The Green Pass allows us, vaccinated, to go to concerts, restaurants and sporting events. But Israel’s real-time experience in post-blockade life leaves many questions unanswered.
TEL AVIV – As the lights dimmed and the music started, an audible wave of excitement swept through the crowd. Someone a few rows above me cheered with joy, as if I were at a wedding in the Middle East.
I came to the Bloomfield football stadium in Tel Aviv for a show by Dikla, an Israeli singer of Iraqi and Egyptian origin, who was hailed by the city as a celebration of the “return of culture”. It was the first live performance I saw in over a year. There were only 500 Israelis vaccinated in a stadium that normally seats almost 30,000 people, but it was strange and exciting to be in a crowd of any size after a year of intermittent blockades.
The public was confined to their socially distant seats, dancing in place and singing through their masks. But the atmosphere was exuberant and confirmed my status as a member of a new privileged class: those who were fully vaccinated.
We, a group that includes more than half of the nine million Israelis, are experiencing a post-pandemic future.
Class membership is certified by the Green Pass, a document that you can download and upload to your phone. It includes a kind of GIF, a small moving animation of green people walking, looking like a happy family, totally vaccinated.
Israel’s vaccination program was remarkably quick and successful.
In the past few weeks, new cases Covid-19 fell sharply, from a peak of 10,000 a day in January to a few hundred in late March. The economy was almost completely reopened. Just as Israel has become a real-world laboratory for vaccine effectiveness, it is now becoming a test case for a post-block and post-vaccination society.
The Green Pass is your ticket.
Green Pass holders can dine in restaurants, stay in hotels and participate in cultural, sporting and religious gatherings, both indoor and outdoor by the thousands. We can go to gyms, pools and theater. We can get married in wedding halls.
We celebrate Easter and Easter spring break in the company of family and friends.
Local newspapers and television stations are announcing summer trips for fully vaccinated people in countries prepared to take them, including Greece, Georgia and Seychelles.
And when you book a table at a restaurant, they ask: Do you have a Green Pass? Are you vaccinated?
The system is imperfect and, in addition to the Green Pass, in many ways, “system” can be overkill. The application has been irregular. There are worrying questions about those who are not vaccinated and noisy debates taking place in real time – some reaching the court – about the rules and responsibilities of returning to near normalcy.
Furthermore, there is no guarantee that this is really the beginning of a post-pandemic future. Several factors – delays in vaccine production, the emergence of a new vaccine-resistant variant and the large number of Israelis who remain unvaccinated – can tear the carpet apart.
The new world has also highlighted inequalities and divisions between societies with more or less access to the vaccine.
Friends and colleagues in the West Bank and Gaza have yet to be vaccinated.
The Palestinian vaccination campaign is just beginning with doses widely donated by other countries amid a bitter debate over Israel’s legal and moral obligations to the health of people in the territory it occupies. Israel vaccinated some 100,000 Palestinians working in Israel or in settlements in the West Bank, but was criticized for not doing more.
More than 5.2 million Israelis received at least one injection of the Pfizer vaccine. About four million remain unvaccinated, half of them people under the age of 16 who are not yet eligible to receive the vaccine, pending regulatory approvals and further testing on children. Hundreds of thousands of citizens who have recovered from Covid have only recently been included in Israel’s vaccination program.
And so far a million people have chosen not to be vaccinated, despite Israel’s enviable supply of vaccine doses.
Some are opposed to giving the injection for ideological reasons, while others are anxious and waiting to see the effect of the vaccine on others. They generated little public sympathy and health officials criticized them for succumbing to what they describe as fake news spread on social media.
Resistances present complicated moral and legal issues. Should they have the right to rejoin the world? Is it ethical to discriminate against them? Or is it fair to force those who did everything they could to protect themselves by being vaccinated to share the space with people who chose not to?
These questions arose when another artist, Achinoam Nini, a prominent singer and songwriter who goes by the stage name Noa, announced a performance for Green Pass holders only, in a venerable auditorium in Tel Aviv.
A small but expressive minority of antivaxxers and others accused her of collaborating with a discriminatory system and supporting medical experimentation and coercion.
“You are collaborating with the selection,” wrote one critic, Reut Sorek, borrowing Holocaust terminology. “You are cooperating with the medical dictatorship and with overriding individual rights.”
Ms. Nini replied in a passionate Facebook post that getting vaccinated was for the common good, balancing public health with personal freedom, part of the social contract and a civic duty, as well as stopping at a red light.
“We have a problem here,” she said in an interview. “The world is paralyzed, people have lost their livelihood, their health, their hope. When you put all these things on the scale, come on, just get vaccinated! And if you really don’t want to, stay home. “
To solve the riddle and serve children under 16, the government has allowed locals to offer quick tests as an alternative to the Green Pass. But many business owners, responsible for ordering and financing the test stations, found the logistics impractical.
Unlike soccer shows and matches, however, going to work is not a luxury for most people.
A teaching assistant at a school for children with special needs in central Israel refused to be vaccinated or, like her employer, the city of Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal, demanded instead to present a negative Covid test weekly.
The school prevented her from working, with the support of the city council.
Teaching assistant Sigal Avishai appealed to the Tel Aviv Labor Court. She argued that the council’s requirements “interfered with her privacy” and “had no legal basis”, and that the requirement for a weekly test “was intended to pressure her to vaccinate against her beliefs,” according to court documents. .
Last month, the court ruled against it, saying its rights should be compared to those of teachers, children and their parents to “life, education and health”, citing the particular vulnerability of the children in question.
In a country with many doses available, access to the vaccine is not a problem, said Gil Gan-Mor, director of the civil and social rights unit of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.
In Israel, he said, “Anyone who is complaining can get the vaccine tomorrow morning.”
But, in the absence of legislation, employers have developed their own policies. At least one college of higher education was relying on the Labor Court precedent to require all employees and students to obtain a Green Pass to attend classes on campus.
In another case that went to court, the Ministry of Health wanted to distribute lists of unvaccinated people to local authorities so that the authorities could, for example, identify unvaccinated teachers who returned to school and try to persuade them to get vaccinated.
Citizens’ rights groups filed lawsuits to prevent the ministry from distributing the lists, arguing that it was an invasion of privacy and that medical information could not be adequately protected. The case is in the Federal Supreme Court.
Even where there are rules, the application is irregular.
The Tel Aviv show was the first time I was asked to show my Green Pass – and the last. My family spent a weekend at an inn in Galilee, where breakfast was served in a closed room for all guests, including unvaccinated children. An Italian restaurant packed in the area made it clear that it was not following the regulations, offering us indoor seats for a 7-year-old child.
Back in Jerusalem, when I called to make a reservation for two at my favorite restaurant, which served fresh market food in a lively open kitchen, I was asked if we both had Green Passes. But when we arrived, no one asked to see them.
The tables were set up as cozy as ever. Strangers sat shoulder to shoulder at the bar. Our young waitress was unmasked. A diner at the next table asked if everything was safe for Covid, then shrugged and continued with his dessert.
Some restaurant owners and managers complained that the pandemic left them chronically understaffed and that they could not be expected to police customers as well.
“It’s embarrassing,” said Eran Avishai, a co-owner of a restaurant in Jerusalem. “I have to ask people all kinds of personal questions.” Some clients have made excuses and notes explaining why they haven’t been vaccinated, he said, and “all kinds of things I don’t want to hear about.”
However, some restaurants are strictly complying with regulations, even verifying the Green Pass with customers’ identity cards. Based on experience, friends are exchanging tips and recommendations on Facebook about the entry policies of local restaurants and bars. And at least one modern pub in Jerusalem is asking only an unknown clientele to show green passes and using the system to keep out undesirables.
I feel a personal feeling of lightness and relief as I continue my new vaccinated life. I even caught myself the other day at the supermarket without my mask, which is still mandatory in public places.
We are living in splendid isolation. Virus restrictions still make most trips a scary proposition and non-Israelis are generally not allowed to enter the country. I miss my family abroad. Until the rest of the world catches up to us, we are a nation that lives in a bubble.