Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is being blamed, and he admits responsibility, for the serious mistake of coming out of the first lockdown too quickly. His remarks, when he was Opposition leaders, than then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert could not continue serving as prime minister while under criminal investigation, are being shown over and over, and people are telling him to practice what he preaches.
He isn't. People are claiming most of his decisions, including the attempt to limit the anti-government protests (which boomeranged) – whether consciously or not – stem from his attempt to avoid his trial. But when we shine a spotlight on it, he is guilty of something far worse – he is responsible for the serious problems with the health care system. Netanyahu was health minister for seven years.
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Every health minister has served on average slightly more than two years. The only one who spent a longer time than Netanyahu as health minister was Yisrael Barzilay, who served for eight years. Netanyahu, while also prime minister, held the health portfolio from March 31, 2009 to March 18, 2003; from Dec. 4, 2014 to Sept. 2, 2015; and from Nov. 28, 2017 to Dec. 29, 2019. Most of that time, Yakov Litzman was his deputy, but that fact does not detract from his ministerial responsibility.
There is a sad joke about a general who uttered the immortal line: "I had a wonderful army, and then a war came and ruined everything." COVID is the war of the 27th health minister, who was Netanyahu. His statement "We have excellent doctors, and the population in Israel is very young" won't be enough for any investigative committee. The facts were never hidden from him that Israel had 2.2 hospital beds per 1,000 people (compared to 3.6 in the OECD); that there were only three thousand doctors; that Israel had one of the lowest number of medical school graduates in the OECD; that the number of nurses in Israel was half the OECD average; and that 5,000 people in Israel were dying each year from infections contracted in hospitals. Nor was the serious shortage of equipment kept from him. He knew everything.
All these years, was he putting blind faith in his deputy, and believed there was no need for him to take an interest in what was happening in the ministry? Did he cut the ministry's budget so freely because he had been the head of it for so long, and didn't have to fight over them with a stubborn health minister who would hold his ground and told Netanyahu that health care was in peril, and doctors were under an inhuman burden, and that suicide among doctors – sometimes in the same departments – was a sign that something was seriously wrong in the system?
Who is holding Netanyahu accountable for all his years as health minister? The Haredim are afraid to take on ministerial portfolios, so they make life easy for the prime minister. He saves them places at the cabinet table, and all they have to do is sign off on directives that only ministers can, and documents that he doesn't have time to read. A deputy minister sits with him for 15 minutes after the cabinet meeting, and signs off on paperwork, then Netanyahu goes about his daily business.
Netanyahu isn't allowed to evade the heavy responsibility. This enormous, important, and sensitive system didn't adjust itself to the size of the population as it should have, and subsisted from one miracle to another. The red flags that doctors were holding up about the COVID units approaching full capacity were the result of Israel not having enough doctors and hospital beds in the first place.
The decision on the current, strict lockdown, with all its social and economic fallout, is the result of those red flags, and they were raised because someone wasn't prepared for the moment when the system would be in urgent need of additional personnel. The "trust me" approach was working overtime. Alongside the loss of control over the situation as a whole, the absence of cabinet meetings, the inability to appoint critical positions, the buckling to political pressure and the loss of the public's trust – we are now paying the price for his seven wretched years as our 27th health minister.
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