Close to 400,000 Israelis have already been vaccinated against the coronavirus, and tens of thousands of others are on track to do the same in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n
Israel was one of the first countries in the world to begin rolling out the COVID-19 vaccine to its population, and according to the University of Oxford-run Our World in Data, is currently second in the world in vaccinations per capita.<\/p>\n
The Israeli Health Ministry is aiming to vaccinate 100,000 Israelis per day as soon as this week,\u00a0Israeli media reported<\/a>, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made the bold claim of saying that Israel would be out of the woods \u201cwithin a few weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n Last month, Israel secured 8 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine \u2014 enough to cover nearly half of Israel\u2019s population of 9 million, as each person requires two doses. Among those eligible to receive the vaccine from the Israeli government, are the nearly 2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.<\/p>\n Those not eligible to receive the vaccine, however, are the more than 5 million Palestinians living under the control of the Israeli occupation in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n The disparities between Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and Israeli citizens are constant, and simply a fact of everyday life in Israel and Palestine \u2014 laws that favor Israelis over Palestinians, and systems that actively discriminate against the latter are commonplace, and widely documented.<\/p>\n The apartheid system under which Israel operates inside the occupied territory, however, could not be better displayed than in the case of the COVID-19 vaccine \u2014 who gets the vaccine, and who doesn\u2019t, is a simple matter of nationality.<\/p>\n \u201cFirstly we have to be very clear: with military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza effectively under Israeli control, Israel is legally obliged by international law to provide for their [Palestinians\u2019] healthcare,\u201d Dr. Yara Hawari, Senior Analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, told\u00a0Mondoweiss.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cIsrael is legally required to provide that vaccine to Palestinians under occupation. We know they [Israel] have not done that,\u201d she said, adding that Israel puts that responsibility on the PA as the service provider for Palestinians.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s a real worry,\u201d Hawari told\u00a0Mondoweiss.\u00a0<\/em>\u201cWe know it\u2019s likely that it will be a really slow process if it\u2019s just left up to the PA.\u201d<\/p>\n The post The COVID-19 vaccine: another ugly face of Israeli Apartheid<\/a> appeared first on Al-Shabaka<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n This post was originally published on Al-Shabaka<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The post The COVID-19 vaccine: another ugly face of Israeli Apartheid<\/a> appeared first on Al-Shabaka<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1343,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17155"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1343"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17155"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17156,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17155\/revisions\/17156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}