its MKs (one abstained) voted to confirm the first government formed in Israel in 12 years not to be led by Netanyahu. The right wing screamed at Bennett for sitting in government with “supporters of terror” but he had the perfect excuse – Netanyahu himself had been prepared to do it.

Just as with the vaccines, the deposed prime minister had been right again. Abbas was the rare figure who could fundamentally change Israel’s political landscape. But Netanyahu had failed to realise that ultimately it would allow his rivals to reap victory.