Amid charged political climate, Israel unites to celebrate medical heroes

Israel is often described as a society divided along sectarian, ethnic and political lines.

By BOB, DEBBIE BAIN
A Jewish Magen David Adom volunteer stands next to a Muslim MDA volunteer. (photo credit: MOHAMD ALNBARE/MDA SPOKESPERSON)
A Jewish Magen David Adom volunteer stands next to a Muslim MDA volunteer.
(photo credit: MOHAMD ALNBARE/MDA SPOKESPERSON)
We are big consumers of news and big fans of politics.
Politics in Israel is a blood sport, and that has never been truer than during the past 18 months. Voters have cast ballots in three successive elections, and failed to return a decisive result in any. Finally, after months of wrangling and animosity, Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu concluded an agreement to lead a coalition government.
Israel is often described as a society divided along sectarian, ethnic and political lines. And, no doubt, those divisions are real, and shape its collective life. But from the haredi Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim to Tel Aviv and our hometown of nearby Ra’anana, and from the largely Arab Nazareth in the North to Beersheba in the Negev, the nation has united to back its brave men and women on the frontlines of the battle against novel coronavirus.
And all with the same modern iconology.
Across the Jewish state, the flag of Magen David Adom, the country’s national emergency medical, disaster, ambulance and blood-services organization and its local chapter of the International Red Cross, has been fluttering not only over these diverse communities but seemingly everywhere one turns. Just as New Yorkers have come out to their city balconies and windows every night at exactly 7 p.m. for the past two months to bang pots and pans in a cacophony of appreciation for their own first responders and medical workers, so, too, have everyday Israelis flown the MDA flag from their front lawns, homes, offices, fence posts, highways, bridges and utility poles and marched in the streets with them to give thanks to their frontline workers battling COVID-19.
It is as if their 23,500 volunteers are returning heroes from war. And they are.
Since its birth more than seven decades ago, Israel has been locked in existential conflicts with its neighbors and terrorists. Never before has the combat shifted from the foxholes and trenches to the emergency rooms and doctor’s offices. The most iconic image of the Six Day War depicts three Israeli paratroopers awestruck before the newly liberated Western Wall. Likewise, the signature Israeli photo that will derive from the coronavirus outbreak will surely come from the medics, doctors, and nurses who have spared no effort to treat and prevent this terrible illness.
Israel’s Health Ministry and MDA have clearly been on the cutting-edge of containment and care. From near the outside of the pandemic, the Jewish state adopted one of the most extensive contract tracing programs to halt the spread of the disease, we read, dispatching brigades of health workers to monitor those who might have been exposed. It was reported almost everywhere that the nation’s emergency hotline fielded exponentially more calls than usual without sacrificing exceptionally rapid call answer times nor ambulance response times, 80,000 a day at their peak! Meanwhile, the hi-tech sector was featured in the news outfitting coronavirus patients and those exposed with electronic health monitors to track their condition. From Tel Aviv’s start-ups to the intelligence community’s tracing capacities, we see on TV all the resources and ingenuity of Israeli society have been marshaled to protect life and return to a normal existence as soon as possible.
THE PANDEMIC’S coexistence silver lining has garnered international notice, as well. Recently, in March, an image of two emergency medical technicians (EMT) – one Jewish, the other Muslim – taking a simultaneous prayer break went viral around the world. The Muslim medic summed up the situation concisely: “The whole world is battling this,” Abu Jama told The New York Times. “This is a disease that doesn’t tell the difference between anyone, any religion, any gender. But you put that aside. We work together, we live together. This is our life.”
A new report by the Foreign Ministry’s department of Public Diplomacy says media coverage of Israel has undergone a full transformation in recent weeks.
Based on hundreds of cables sent home by Israeli embassies around the world, coverage of Israel in the news has completely turned around during that time period.
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic in January, “Israel’s [approach] was viewed with hostility, mainly due to its decisions to cancel flights, close borders and remove foreign nationals in the first stage, and later on for its implementation of cellular location technologies that Israeli security agencies were using in the fight against terror,” the report says.
This line of reasoning, however, quickly changed course. Once the scope of the pandemic became more apparent in the West, articles involving Israel began praising the country’s lifesaving policies, the report continues.
“In the second stage, Israel was portrayed as a model of a country successfully coping with the medical crisis, precisely due to all the reasons for which it was previously criticized,” the report says. Israel also received recognition for its immense efforts on behalf of its citizens stranded across the globe during the crisis.
Israel’s medical heroes have been receiving many types of much-deserved recognition. A constellation of the nation’s most famous musicians recorded a music video also paying homage to these saviors in scrubs. Sherri and Uzi Fox’s new version of the late Gabi Shoshan’s hit song “To Be Sometimes” was performed online not long ago. The video was filmed inside the homes of the two singers and also in front of MDA facilities.
Israel remains a fractious and raucous democracy, where disagreements are aired sometimes with a certain stridency. But for now at least, that has all been put to the side, with the nation united under the flag of Magen David Adom, its red Star of David set against a field of white.
The writers are Debbie Bain who is a licensed real estate broker in Ra’anana and her husband Bob who is retired. The two moved to Israel from Los Angeles with their five sons in 2010.


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