Israel's COVID-19 response has parallels to the Gulf War - opinion

• Date: 07 January 2021
• Author: RUTHIE BLUM
• Published date: 07 January 2021

One thing is certain, however. When Israelis acclimatize to danger, we tend to grow complacent, or at least inured. Such an attitude is compounded by the happy fact that more than 1.5 million citizens have already received the first injection of the Pfizer vaccine, and a shipment of Moderna doses landed at Ben-Gurion Airport on Thursday night.

Ironically, Israelis have been pushing, shoving and using "protektzia" to get inoculated as fervently as they nonchalantly cram into any space available. Such behavioral norms are so ingrained that no Health Ministry warnings can curb them.

As annoying as this may seem, it is actually one of the many paradoxes that make Israeli society so miraculous.

Nor is it the least bit new. The coronavirus crisis is simply the latest – and longest-lasting – example. As we approach the 30th anniversary of the First Gulf War, it is worth reviewing how average Israelis operated during the nearly six-week period when the late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles were raining down regularly on the country.

At 2 a.m. on January 17, 1991, the air raid sirens that Israelis had been anticipating for a few weeks – while heading to Home Front Command stations to pick up and learn how to don our gas masks and use other items in our anti-chemical-weapons kit – finally arrived.

As everyone had been instructed ahead of that terrifying night, we all had designated a room in our homes to seal off with plastic sheets and duct tape. For the first time ever, we were told not to enter bomb shelters in the event of an attack, because "gas sinks."

The initial fear in the air was palpable, even among IDF veterans. As well-versed as they were in conventional warfare – and as accustomed as all Israelis have been since the establishment of the state to the perils of bombs and other means of mass murder – this was a very different scenario.

Furthermore, the very idea of Jews being gassed to death was reminiscent of the Holocaust. The survivors in Israel were thus even more traumatized than anybody else by the thought that Saddam might make good on the threat he made in April 1990 to wipe out half of the Jewish state with chemical weapons if they were to hit any target in Iraq.

A few months later, on August 2, Iraq invaded Kuwait. In response, then-US president George H.W. Bush organized an international coalition against the move. On November 29, the UN Security Council authorized the use of "all means necessary" to remove Iraqi forces from...