{"id":4114,"date":"2020-03-15T09:39:07","date_gmt":"2020-03-15T07:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/?p=4114"},"modified":"2020-03-15T09:40:46","modified_gmt":"2020-03-15T07:40:46","slug":"is-jewish-fear-of-the-other-driving-israels-response-to-the-new-coronavirus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/2020\/03\/is-jewish-fear-of-the-other-driving-israels-response-to-the-new-coronavirus\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Jewish \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fear of the other\u00e2\u20ac\u009d driving Israel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s response to the new coronavirus?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As COVID-19, the disease caused by the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, transitions into a global pandemic, numerous countries have enacted varying degrees of travel bans and quarantines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Israel has taken some of the earliest, most severe steps in the world, banning travelers<\/a> from affected regions, canceling public events and conferences, placing tens of thousands of potentially infectious travelers in 14-day home quarantines, and recommending that Israelis not fly abroad for the time being, prompting pictures shared to social media of an eerily empty Ben-Gurion Airport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many Israelis are up in arms over the disruption to their lives the new regulations are causing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They have some reason to be skeptical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Travel bans simply don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t work for these kinds of respiratory viruses \u00e2\u20ac\u0153because they move too quickly,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Jennifer Nuzzo<\/a>, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I think this virus will turn up everywhere because that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how respiratory viruses tend to spread.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch predicts that within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world<\/a> will be infected with COVID-19, although he emphasized in an article in\u00c2\u00a0<\/a>The Atlantic<\/a><\/em> that most will have mild disease or be asymptomatic. By this time next year, he quipped, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cold and flu season\u00e2\u20ac\u009d could become \u00e2\u20ac\u0153cold, flu and COVID-19 season.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A 2014 British meta-analysis<\/a> on the effect of travel restrictions on influenza outbreaks concluded that bans slowed disease spread by no more than 3%. But that may be enough to stop a country-wide outbreak that overwhelms the medical system. If we can push the full contagion off until after the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153regular\u00e2\u20ac\u009d winter flu season – to “flatten the curve” – the thinking goes, it may be more manageable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d like to suggest another reason why Israel has been so extreme in its approach: a long-standing fear of the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new coronavirus is highly triggering to the Jewish people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s collective memory \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it reminds us of all those in our past who have tried to wipe us out (even if this time it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a nation doing the killing). The holiday of Purim only reinforces that message.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now that we have our own state, we Israelis are hyper aware of anyone \u00e2\u20ac\u201c or anything \u00e2\u20ac\u201c coming to harm us; our commitment to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153never again\u00e2\u20ac\u009d means that Jewish survival has become one of our ultimate imperatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While that may provide some explanation for what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s happening in the country, there is still something unsettling about Israel shutting itself off from the world and turning into a ghetto of its own making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I know we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re talking about a health ghetto whose borders are intended to save lives. But there have been less savory examples of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153others\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that recent Israeli governments have tried to keep out: refugees from Africa, immigrants with Jewish backgrounds deemed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153questionable\u00e2\u20ac\u009d by the rabbinate, leftists whose political activism is seen as threatening. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is clearly not an approach that I support. So, should it also impact my views on COVID-19 prompted bans and quarantines?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve found myself ping-ponging over the last few weeks \u00e2\u20ac\u201c at times defiant (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153bans are stupid\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), other times appreciative (as someone who is immunocompromised from cancer treatment, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m in the group that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most vulnerable to coronavirus complications). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lesson from Israel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s recent past that may help guide us through this confusing period. Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s treat COVID-19 as we do terror attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do Israelis respond to bus bombings and stabbings and rockets? By continuing to live our lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sure, during the Second Intifada, we took precautions. We made sure to frequent cafes with armed guards and kept the keys to our bomb shelters handy. Tourists were wary, but many still came. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Terrorism didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t break us. Nor should the new coronavirus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Terror attacks \u00e2\u20ac\u201c like viruses \u00e2\u20ac\u201c can arise at any point. Missiles from Gaza, Lebanon and Syria are always poised to be launched, but that hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stopped us from going about our daily activities, just like we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think twice about driving our cars on Israel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dangerous roads. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s how we compartmentalize risk in the Middle East.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean we should ignore the Ministry of Health\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s advisories. If I were to come in contact with someone who had the virus, I would of course accede to the Ministry\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s regulations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Depicting COVID-19 as a viral terrorist confounds the narrative of fearing the other. It allows us to think logically \u00e2\u20ac\u201c from experience \u00e2\u20ac\u201c not out of hysteria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, much of the strategy to contain COVID-19 seems driven by panic. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s like when two airplanes crash in quick succession.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Flying suddenly feels scarier \u00e2\u20ac\u201c even if your conscious mind knows that those crashes are a statistical aberration with little bearing on the safety of your next flight,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d writes Max Fisher<\/a> in\u00c2\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>. With the new coronavirus, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re focused on the fatalities, not on the 98% of people who are recovering or who had mild cases.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why, when a friend\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mother died recently, we went to the shiva<\/em>. A few days later, we attended a house concert (with just 30 people) of a lovely new indie folk band (shout out to Saltwater<\/a>). At the same time, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve adopted a form of greeting that I promoted in this column already two years ago when I started chemotherapy: elbow bumps instead of handshakes. Now it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s public policy.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not trying to be fatalistic. Obviously, if the situation deteriorates, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll not stand on chutzpah or ceremony.\u00c2\u00a0(I wouldn’t go to that shiva or house concert now.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, I hope that a smart balance can demonstrate that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fear of the other\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is not the inevitable epigenetic legacy of the Jewish people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s millennia-long shared trauma and that there are better ways to formulate a response to these challenging times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This column was submitted for publication a week before it appeared in the <\/em>Friday Jerusalem Post<\/em><\/a>. So much has changed in the ensuing days, including my then skeptical attitude towards bans and quarantines. But the main points – the influence of Jewish “fear of the other” and treating coronavirus like a terror attack – still remain worth considering.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Israel’s response to the new coronavirus has been proactive and strong. Is it driven in any way by classic Jewish “fear of the other?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[122,66,46,117],"tags":[249,253,271,270,267,268,269,27],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4114"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4114"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4120,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4114\/revisions\/4120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}