Prime Minister Naftali Bennett visited a vaccination complex in Taiba on Thursday in an effort to encourage increased inoculation among the younger Arab population, which has been lagging far behind the rest of the country.
“I appeal to the youth: The most sacred thing is to safeguard the dignity and the lives of your grandfather and grandmother, of your mother and father,” Bennett said. “Young people, you are the most contagious. If you are vaccinated and wear masks, you are safeguarding the lives of your grandfather and grandmother.”
While around 39% of the total Israeli population between the ages of 12 and 15 has received at least their first shot of the coronavirus vaccine, according to the Health Ministry website. However, fewer young Arab have thus far turned out to get the jab. Data shared by ministry officials last week showed that only around 16% of Arab 12-15-year-olds are vaccinated.
“I appeal to public leaders in the Arab sector and ask you to join in the fight to save lives,” Bennett said. “Your lives are important to me. Get vaccinated – Ruchu tita’amu.”
But it is unlikely that Bennett’s public broadcast will yield the results that he wants, according to Dr. Nasreen Haddad Haj-Yahya, director of the Arab-Jewish Relations Program at the Israel Democracy Institute.
“The younger population is much more challenging, and the state is managing less well to get them vaccinated for many reasons,” Haj-Yahya said. “What worked to get the older generation vaccinated does not speak to the younger generation.”
She said young Arab Israelis are on TikTok, Snapchat and other social networks, and pay little attention to mainstream media. She recommended that Bennett tap into a number of key Arabic-speaking social media influencers and ask them to help do the work on the government’s behalf.
Moreover, much of the young Arab community has been brainwashed by conspiracy theories and fake news, not just in Israel but also from the Palestinians – and really the whole Arab world.
“There are all kinds of conspiracy theories telling people not to get vaccinated, that the intention is to put all kinds of chips or other trackers in you or to prevent you from getting pregnant,” Haj-Yahya said.
She noted that unlike Hebrew, which is a language spoken only in the State of Israel, Arabic is spoken by hundreds of millions of people, so there is a lot more misinformation available to Arabic readers and no good system for confronting it.
Bennett came to this realization before his visit to Taiba, where he said, “People are dying from the coronavirus, not from the very few side effects of the marvelous vaccines.... There is a lot of fake news.”
“Highly charged concerns about fertility risks were prevalent among ultra-Orthodox Jews and Bedouin Arabs –two traditional populations that champion large families,” explained a recently published report by a team of Israeli researchers from the Israel Journal of Health Policy Research. It also cited the challenge of “limited exposure” to mainstream media, which provides information on new scientific developments.
ANOTHER ISSUE is trust between Arab society and government, Haj-Yahya said.
She explained that trust has long been low between Arab society and the government. It was further exasperated after people who were vaccinated were told this would enable them to travel out of the country and return without entering isolation, and then were asked to quarantine.
Just as Arab families booked their trips to Turkey for Eid al-Adha in July, the country became red, and travelers were forced to cancel or enter isolation.
“The timing was really not good,” Haj-Yahya said. “There was little sensitivity or understanding of how these kinds of actions harmed a specific community or hurt their trust.”
Finally, she said that the lack of Arab decision-makers sitting around the table at the Health Ministry further exacerbates the situation. By Haj-Yahya’s calculation, only 2.8% of Health Ministry headquarters staff is Arab, despite the large number who work in the country’s healthcare system.
Although Israel did establish an Arab desk that is managed by Ayman Saif, Haj-Yahya acknowledged, she said “decision-makers need to be from the Arab community, too. This could help the state make decisions that are more realistic for the Arab community and help make the Arab community more compliant.”
But there is hope – at least according to Bruce Rosen, systems research group leader and director of the Smokler Center for Health Policy Research at the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute. He co-authored the paper published in the Israel Journal of Health Policy Research titled “Addressing vaccine hesitancy and access barriers to achieve persistent progress in Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination program.”
He said when Israel kicked off its vaccination drive in December 2020, there were large gaps between the haredi (ultra-Orthodox), Arab and general communities that the government was mostly able to close.
The article shared the following data: At the end of December 2020, the vaccination rate among persons ages 60 and older in the Arab sector was 24% compared to 46% in the general sector, and 40% in the haredi sector. But by March, the differences had narrowed to 89% in the Arab sector, 91% in the haredi sector and 96% in the general sector.
Rosen believes the success came when Israel developed sector-specific programs, such as working directly with religious leaders or designing special PR or marketing campaigns for the haredi and Arab communities.
“In August 2020, the management of Israel’s national program for addressing COVID-19 was assigned to Magen Israel, a new organizational unit with Ministry of Health leadership. Magen Israel then established a special task force charged with focusing on the population of ultra-Orthodox Jews and another special task force focused on the Israeli Arab population,” the report said. “These task forces were established in consultation with leaders of the relevant communities and included professionals from within those communities.”
By the time the vaccination campaigns started, “many Muslim religious leaders, Arab physicians and Arab soccer stars responded to requests from Magen Israel that they actively and publicly encourage Israeli Arabs to get vaccinated,” the report continued. “Mayors and other leaders of Arab municipalities also spoke out in favor of vaccination and took concrete steps to make it easier for residents of their municipalities to reach vaccination sites.”
Most of the population is not anti-vaccination – probably less than 3%, according to Prof. Nadav Davidovitch, who co-authored the “Addressing vaccine hesitancy” paper with Rosen, Prof. Michael Hartal, Prof. Ruth Waitzberg and Prof. Avi Israeli. Rather, he said, many people are “vaccine hesitant.”
He said the government’s talking about “one million unvaccinated people” does not help get those people inoculated. Rather, the government needs to identify who they are and what will convince them to get the jab.
“You cannot give a universal message that is going to be adapted everywhere,” Davidovitch said. “We need to be much more proactive.”