Author: arieh

After a while the stories all become so similar that they blur together.

Covid-19 infection rates rise. The Health Ministry (or coronavirus czar, or NSC head, or even the prime minister) plan measures to stop the spread of the disease. The measures are announced or briefed to the public. It becomes clear that these measures are unacceptable to the Haredi community. The Coronavirus Cabinet is delayed until a compromise is worked out. The committee eventually meets and votes to do something else instead, but from tomorrow or the day after.

Overnight, it becomes clear that the compromise measures are also unacceptable to the Haredi community. More negotiations happen. The meeting is delayed again. Another compromise is agreed and voted on, but without the list of towns it will apply to; they’ll decide that tomorrow. But then it becomes clear that it affects the towns with the highest rates of infection, and those are mostly Haredi. So it’s unacceptable again… and meanwhile, Covid-19 infection rates rise.

We’ve been through this cycle over and over again. Three times the adoption of the Gamzu Plan was delayed after objections from the Haredi parties, for example.

And here we are again. The coronavirus cabinet voted last Thursday night to effectively lock down ‘red towns’ starting from Monday… but they didn’t vote on which towns. Over the weekend, the sharp rise in infections in Bnei Brak and other Haredi areas led to the huge Haredi political backlash I wrote about yesterday.

So the vote on the lockdown towns was delayed, then cancelled, and instead the coronavirus cabinet voted to impose a curfew on 40 towns from Monday night. No shops or entertainment after 7pm, no travelling more than 500m from the house, educational institutions closed… the works.

This was less of a compromise and more of a capitulation, because a curfew on coronavirus hotspots was previously being planned in addition to local lockdowns. But it’s better than nothing.

Except, yup, they didn’t decide which towns. And so, today, the coronavirus cabinet was due to meet to vote on which towns to curfew.

And, of course, the meeting was delayed because of pressure from Haredi parties. The curfew includes nighttime closure of educational facilities, which includes yeshivot. Senior Haredi rabbis have instructed their communities to ignore any such closures.

(There are also some weird rumours out there, like that instead of the obvious towns to curfew – the red zones! – the list might include Eilat, which is a full-on green zone. Though Eilat might be green because the people getting infected there are internal tourists who live in other cities.)

So the curfew won’t start tonight. It’s now planned to come into effect tomorrow, Tuesday night. And there still isn’t a list of which towns will be curfewed — the coronavirus cabinet is debating that now, supposedly.

And you can already predict what will happen if the ‘wrong’ towns are on the list….

Meanwhile, Israel’s test test positivity for the last six days is a worrying 9%. Every day of delay is a day where cases grow exponentially.

As I sounded the alarm over Israel’s sharp increase in daily coronavirus cases last week, I made a rather gloomy prediction:

I don’t see how Haredi yeshivot can possibly be able to function safely while virus cases are high without making things much worse. But I also see little political possibility that the government, relying on Haredi votes at Cabinet and in the Knesset, will take the necessary action.

Hopefully, ministers stick to the Gamzu Plan and impose targeted measures on the hotspots today or tomorrow. But I think more likely is doing little and opting for a country-wide lockdown later, once things are worse.

The next day, Friday, the Coronavirus Cabinet met and decided to impose a de-facto lockdown on the most serious virus hotspots. Residents of these towns would be forbidden from leaving except for essential needs and emergencies, shops and educational institutions would be closed, visitors would be banned and a 500-metre rule would be in effect for anyone out of the house.

Another thing happened, too. The full list of Red Zones was published and it included, as expected, the Haredi city of Bnei Brak.

The local lockdown was due to come into effect only after a second meeting of the Coronavirus Cabinet which would decide which of the red zones it would apply to, with the suggestion that it would only fall on the 8-10 towns with both a high Traffic Light score and a lot of people. A bit last-minute, but that’s how things always are here.

And then today it all fell apart.

The mayors of Bnei Brak, Beitar Illit, Elad and Immanuel, four Haredi towns, wrote a letter to Benjamin Netanyahu, formally announcing that they would withdraw cooperation with the national government if their cities were locked down. The letter also hinted strongly that the Haredi public, and their political parties, might be done with Netanyahu for good if he proceeded with the plan.

(The Haredi parties used to be a swing bloc in Israel. Since they refused to support Tzipi Livni in 2008, triggering an election, they have essentially transformed into a part of the Israeli Right, supporting Netanyahu and Likud even when excluded from the coalition by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in 2013. It is the Haredi parties as much as anyone that have kept Netanyahu in power.)

To add even more pressure on Netanyahu, the Rabbinic leadership of Bnei Brak organised a visit tonight by Defence Minister and “Alternate Prime Minister” Benny Gantz. In theory, of course, Netanyahu is supposed to hand over the premiership to Gantz in just over a year anyway, but this visit sent the current PM into reverse.

Netanyahu cancelled this afternoon’s Coronavirus Cabinet meeting where the lockdowns were due to be voted into effect. Instead, he invited the heads of the Haredi parties in for a private meeting, with Prof. Gamzu in attendance. The meeting just ended, and Netanyahu announced that he was “considering alternatives” to the local lockdowns.

What alternatives? The answer is, again, predictable: a total national lockdown for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year which starts in two weeks. This is reportedly what Shas leader Arye Deri is supporting.

A national lockdown helps the Haredi community feel less singled out, of course. But it’s also MUCH harder to police than a targeted closure of a couple of cities. The Haredi leaders probably calculate (probably accurately) that the police are less likely to break up huge indoor prayer services in Bnei Brak if they’re busy stopping people from driving on highways in Beer Sheva.

Waiting until things get worse is not a strategy. The level of infection is now so high that it is crossing into nursing homes and other vulnerable populations. Deri’s New Year lockdown means a two week delay, which could cost hundreds of lives.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s pretty much what I predicted on Thursday. I still hope I’m wrong, and the Government will stick to the original plan, but it doesn’t look like it. Gamzu is now briefing the media that he might resign, which makes sense because cancelling local mitigation and slapping in a national lockdown is precisely the opposite of his plan.

If there’s a national lockdown in two weeks, a lot of the public will blame those Haredi leaders who spent months blocking all attempts to stop the virus in their neighbourhoods.

Yesterday, 3075 coronavirus cases were identified in Israel, a record number. The previous record, the day before, was 2250 daily cases.

That works out to 32.6 new coronavirus cases per 100k residents yesterday, which is the highest in the world (excluding microstates).

Bnei Brak alone reported over 250 cases yesterday. If Bnei Brak was a country, it would have been the 61st-worst in the world yesterday, with more cases than Belgium, Greece, Norway or Ireland.

This rise isn’t just down to testing. Testing is high: at least 34,000 tests were processed yesterday, which is a lot. But the positivity on those tests is 9.4%, which is worryingly high too, especially given the high number of tests. I don’t think Israel has had such a high positivity on a day where more than 25k tests were processed before.

So this is new and this is bad. If we had seen these numbers on Monday instead of Wednesday, I don’t think the schools would have reopened on Tuesday.

Where are the new cases? Everywhere, to a degree, but the most notable increase is in Haredi towns. Bnei Brak, Modiin Ilit and Beit Shemesh, in particular, are seeing numbers surge.

Haredi towns were the biggest virus hotspots for the whole second wave until the beginning of August, when cases began to drop, replaced by a rise in cases in Arab towns. The new wave of infections in Arab communities was blamed on mass Eid al-Adha celebrations, but the drop in Haredi communities was just put down to better rule-following.

But something else happened at the start of August: The Haredi yeshiva (religious school) system began its three-week summer break following the 9 Av fast-day.

That break ended two weeks ago. The reopening happened despite the case numbers in Haredi towns: dropping, but still very high. Unlike the question of the broader school year, there was no serious discussion about delaying the reopening of Haredi yeshivot.

Two weeks later (which is just about the right amount of time it takes for the virus to spread widely), Haredi communities are suffering a renewed outbreak. Yesterday, it was reported that 800 cases in the last week were Yeshiva students, and that was before yesterday’s numbers were taken into account.

Perhaps this is why R Haim Kanievsky, one of the most senior leaders of the non-Hassidic Ashkenazi Haredim, is now calling for Yeshiva students not to get tested at all because it could lead to yeshiva closures or even a full shutdown. This call came, presumably, because they were seeing the rise in cases for themselves.

I don’t have an answer here or words of encouragement. Until this new surge, cases were stable and hospitals were finally beginning to ease off a little from last week’s peak.

I don’t see how Haredi yeshivot can possibly be able to function safely while virus cases are high without making things much worse. But I also see little political possibility that the government, relying on Haredi votes at Cabinet and in the Knesset, will take the necessary action.

Hopefully, ministers stick to the Gamzu Plan and impose targeted measures on the hotspots today or tomorrow. But I think more likely is doing little and opting for a country-wide lockdown later, once things are worse.