© TwitterNaftali Bennet, Israeli defense minister, visits an ultraorthodox community with soldiers.
I have to disagree with Dr. Azmi Bishara. Trying to defend the disastrously late response of western capitalist states to the pandemic, he claimed
in Arab 48, that governments should not be assessed by their conduct at emergencies. I find just the opposite to be the case. We have seen, in many cases, that in normal times a country can just about manage itself without a functioning government.
But a major crisis exposes abruptly many things about the nature of each regime, exactly at the time that we desperately need a good government to protect us, and everybody is taking note.The Economist reports that in the United States,
lifesaving PPE (personal protective equipment) that is imported by the government (through FEMA) is given to private distributers to make a buck at the expense of the lives of medical staff on the frontline. We have seen all rich countries stop exporting essential medical goods and outbidding everybody else to get whatever is on the market. When Italy was at the worst of the crisis,
Germany banned export of medical supply, but when China sent needed life-saving equipment
EU leaders warned that China was doing so "for propaganda purposes".Reading the local Corona news in Israel is yet a very different story.
Israel's Apartheid regime is showing itself to be absurdly abnormal even in the most abnormal of times. Here are some heart-breaking examples of what Apartheid looks like at the time of Corona.
Comment: Never forget that the consequences of this lockdown are completely manufactured. Locking down the entire planet for a virus no more severe than the flu was a completely unnecessary overreaction. This makes the consequences all the more infuriating.
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