![]() ![]() It also highlighted the shortage of hospital beds, isolation rooms, staffing, and medications, in addition to ill-equipped intensive care units and a lack of cooperation between the MoH and the Ministry of Defense (MoD) (Office of the State Comptroller and Ombudsman of Israel, 2020, p. A state audit report published on 23 March 2020, concluded that the MoH, the Health Management Organizations, and the hospital system were not fully prepared for a pandemic flu outbreak despite a 2005 government decision regarding the need for preparedness. Regarding health system capacity, although Israel has faced serious emergency management challenges, especially wars and major terrorist attacks, its healthcare system was not prepared for an epidemic. 1 Thus, the conditions were ripe for political considerations to intermingle with the definition of policy problems as well as the selection of policy measures in the fight against COVID-19. This unique situation, which occurred amid deep global anxiety regarding the spread of the coronavirus, resulted in great uncertainty, and the situation was further aggravated by the fact that the head of the Israeli care-taker government, Benjamin Netanyahu, was scheduled to appear in court on 17 March 2020, on charges of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. Indeed, following two consecutive elections before the pandemic and a third that was held immediately after its initial outbreak, the government – comprised of right-wing and ultra-Orthodox religious parties – fell short of winning the majority needed to form a new coalition government. As the Israeli government began implementing these measures in late January 2020, it was experiencing a constitutional crisis that was exacerbated by a yearlong electoral impasse. ![]() From the early stages of COVID-19 spread in Israel, the government implemented a combination of stringent social distancing measures, complete closure of the education system, cessation of passenger flights to Israel, strict curfews and lockdowns, as well as a near-complete shuttering of the economy, and, at the time of writing (), the number of deaths stands at 285 (Ministry of Health, 2020a). The Israeli government has successfully curbed the spread of the first wave of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). It argues that Prime Minister Netanyahu employed disproportionate policy responses both at the rhetorical level and on the ground in the fight against COVID-19 that during the crisis, Netanyahu enjoyed wide political leeway to employ disproportionate policy responses, and the general public exhibited a willingness to tolerate this and (iii) that ascertaining the occurrence of disproportionate policy responses is not solely a matter of perception. The article also gauges the consequences and implications of the policy choices made in the fight against COVID-19 for the disproportionate policy perspective. It thereafter draws on the disproportionate policy perspective to ascertain the ideas and sensitivities that placed key policy responses on trajectories which prioritized differential policy responses over general, nation-wide solutions (and vice versa), even though data in the public domain supported the selection of opposing policy solutions on epidemiological or social welfare grounds. This article describes the efforts made by the Israeli government to contain the spread of COVID-19, which were implemented amidst a constitutional crisis and a yearlong electoral impasse, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was awaiting a trial for charges of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust.
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