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April 22nd, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Like all people, Palestinians have the right to live in health and safety. But while the Israeli government rolls out the COVID-19 vaccine to millions of Israeli citizens, Israel is denying the lifesaving vaccine to Palestinians living under its military occupation.
We must be clear: the Israeli government is obligated under international law to provide the vaccine to Palestinians living under its military occupation and is actively neglecting their obligation to do so. This endangers Palestinians who are already at risk because of Israel’s systematic destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Indigenous, Black, and brown communities have been disproportionately impacted by the virus, but are receiving vaccinations at a much lower rate than white Americans, part of longstanding inequalities in healthcare access and structural barriers to care.
COVID-19 did not invent systematic injustice, but it has exposed and sharpened injustices already there.
COVID-19 did not invent systematic injustice, but it has exposed and sharpened injustices already there. Israel’s refusal to vaccinate Palestinians is but the latest, cruel and inhuman chapter of its decades-long practice of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, military occupation and, of course, apartheid against the Palestinian people.
The U.S. is itself a settler-colony with centuries of systematic racism to its name. Both the tolls of COVID-19 and rates of vaccine denial remain systematically centered around Indigenous, Black and brown people. There is a name for this, and it’s medical apartheid.
As the Invest in Justice Coalition, we believe that justice is political (not humanitarian). It’s time to take a stand to end all military funding to an apartheid regime overseas and to demand the end to apartheid right here.
Featured here are summarized remarks from a round table discussion adapted from the webinar hosted on March 31. A recording of the webinar can be watched here.
Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, Honorary Senior Lecturer, Center for Blast Injury Studies, Imperial College London University
Dr. Abu Sitta is a British-Palestinian Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon based in London. He has worked as a war surgeon in Iraq, South Lebanon and during the three wars in the Gaza Strip. He recently published in the Journal of Palestine Studies on “The Virus, the Settler and the Siege: Gaza in the Age of Corona.”
Israel has weaponized the pandemic and used it to exert pressure to extract political concessions from the Palestinians and to confer Palestine from a political question to a humanitarian crisis. The siege on Gaza is no longer seen as a form of warfare. The denial of Palestinian political rights and the right to self-determination are deferred.
Instead, we see Gaza as a humanitarian case of the need for access to water, healthcare, etc. The creation of catastrophe has continued to be used by Israel through the pandemic. Originally Israel denied Palestinian access to PCR tests. For the first 5 months of the pandemic, the authorities there had to rely on putting people in quarantine for over a month because they had no access to PCR testing. Likewise, Israel has denied its obligation to provide vaccines under international law.
The only reason Palestinian laborers inside the Green Line got vaccine access is because Palestinian lives only matter insomuch as they protect the lives of the settlers in the racial colony, so that is the only mass vaccination that the Israeli government has provided to Palestinians.
Manal Shqair is the International Outreach Coordinator of the Land Defense Coalition
The Land Defense Coalition is an umbrella of grassroots organizations based in Palestine. Shqair is a trade unionist in the Palestinian New Federation of Trade Unions (New Unions) founded in 2012 to represent and defend Palestinian workers in the West Bank working in Israeli factories.
Palestinian are classified into legal and illegal workers. There are about 50,000 ‘legal workers’ – they have health insurance at Israeli corporations inside Israel. They pay about $28/month for that care. Yet Israel refuses to treat them at Israeli health centers, so Palestinian workers getting injured at Israeli corporations are transported to Palestinian hospitals in the West Bank. These hospitals in the Israeli occupied West Bank are inadequate due to Israeli strangulation of the Palestinian economy.
There are other legal workers who have permits to enter the settlements, but they don’t have a work permit; Israeli employers deny them health insurance. Israeli employers force them to leave and seek treatment elsewhere. The rest are ‘illegal workers’ who are denied permits – they are denied any kind of healthcare access.”
Farah Kader, public health analyst in New York
Khader’s work involves the evaluation of COVID-19 disparities and vaccine distribution in Westchester County. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Infectious Disease from the University of California-Berkeley and a Master’s of Public Health in Environmental Health Sciences from the University of Michigan.
Racism creates conditions that make communities of color more vulnerable to dying from COVID-19.
Racism creates conditions that make communities of color more vulnerable to dying from COVID-19, called comorbidities. Communities of color in the United States, especially Black Americans, have many more comorbidities than white Americans.
This racist dynamic has a strong parallel to Palestinians in Palestine in comparison with Jewish Israelis: higher rates of comorbidities and a deliberately underdeveloped health sector are the result of Israeli occupation. Oppressed groups are way more likely to be exposed to COVID-19 in the first place for example though housing discrimination, including in Black neighborhoods and in indigenous reservations. Minority neighborhoods have higher rates of policing and lower access to resources. In Palestine, a similar situation, with arbitrary arrests, unequal access to water, home demolitions, and resulting crowded coalitions. The CDC ordered an emergency eviction moratorium in the US, but Israel’s government did not pause home demolitions.
Malak Zakout, We Are Not Numbers
Malak Zakout is a writer, translator and English language trainer based in Gaza. She shared her personal experience with Israel’s medical apartheid policies as experienced by here family living under Israel’s blockade, which prevents the travel of patients and medicine.
Patients in Gaza are not only threatened by their conditions, but by Israel’s medical apartheid. I am here to speak up for my father, a patient harmed by Israel’s medical apartheid. My father woke up from his coma, and the first word he said was my name. I could feel the thud of my heart. It took 8 years, losing 15 kilograms of weight from the toll on his body, and a great deal of perseverance to defeat the cancer demon. He went nearly 6 times a year to Jerusalem for treatment. He survived though, at first.
Later though, he became sick again. I could read full heartbreaking sentences in their eyes. I did not have the guts to ask. They were moving my dad elsewhere. It’s been two years now since he passed. I still mistakenly set 6 plates, 6 cups, and 6 chairs in my house; it doesn’t feel right that we are only 5 now.
A week after the funeral, we heard from the civil authority that his treatment access was granted. Diagnosis, treatment method, civil coordination, all need to line up for patients to make it. What hurts the most is that my dad did all of his research papers on cancer yet died of cancer. In a season where colorful flowers are supposed to turn to beautiful fruits, I lost my dad.
Sahar AlSulibe, Palestinian Medical Relief Society
Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS) is a grassroots community-based Palestinian health organization. PMRS was founded in 1979 by a group of Palestinian doctors and health professionals seeking to supplement the decayed and inadequate health infrastructure caused by years of Israeli military occupation.
I am a women’s health doctor who works in a mobile clinic. I am from El-Khalil, Hebron.
Israel is violating international law by denying us vaccines, even to our most sick and vulnerable.
Over 200 flying Israeli checkpoints hamper our movement under Israeli occupation, including us as a mobile clinic. Checkpoints are closed without notice and we must wait hours or come back the next day. Many of the communities we are working with have limited healthcare access. During the lockdown, you can’t even find a taxi to get to some of these communities.
For example, Zanouta is a small community where we provide our services. Seven of their tents were demolished by the Israeli military in the last week. Our health system is suffering and we are facing our own limitations. Palestinian women are now shouldering all sorts of unpaid work in the intersection of crises that they face under pandemic and occupation.
I am a doctor working daily with patients but I still have not had access to a vaccine. Israel is violating international law by denying us vaccines, even to our most sick and vulnerable.
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib
The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced what we already knew, threatening Palestinians not only through violence, but by denying Palestinian access to healthcare. Palestinians living under occupation are excluded from receiving vaccines. Let us be very clear, under international law, Israel is responsible for providing vaccination to all Palestinian living under its occupation.
This is only one facet of a larger issue that is medical apartheid, a system that denies Palestinians like my grandmother from traveling to medical care. These systems are mirroried here in the United States: our Black and Indigneous neighbors are dying at even twice the rate of white Americans.
I am proud of a recent letter I and colleagues sent to pressure Israel to abide by international law. When I see almost $4 billion going to Israel, I see money going to Israel’s occupation and not going to my district, one of the poorest districts in the country. This is just one more example of the need to stop investing in war and start investing in healthcare.”
TAKE ACTION
Join us in asking Dr. Fauci to End Medical Apartheid – Sign on your organization by contacting Coalition members Omar at Eyewitness Palestine and/or Leah at US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
- Demand the right to healthcare for the Palestinian people and affirm Israel’s obligation to provide them with COVID-19 vaccines
- To refuse complicity with Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people and REJECT the Dan David Prize, an Israeli prize that is a longstanding boycott target for its whitewashing–we might even say culture-washing– of Israeli apartheid against Palestinians, including medical apartheid today
- To advocate for racially just health policies in the US and everywhere, including the Movement for Black Lives’ COVID-19 platform
Sponsored by the Invest in Justice Coalition: Adalah Justice Project (AJP), MPower Change, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Palestine Working Group, Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA), Eyewitness Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace Action (JVP Action), & Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD), US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR)
Thank you to our additional cosponsors:
USPCN, The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine, USACBI, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Corvallis Palestine Solidarity, 1for3.org, Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), Madison-Rafah Sister City Project
This article is part of the Mondoweiss series Redefining Liberation by the Adalah Justice Project on moving past the narrow definition of national struggle and embracing liberation strategies grounded in the rich Palestinian legacy of joint struggle and transnational solidarity. With strong connections to radical organizing happening in their Palestinian homeland, Adalah Justice Project‘s vision of transformation is rooted in the understanding that race, gender, sexual orientation, and class all intersect to create the conditions of our current reality. AJP is a Palestinian organization that works to transform public discourse and U.S. policy on Palestine through public education, coalition-building, and advocacy within all realms of political activity, from the grassroots to Capitol Hill. Learn more about AJP’s work, and follow the entire series here.
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