Periscope
other major powers in an effort to
revive the two nations’ full compli-
ance with a 2015 nuclear deal aban-
doned by former President Donald
Trump in 2018. Israel has protested
the effort by the U.S. to return to the
agreement, but President Joe Biden
has pressed on with negotiations.
Concerns about direct escalation
between Iran and Israel loom over
the region, but just as nearly every
other country in the world, Israel is
already at war with a different kind
of enemy: COVID-19. Bennett takes
the war analogy seriously.
“Israel has spent 73 years fighting
for its survival, and that’s something
that made the Israeli people more
resilient and more agile,” Bennett
told Newsweek via a spokesperson
on WhatsApp. “When faced by this
invisible enemy, the Israeli fighting
spirit kicked in and made Israel’s
vaccine campaigns one of the most
successful in the world.”
“We’ll do what we can to protect
lives in the fight against COVID and
in the face of the threats posed to
our people,” he added.
In November, Bennett summoned
top officials to hold a war game
against what was then a hypothetical
vaccine-resistant variant of the disease.
“The purpose of the war game was to
prepare us for the next war and not
for the previous war, and it certainly
did,” Bennett said. “When Omicron
was discovered, we found ourselves
in a much better situation than we
could have been, largely thanks to the
war game.” The exercise was launched
on November 11, less than two weeks
before the first case of what the World
Health Organization would later call
Omicron was reported in South Africa.
“At the first stage of the drill we de-
cided to keep Israel’s borders open
to tourists,” Bennett said, “only to
find that by the later stages of the
10 NEWSWEEK.COM
MIDDLE EAST
drill, the country’s hospitals were
overwhelmed with patients. We con-
cluded that it would have been bet-
ter if we had limited entry of tourists
into Israel’s borders at an early stage.
This is just one of the many insights
we gained from the drill that influ-
enced our decision-making process
when Omicron was discovered.”
“The more prepared we are, the
greater chances we’ll have at win-
ning the war against COVID,” he
added. “We must move fast, hard
and strong.”
Among the experts tasked by Ben-
nett with organizing the exercise
was retired Israeli Major General
Yaacov Ayish, who previously led the
Israel Defense Forces’ General Staff
Operations Branch and served as
Ground Forces Chief of Staff during
the country’s second war with Leba-
non in 2006. “In Israel, we faced four
waves in this war against COVID
in the last nearly two years,” Ayish
told Newsweek. “And right after the
fourth wave, under the leadership of
Prime Minister Bennett, he decided
that, although we faced it very suc-
cessfully with the vaccines etcetera,
instead of moving on and dealing
with that and the other challenges
that Israel has, to prepare the whole
governmental system, the relevant
agencies and the relevant ministries
for the fifth wave.”
“As Prime Minister of
Israel, I am committed
to protecting Israel
both from Iran and any
other threat, including
COVID-19. One does
not come at the
expense of the other.”
Ayish said Bennett and his com-
mand assembled in a deep under-
ground bunker designed for officials
in times of crisis, to create “some-
thing as close as we can to reality.”
For added effect, Israeli news me-
dia was brought in to simulate the
information front of the fight, Ayish
said, “You could see in certain stages
that [troops and officials are] really
under pressure when they are watch-
ing the TV channels and hearing the
commentators talking about the
implications of this variant, and the
fact that it’s lethal, and the fact that
it can bypass the vaccine, and the
fact that the PCR [polymerase chain
reaction] tests are not as effective as
we expected them to be, and there-
fore we don’t identify those who
are infected.”
Competing narratives over the
C LO C KWISE FROM TOP: ISR AELI GOV ERME NT PRE SS OFFICE/GET T Y; GIL COHEN MAGEN/GET T Y; THIERRY TRONNEL/GET T Y
disease and how best to tackle it
were also simulated. As in many other
countries, skepticism and resistance
to vaccines in Israel has not only
helped to fuel the pandemic, but has
also torn the fabric of society, creat-
ing added tensions at a time of great
stress for the system.
All the while, Ayish said Bennett
sat at the head of the operations ta-
ble, “asking what is going on, what is
the situation report, what can we do,
what are our capabilities in different
channels, what type of implications
is this going to have on the educa-
tion system, on the judiciary system,
on the Israeli economy, on the other
agencies and ministries.”
Ayish added, “The biggest chal-
lenge is it also affected children in
the exercise. Think about the psy-
chological impact on those who are
exercising. Suddenly, children are
affected and you’re sending them to
school, so, suddenly, other kids are
affected and some of them in the
war game died due to that, so it was
J a N ua r y 21, 2022