Beating a Pandemic is Easy? This is Bennett’s Second Test

At the end of last summer, Naftali Bennett, the head of the Yamina party and a man with no job other than being an opposition politician, wrote and published a short book: “How to Beat a Pandemic.”

How?

Writing a recipe for how is one thing, beating it in real life is quite another. And Bennett, the lucky guy, will get to do both. He wrote the book when he was in the opposition, and now, as Prime Minister of Israel, he will get a chance to implement its conclusions. First stop: Ben Gurion airport. In the last couple of weeks, some Israelis came back to the country carrying the Indian variant of COVID-19. The result is worrying: schools in which dozens of students got infected; cities in which mask rules are back in place, just days after masks were eliminated. Israel is not yet in crisis mode, and the number of people directly impacted is still small. But on the street one can already hear people joking with one another as they walk their dogs. “Yes, I decided to take a little walk before the quarantine is back.”

What happened? Two things. One, the Indian variant is highly infectious, and a few unvaccinated teens can quickly spread the disease. Two, Israelis cannot sit still. As soon as the airport was opened, they hurried to renew their routine of constant travel. One survey from yesterday found that half—half!—of all Israelis intend to travel abroad this summer. Dear world, five million Israelis are coming your way. Dear world, please make sure to send them back unharmed.

Alas, some of them do come back with the unintentional capacity to harm. They get COVID, they fly, they enter the country, they engage with other people and pass along the virus. At the airport they discover that Israel did not yet implement Bennett’s manual for battling a pandemic. We’re seeing long lines, no masks, little supervision. Many of them are sent home too soon. Many of them do not obey the command to stay home, quarantined for a few days. The result is a rapid rise in the number of infected Israelis. A rapid, scary, and depressing rise in new COVID cases.

Last week I wrote about Bennett’s first test: a law that he must pass for which there is still no majority. The resurgence of COVID could be his second, even more important test. And for now, his government does not seem more efficient than the government that Bennett was so eloquent in criticizing.

For now.

Of course, we should give it some time to organize. We should give it some time to prove that a better way to manage the country during a pandemic can be found. The Netanyahu government was highly efficient in getting the vaccines and immunizing the population. It was ineffective in running the country while we were all waiting for the vaccines to be developed and shipped. Bennett was one of the more pointed critics of the government because of its inefficiency and clumsiness. “The obvious goal,” he wrote in his book, is “to maintain an almost normal routine of life alongside the corona.” He also wrote that this is “an achievable goal.”

The transition from knowing what needs to be done to doing what needs to be done seems simple but is the most difficult transition in every policymaker’s career. Knowing is easy because it only involves one person, the one who thinks he knows. Implementing is messy and complicated. It involves other people who might have other ideas. It involves a bureaucracy that does not always function with the necessary efficiency. It involves political interests—such as not offending your partners, and not enraging the public. Bennett is a fresh PM. Does he want to begin his term with a move that is likely to enrage the five million Israelis who plan to travel this summer?

The transition from knowing what needs to be done to doing what needs to be done seems simple but is the most difficult transition in every policymaker’s career.

Today, he pleaded with Israelis to stay home. Nice try. If we learned anything from the first round of the pandemic, it is that requests and pleadings do not have enough impact on people who really want to travel/work/attend school/attend synagogue/dine at a restaurant. Bennett will soon have to deal with families who must see a grandfather who lives in Australia, with Haredim who come from New York, with soldiers who already bought a ticket to Greece, with droves of Israelis who got the vaccine and lost their sense of vulnerability. If he wants all of these to refrain from travel (again, half the country plans to travel), he will need to do more than ask. He will have to quickly tighten the procedures at the Ben Gurion airport. He will have to make decisions that will not be popular. He will have to do all this while a combative opposition is ready to undercut his authority and question his legitimacy.

So yes, writing a book was the easy part.

Shmuel Rosner is an Israeli columnist, editor, and researcher. He is the editor of the research and data-journalism website themadad.com, and is the political editor of the Jewish Journal.