COVID-19 Vaccination in Palestine/Israel: Citizenship, Capitalism, and the Logic of Elimination
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Despite Israel’s responsibility under international law to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics in its occupied territories, Israeli officials have refused to distribute COVID-19 vaccines to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Through a critical discourse analysis of Israeli officials’ statements regarding Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign, this paper explores how Israel evades this responsibility while presenting itself as committed to public health and human rights. We find that Israeli officials strategically present Palestinians as an autonomous nation when discussing COVID-19 vaccinations, despite Israel’s ongoing attempts to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Relatedly, Israel justifies its refusal to vaccinate Palestinians on the grounds of the Palestinian Authority’s economic independence, thereby obscuring Israel’s control over the Palestinian economy. In this way, Israel relies on citizenship and economic inequality, as internationally sanctioned forms of exclusion, to deny Palestinians their right to health. Drawing on theorists such as Michel Foucault, Achille Mbembe, and Jasbir Puar, we argue that withholding vaccines from Palestinians reveals the ways that Israel furthers its settler-colonial aims under the guise of liberal humanitarianism and economic growth. Instead of directing these conclusions toward Israel as an exceptional case, we contend that these processes reveal how settler-colonial societies use liberal frameworks of citizenship and capitalism to carry out their racialized projects of elimination.
On December 20, 2020, Israeli officials announced that their COVID-19 vaccination campaign was underway. The day before the campaign began, Israeli Ministry of Health Director-General Chezy Levy stated, “It is important for me to stress that we will vaccinate everyone, and there is nothing to worry about.”1 Attempting to quell fears concerning vaccine access, Levy made Israel’s vaccination goal explicit: everyone would receive a vaccine. However, as Israeli medical professionals administered thousands of doses over the next few weeks, it became clear that Levy’s use of the term everyone did not include Palestinians living in Israel’s occupied territories. While Israeli officials distributed 14 million vaccines to its nine million citizens, they have not fulfilled their responsibility under international law to vaccinate the 5.3 million Palestinians living under their rule in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT).2 As of August 2022, Palestinians in the OPT have received only three million vaccines for its five million people, primarily from the United Nations’ COVAX program and countries such as Russia, China, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates.3
