With the Green Pass, we can, vaccinated, go to concerts, restaurants and sporting events. But Israel’s real-time experiment in practice after the lockdown leaves many questions unanswered.
TEL AVIV – As the lights dim and the music begins, an audible excitement bounces through the crowd. Someone a few rows above me roared with joy, as if at a Middle Eastern wedding.
I came to the Bloomfield Soccer Stadium in Tel Aviv for a concert by Dikla, an Israeli singer of Iraqi and Egyptian descent, who was praised by the city as a celebration of the ‘return of culture’. It was the first live performance I attended in over a year. There were only 500 vaccinated Israelites in a stadium that usually houses nearly 30,000 people, but it feels strange and exciting to be in a crowd of every size after a year of intermittent closures.
The audience was confined to their social distance, dancing in their place and singing through their masks. But the atmosphere was exuberant and it confirmed my status as a member of a new privileged class: the fully vaccinated.
We, a group that includes more than half of Israel’s nine million people, are getting a taste of a post-pandemic future.
The membership of the class is certified by the Green Pass, a document that you can download and carry on your phone. It contains a kind of GIF, a moving animation of green people running together, like a happy, fully vaccinated family.
Israel’s vaccination program was remarkably fast and successful.
In recent weeks, new matters of Covid-19 dropped dramatically, from a peak of 10,000 per day in January to a few hundred by the end of March. The economy is almost open again. Just as Israel has become a real laboratory for the effectiveness of the vaccine, it is now becoming a test case for a post-lockdown, post-vaccinated society.
The Green Pass is your entrance ticket.
Green Pass holders may dine indoors in restaurants, stay in hotels, and attend thousands of cultural, sporting, and religious gatherings indoors and outdoors. We can go to gyms, swimming pools and the theater. We can get married in wedding homes.
We celebrated the spring holiday of Easter and Easter in the company of family and friends.
Local newspapers and television stations advertise summer road trips for people vaccinated in countries willing to take them, including Greece, Georgia and the Seychelles.
And when you book a table at a restaurant, they ask: Do you have a Green Pass? Have you been vaccinated?
The system is imperfect, and outside the Green Pass, ‘system’ can be an exaggerated pronunciation in many ways. Application was volatile. There are worrying questions about those not being vaccinated, and noisy debates taking place in real time – some ending up in court – about the rules and responsibilities of returning to near normal.
Moreover, there is no guarantee that this will be the beginning of a future after the pandemic. Any number of factors – delays in vaccine production, the emergence of a new vaccine-resistant variant and the large number of Israelis who have not yet been vaccinated – can pull the rug out from under it.
The new world has also highlighted the inequalities and divisions between societies with more or less access to the vaccine.
Friends and colleagues in the West Bank and Gaza have not yet been able to get vaccinated.
The Palestinian vaccination campaign is just underway with doses donated largely by other countries amid a bitter debate over Israel’s legal and moral obligations to the health of people in the area it occupies. Israel has vaccinated about 100,000 Palestinians working in Israel or in Western settlements, but has been criticized for not doing more.
More than 5.2 million Israelis have received at least one survey of the Pfizer vaccine. About four million remain unvaccinated, half of whom are people under 16 who are not yet able to receive the vaccine pending approval and further testing on children. Hundreds of thousands of citizens who have recovered from Covid have only recently been included in Israel’s vaccination program.
And up to a million people have so far chosen not to be vaccinated, despite Israel’s enviable supply of vaccine doses.
Some are against taking the shot on ideological grounds, while others are apparently anxious and waiting to see the effect of the vaccine on others. They have garnered little public sympathy, and health officials have criticized them for giving in to what they describe as fake news spread on social media.
The postponement presents difficult moral and legal questions. Should they also have the right to rejoin the world? Is it ethical to discriminate against them? Or is it fair to force those who have done everything in their power to protect themselves by being vaccinated to share space with people who choose not to do so?
These questions arose when another artist, Achinoam Nini, a leading singer-songwriter named Noah, announced a performance for Green Pass holders only in a venerable auditorium in Tel Aviv.
A small but outspoken minority of anti-vaxxers and others accused her of collaborating with a discriminatory system and supporting medical experimentation and coercion.
“You work with selection,” wrote one critic, Reut Sorek, deriving terminology from the Holocaust. “You are working with medical dictatorship and the trampling of individual rights.”
Me. Nini responded in a passionate Facebook message that it was meant to vaccinate the public interest, to balance public health against personal freedom, a part of the social contract and a civic duty just like joining ‘ to stop a red light.
“We have a problem here,” she said in an interview. ‘The world is paralyzed, people have lost their livelihood, their health and their hope. If you put all that stuff on the scale, then come on, just get vaccinated! And if you really do not want to, then stay at home. ‘
To solve the mystery and cater for under-16s, the government allowed places to be quickly tested as an alternative to the Green Pass. But many business owners, who are responsible for ordering and financing the test stations, find the logistics impractical.
Unlike concerts and football matches, however, work is not a luxury for most people.
A teaching assistant at a school for children with special needs in central Israel refused to be vaccinated, or as her employer, the city of Kochav Yair-Tzur Yigal, insisted on hosting a weekly negative Covid test.
The school prevented her from getting to work, with the support of the city council.
The teaching assistant, Sigal Avishai, appealed to the Tel Aviv Labor Court. She argued that the council’s claims ” infringe on her privacy ” and that it was ” without legal basis ”, and that the requirement of a ‘weekly test’ was intended to put her under pressure to to be vaccinated contrary to her conviction ‘, according to court documents.
Last month, the court ruled against her, saying her rights should be balanced against those of the teaching staff, the children and their parents for ‘life, education and health’, referring to the specific vulnerability of the children involved.
In a country with many doses to go around, access to the vaccine is not a problem, said Gil Gan-Mor, director of the civil and social rights unit at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.
In Israel, he said: “Anyone who complains can get the vaccine tomorrow morning.”
But in the absence of legislation, employers have drawn up their own policies. At least one university of higher education took advantage of the labor court’s appeal to obtain a Green Pass from all staff and students to attend classes on campus.
In another case that went to court, the Ministry of Health wanted to distribute lists of non-vaccinated among the local authorities so that the authorities, for example, can identify non-vaccinated teachers who have returned to school and try to persuade them to be vaccinated does not become.
Civil rights groups have sued to prevent the ministry from distributing the lists, arguing that it is a violation of privacy and that the medical information cannot be adequately protected. The case is pending before the Supreme Court.
Even where there are rules, enforcement is spotlight.
The concert in Tel Aviv was the first time I was asked to show my Green Pass – and the last time. My family has since spent a weekend in a B&B in the Galilee where breakfast was served in a closed room for all guests, including children who were not vaccinated. An overcrowded Italian restaurant in the area made it clear that it did not comply with the regulations, and we were offered indoor seating with a 7-year-old.
When I called back in Jerusalem to book two people at my favorite restaurant, serving expensive, fresh market food from a lively open kitchen, I was asked if we both have Green Passes. But when we got there, no one asked to see them.
The tables are as cozy as ever. Strangers sit shoulder to shoulder at the bar. Our young waitress is unmasked. A dining room at the next table questioned how Covid-safe it all was, shrugged her shoulders, and continued with her dessert.
Some restaurant owners and managers have complained that the pandemic has chronically manned them and that they cannot be expected to police the customers as well.
“It’s an embarrassment,” said Eran Avishai, a co-owner of a restaurant in Jerusalem. “I have to ask people all kinds of personal questions.” Some customers have come up with excuses and notes to explain why they were not vaccinated, and he says, “all sorts of things I do not want about.”
However, some restaurants strictly adhere to the prescriptions, and even look at the Green Pass on customers’ identity cards. Based on experience, friends exchange tips and recommendations on Facebook about the access policies of local eateries and waterholes. And at least one hipster bar in Jerusalem only asks unknown customers to show Green Passes and use the system to keep unwanted things out.
I feel a personal sense of lightness and relief as I approach my new, vaccinated life. I even caught myself in the supermarket the other day without my mask, which is still needed in public places.
We live in wonderful isolation. Virus restrictions still make most travel a daunting proposition and non-Israelites generally cannot enter the country. I miss my family overseas. To catch up with the rest of the world, we are a nation living in a bubble.