Israel led the world in the rapid vaccination of a large part of its population, so, of course, the global left must find fault: hence the impulse to condemn Jerusalem for not taking responsibility for vaccinations in Gaza and the West Bank.
In a series of tweets, Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth accused Israel of racism for this alleged failure; a week later, the Palestinian authorities decided to play the blame game, announcing that Israel is responsible for vaccinating the Palestinians, despite previous statements to the contrary.
In reality, as Hillel Neuer’s Notes from UN Watch, the Oslo II Agreement of 1995 assigns responsibility for the health care and vaccination of its people to the Palestinian Authority.
And while the two countries must cooperate in terms of treating epidemics, Palestinian Ministry of Health officials admitted in December that they had not asked for help to obtain vaccines from Israel.
Palestinian officials routinely come to Israel in search of important medical care, but PA propaganda discourages everyone else, with bleak suggestions that Jewish doctors will only offer substandard care to Arabs – if they are not secretly experimenting with Palestinian patients.
The AP closed its own agreements to acquire AstraZeneca and Russian Sputnik V vaccines, although the first only started to arrive this month. Nor did he make any official (embarrassing) requests for Jerusalem to help. (World Health Organization officials cite only “informal discussions” in which they made such a request.)
Note that Israel is vaccinating its Arab citizens. In fact, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even visited Arab areas to encourage vax obtaining. Many Israeli Arabs in East Jerusalem did so.
And Jerusalem is also targeting Palestinian terrorists as a matter of priority, in front of many of its own citizens – even though the Palestinian Authority’s propaganda suggests that the program is really about conducting medical experiments. But the enemy of NGOs and the United Nations is, as always, Israel, no matter the facts.