Legal rights are human rights that are given to us by the virtue of the legislation that exists where we reside and our category of citizenship within that area (recognizing that citizens and refugees have distinct rights). A moral right is something that we must acknowledge as a result of our ethics. There is a significant intersection between legal and moral rights and the human right to health is encompassed by it as per international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention. However, I would like to focus on an anomalous region, where international laws and diplomatic pressure bear no weight – Israel and Palestine.
Although the issue is substantially more complex than what binary categorization would allow, I have chosen to place the former in the category of the oppressor and the latter in the category of the subaltern. ‘Subaltern’, a term often subsumed under the umbrella of post-colonial thought, will be considered in a unique context here – from the perspective of ‘internal colonialism’, where the colonized live among their colonizers (Byrd & Rothberg, 2011). In this form of colonialism, the prefix ‘post’ becomes entirely redundant because colonization is a process that is very much in media res for the people of Palestine, especially while the Israeli far right still aims to annex the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Accordingly, the term ‘subaltern’ encompasses an otherness that resists the colonizer’s appropriation, like the Palestinians that remain within the West Bank and Gaza, but where the subaltern still suffers from disenfranchisement and the depravation of their rights.
‘Crisis’ – translations and etymologies
In her highly intriguing podcast, Dr Staiger invited us to explore the Greek etymology of the prolifically-used English word ‘crisis’ by taking us through an array of languages in which a similar term exists. The French, Spanish, Italian and German words for ‘crisis’ share the same Greek etymological root but diverge in slightly in meaning as they separate, absorb and extrapolate different nuances and fragments of the root ‘krinon’ (meaning to ‘separate’ or to ‘choose’) (Koselleck & Richter, 2006).
However, the podcast briefly diverged from Greek etymology to discuss the Hebrew word for crisis ‘mashbel’, which Dr Guinea explained to us. ‘Mashbel’ stems from the Hebrew root ‘shavar’ (which means ‘ending’ or ‘breaking up’). With respect to the Jewish identity, Dr Guinea contextualised ‘crisis’ to be characterised by a religious minority being engulfed by a religious majority, which raises the issue of the Jewish diaspora.
European Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Diaspora
Centuries of European anti-Semitism, a concept we briefly visited in our study of the plague in Medieval Europe, afflicted Jewish people and led to several cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide. In the middle ages, the Black Death was attributed to Jews and as a result violent massacres took place in attempts to eradicate them, as post-mortem examinations from the late 1300s have revealed (Green, 2014). In modern history, we are familiar with another culmination of the heinous force that is Anti-Semitism – the holocaust and the wave of hatred that came from Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
A Zionist Victory
The Torah identifies Israel, and areas surrounding it that belong to other Middle Eastern states, as holy land that the Jews are entitled to, which is how most Zionists justify the annexation of Palestine. The formation of Israel was the promise of a land that would free Jewish people of the perpetual crisis of diaspora. However, in attempts to free themselves of a subaltern existence after centuries of persecution in Europe, the Zionists thwarted the Palestinians and exiled them from their homelands, reducing them to the exact same state of subalternity. It is poignantly ironic that Jewish freedom had to come at the expense of a dismal, diasporic existence for Palestinian people.
From a humanitarian perspective, I find it very difficult to reason with justifications for the atrocity – the fulfilment of the Zionist agenda did not have to come at the expense of over a million Palestinian lives or their expulsion from their homeland – but it’s too late to think about what could’ve happened if human beings were a species capable of peaceful diplomacy. However, it is not too late to discuss how we’re going to address the refugee crisis of over 5.5 million displaced Palestinian people since the forced exodus (Jewish Virtual Library, 2021) and their human right to health in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Today, the West Bank and Gaza, areas declared in the Oslo Agreements as parts of the official state of Palestine, are currently under Israeli military occupation and the state of Israel controls access to the region for Palestinians (to answer your question about the exiled Palestinians, no real diplomatic solution was achieved and most of them live as refugees in neighbouring Arab countries or made it beyond the Middle East if they were capable of making the tumultuous journey). Palestine, as a result of the Israeli conflict, is a nation with stunted socio-economic development and has substantially inferior medical infrastructure compared to its occupier/settler coloniser.
Are the occupiers obliged to vaccinate the occupied?
With Dr Wilson we explored South Africa as a case study, where the human right to health is a judicial one. However, our analysis was limited to a post-apartheid case, whereas several activists today consider Israel a 21st century apartheid state.
In a region where borderlines are enfeebled by growing land annexation, where the militaristic coloniser antagonises the subaltern and where the Palestinian is not a citizen of Israel – what doctrine determines whether the state of Israel should vaccinate Palestinians? Several humanitarian organisations, including Medecins Sans Frontieres, and the United Nations have expressed that by International Law and the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel must vaccinate all Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza.
Residents of East Jerusalem have been offered doses but as for the blockaded West Bank and Gaza, whose citizens suffer from a water crisis, a lack of electricity and severe unemployment as a result of occupation, the Minister of Health’s unwillingness to disseminate the vaccine speaks volumes for the dismal fate that awaits Palestinians (Lynk, 2021).
The failed judicialization of the human right to health
In the dystopian region of historic Palestine, positive, negative, ethical, moral and legal rights (and their various intersections) cannot be debated because they simply do not exist. Instead, millions are forced to endure a purgatorial existence with no state protection or health provisions, while there is a looming burden that refugee host countries, which are mostly third-world countries, will now have to endure to vaccinate their own citizens as well as Palestinian refugees.
I don’t really have any catharsis to offer about the matter and I don’t really need to explain the ethical conundrums that we’re dealing with over here. I just hope that our generation will be conscientious and driven enough to find solutions to issues as worthy of action as this one.
Bibliography
Byrd, Jodi A., and Michael Rothberg. Between subalternity and indigeneity: Critical categories for postcolonial studies. Interventions 13.1 (2011): 1-12.
Green, M. H., 2014. Editor’s introduction to Pandemic disease in the medieval World: rethinking the Black death. The Medieval Globe, Volume 1.
Jewish Virtual Library, 2021. Total Palestinian Refugees (1950 – Present). [Online]
Available at: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/total-palestinian-refugees-1950-present
[Accessed 2021].
Koselleck, R. & Richter, M. W., 2006. Crisis. Journal of the History of Ideas, 67(2), pp. 357-400.
Lynk, M., 2021. Israel/OPT: UN experts call on Israel to ensure equal access to COVID-19 vaccines for Palestinians. [Online]
Available at: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=26655
[Accessed 2021].