MN Anti-War Committee Condemns Israeli Medical Apartheid

MN Anti-War Committee Condemns Israeli Medical Apartheid

Across the globe, COVID-19 has exacerbated all pre-existing inequalities and put lots of us working people that much deeper in debt and that much closer to eviction. It has further aggravated the effects of poverty, war, racism, injustice, and oppression.

Here in Minnesota, 90 percent of vaccine shots delivered so far have gone to whites, who make up only about 80 percent of the population. Latinx Minnesotans have had around twice as many positive cases as whites have had, and are 6.5 times as likely to die of COVID. Black Minnesotans are around 2.5 times as likely to die of COVID than whites. Indigenous people are 4.6 times as likely to die of COVID than whites. Not surprisingly, the policies implemented here have benefited white Minnesotans at the direct expense of Minnesotans of color. In our already broken and racist system, COVID has made the stakes even higher.

Israel, thanks in large part to billions of dollars a year in US aid, has led the world in vaccinations. Their state-run healthcare system, free for all Israeli citizens, has provided half the population with vaccines already! Compare that to the 10 percent of Americans vaccinated at the time of this writing, and Israel’s record seems miraculous – “humanitarian”, even!

For the 5 million Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, however, the story is very different. For decades, the Israeli regime has purposefully destabilized medicine, electricity, housing, and water in these regions, and it’s no surprise that this vindictive policy extends to the COVID-19 response.  As a result, thousands of Palestinians are dying, and there is a malicious lack of a plan to distribute vaccines.

To put the situation in local terms: imagine 2,000,000 people packed into an area the size of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, with no way to access medical supplies and with an occupying power intentionally withholding a life-saving vaccine.  That’s the situation in Gaza.  (The population of the entire Twin Cities area is 700,000, for reference.) It’s quite obvious that the effect desired by Israel of purposely letting COVID run rampant in the most densely populated place on Earth is ethnic cleansing.

The Anti-War Committee stands shoulder-to-shoulder in solidarity with Palestinians in their struggle against apartheid and occupation. We see connections between the history of oppression of people of color in both the U.S. and Palestine. We will continue to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement being led by an international coalition of Palestinian civil society organizations. We unconditionally condemn Israeli medical apartheid and US aid to Israel, and support self-determination and the right of return for the Palestinian people as the only path forward to peace and justice.

From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free!