NY Times think Israel should give vaccine to those who plot its destruction

 Lev Tsitrin:

The New York Times is an amazing paper. Take the report titled "Israel Gives Vaccine to Far-Off Allies, as Palestinians Wait." The gist of it is this: Israel has a small surplus of COVID vaccine doses, and as a token of friendship, will sent them "to nations like the Czech Republic and Honduras that pledged to move diplomats to Jerusalem" rather than to Palestinians to whom they gave so far, as a humanitarian gesture, "2,000 doses and promised 3,000 more" -- "token figures, given the size of the Palestinian population."

Why the Times thinks this worthy of an article is unclear. For one, Israel is in no position to inoculate populations that are comparable in size to its' own. As is clear from the article itself, several thousand doses it plans to send to friendly countries (to be used undoubtedly for the health care workers) is just a token of friendship. So it looks like the Times' intention is to smear Israel with violating "international law:" "human rights watchdogs say that Israel should organize a systematic vaccine program in the occupied territories, rather than sporadically deliver spares a few thousand at a time. They cite the Fourth Geneva Convention, which obliges an occupying power to coordinate with the local authorities to maintain public health within an occupied territory, including during epidemics."

Why Israel should be responsible for inoculating Palestinians is not at all clear given that, as the report itself notes, "the Palestinian Authority was given responsibility for organizing its own health care system in the 1990s, after the signing of the Oslo Accords that gave the Palestinian leadership limited autonomy in parts of the occupied territories." (The specifics can be found in an excellent article  that quotes the relevant "chapter and verse"). In the report, the Times simply uses the classical tactic of trying to look fair while throwing the mud at Israel in the hope that some of it sticks.

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There is more.

The NY Times does not have much of a point.  If they were serious about making a case for providing a vaccine to the Palestinians they should make the case based on the impact on Israeli health if Palestinians in close proximity to Israelis become infected.