Here’s a selection of top news stories in Israel from the final days of 2021:
The Bennett government placed the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on the Covid red list, preventing Israelis from traveling there, and decided to start administering a fourth dose of the vaccine at home.
Mansour Abbas, leader of the United Arab List, said that “Israel was born a Jewish state and will remain one”.
Arye Deri, leader of Shas, signed a plea bargain admitting to charges of tax evasion, agreeing to pay a 180,000 shekel fine and resign from the Knesset.
None of these headlines were predicted a year ago, when 2021 began. Naftali Bennett, leader of a tiny party, is prime minister. The UAE has become a major destination for Israeli tourists. The vaccines were successful, yet the pandemic is still with us and we need more doses. An Arab party is a member of the coalition and its leader, on a charm offensive to Jewish Israel, has become one of the most influential politicians in the country.
Deri, until recently the second-most powerful politician in Israel, has been banished, along with the rest of the Charedi party leaders from the government benches. And the man who was the most powerful in the country in the first six months of 2021 is, by the end of the year, slowly disappearing from the headlines.
The barometer of Benjamin Netanyahu’s career is one way of reviewing this year in Israel. He started it as the all-powerful prime minister, the first Israeli to receive the Covid-19 vaccine, just 12 days before 2021 started — the man who had just signed historic diplomatic agreements with the UAE and three other Arab states, and was heading in to an unbelievable fourth consecutive election campaign against a divided and demoralised opposition.
Finally, this time, he was going to seal matters. But Mr Netanyahu’s fall from power is only one story of this year in Israel, one that has been told too many times until it obscures the many other compelling narratives in the country this year.
So let’s look at other stories. Israel’s vaccine roll-outs, for example, which initially were dominated by the Netanyahu campaign, until even the National Election Commission had to order Likud to change its slogan for being too similar to the one used by the Health Ministry to encourage Israelis to get their jabs...
World leader Israel
Israel proved this year that the incredible scientific achievement of developing a vaccine less than 12 months since the virus emerged wasn’t enough.
A country needs an efficient public health system to ensure that enough doses get into arms so that it can have a hope of curbing the waves of infection. And Israel’s unique system of competing public health providers with their digital outreach programmes turned out to be the perfect framework for emergency nationwide vaccine delivery.
As a result, for the first quarter of the year, Israel led the world in vaccinating its population and was the first country where it proved to be efficient in breaking the curve. As a result, a few months later, when the more contagious and dangerous Delta Variant arrived on the scene, a new prime minister could take the calculated risk of rolling out booster vaccines, the first available anywhere in the world, without imposing another lockdown.
Naftali Bennett could make that decision, as a new prime minister, partly because Israel’s health system had already shown it could administer millions of doses within weeks, but also because in the bizarre new coalition he found himself leading, with its eight diverse parties, no-one else wanted to take responsibility.
And the booster jabs worked, at least until Omicron came along. As 2021 ends, he faces another similar conundrum: whether to announce a lockdown or rely on another round of boosters.
Beating the Delta Variant was just one of a series of tests that Mr Bennett passed in the six months since his surprising elevation to lead a coalition cobbled together for him by his partner and “alternate-prime minister” Yair Lapid, the new government’s architect.
Mr Bennett had to prove to Israelis who had got so used to having one dominant leader for so long that a different type of government, where the prime minister is just first among equals and decisions have to be reached through consensus, is possible.
That a new generation of Israeli politicians can be entrusted with the country’s future. That a prime minister who isn’t called Netanyahu could represent Israel at the White House and in the royal palace in Abu Dhabi.
Bibi’s palestinian legacy
The dismissive predictions of Mr Netanyahu and his diehard supporters that the new government would fall very soon had evaporated by November, when a new budget was passed. Despite the disparity in the coalition partners’ ideology and their wafer-thin majority, they stuck together, largely due to their fear of a Netanyahu comeback.
All the leader of the opposition has now is his increasingly bizarre social media output, a never-ending corruption case which is draining his personal resources and an increasingly fractious Likud party.
That doesn’t mean that Mr Netanyahu does not have a legacy. It is becoming clearer by the day. One of his former aides summed it up accurately a few weeks ago in an interview: “Netanyahu killed the Palestinian issue”.
This year proved that the Israel-Palestine conflict simply doesn’t interest the world anymore. Even when Israel and Hamas went to war for 12 days, thousands of rockets were launched at Israeli cities and Gaza was pulverised by Israeli air-strikes, the world paid attention only momentarily, and as soon as a ceasefire was announced, attention was immediately diverted elsewhere.
Despite a new Democratic administration in the United States promising to change course from Trump’s policies, nothing has changed. The US has kept its embassy in Jerusalem and not reopened its consulate to the Palestinians.
The Palestinian issue is so dormant that an Palestinian-Israeli party can be a coalition partner in a government lead by a former CEO of the Yesha council of settlers.
Mansour Abbas in his speeches doesn’t even mention his own Palestinian identity, just the need for equality for Israel’s Arab citizens. And Mr Bennett held a four-hour meeting with the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi without the Palestinians being mentioned in their joint statement.
This was a year in which Israeli political and diplomatic axioms were broken. It’s not irreversible. The unwieldy Bennett-Lapid juggernaut could run out of road. Netanyahu could make his comeback. The Palestinians could make their own return to the agenda. And who knows what new variants the coronavirus has in store for us in 2022. But 2021 taught us that nothing lasts forever.
