https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15978/palestinians-israel-coronavirus
Israeli and PA health departments meet regularly to coordinate action and share vital information. Troops from the IDF’s Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) are organising joint training for medical teams. Israel provides test kits, laboratory supplies, medicines and personal protective equipment for Palestinian health workers.
Some Palestinian Arab leaders today seem to prefer that their own people succumb to disease rather than cooperate with Israel. While Palestinians and Israelis on the ground pull together against Coronavirus…. articles in official Palestinian Authority publications assert that Israel is deliberately spreading the infection and trying to contaminate Palestinian prisoners, using Coronavirus as a biological weapon. Of course, Israel-haters in both mainstream and social media are only too eager to amplify such defamatory and divisive outbursts.
A recent Coronavirus op-ed in the Washington Post demanded that Israel “lift the siege on Gaza”. Predictably, the author ignores the fact that Israel’s lawful blockade of the Gaza Strip — also imposed by Egypt — is in place for one reason only: the regime there remains intent on using Gaza as a base for terrorist attacks against both Israel and Egypt. But even in Gaza, a form of cooperation has been achieved.
Israel-haters don’t want to know this, but what the author calls for is of course exactly what has been happening since the Coronavirus outbreak.
Coronavirus has turned the world upside down. One Through the Looking Glass moment was the UN’s praise for Israel over “unprecedented cooperation on efforts aimed at containing the epidemic”. Those of us who follow the Middle East know that any judgement on Israel apart from outright condemnation is unprecedented for the UN.
What is not unprecedented is cooperation between Arabs and Israelis such as we see today. One hundred years ago, a Jewish microbiologist, Dr Israel Kligler, led the fight to eradicate malaria from this land. For centuries, the territory had been ravaged by the mosquito, decimating the people that tried to live there, leaving it barren and sparsely populated. Shortly before Kligler’s war on malaria, British General Edmund Allenby, speaking of his 1917-18 fight against the Ottoman Empire in Palestine, had said: “I am campaigning against mosquitoes”. His battle plans against the Turks were shaped above all by the need to overcome the murderous effects of malaria on his own forces.