Arab-Israeli communities stand at a crossroads for integration
One of the major turning points in the formation of the recent government in Israel was the willingness of the Ra’am Party to participate in the coalition.
This helped enable a coalition of mostly Jewish parties to unseat former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu after he had clung to power for 12 straight years. But the participation of Ra’am is also interesting because it doesn’t represent the participation of the historical Arab Left in Israel, but the religious Right.
This is not entirely a historical first. Arab parties have played a role in Israeli coalition politics, not only in the 1950s when some worked with the ruling Labor Party, but also in the 1990s when they remained outside the coalition but supported Yitzhak Rabin’s government. Ra’am made a major choice to be in the coalition and participate openly in meetings.
The odd thing here is that the more likely candidate for participation in a coalition to unseat Netanyahu should have been Ayman Odeh, whose roots are in the Hadash Party, which includes Jews and Arabs and has roots in Communist voters in Israel.
Yet Odeh refrained from participation, in part because he runs the Joint List, which includes Arab politicians who have hostile views about any role in an Israeli government.
In short, the radical Left, which supposedly embraces coexistence, opposed the coalition, while more religious right-wing Arab voters appeared to support it.
At the same time that this historic compromise was made by Jewish and Arab parties to work together in a coalition, there is also evidence that Arabs in Israel are making major strides economically.
This may represent a shift from economic success on the local level – where businesses thrived in villages but where tax avoidance, gray markets and a shadow economy also thrived – to integration.
Israel often ignored the Arab sector in the past, not developing public transport, highways or rail lines that served Arab areas. Because most communities in Israel are divided, that left a quarter
average several hundred.
The percentages of probability of having an antibody level under 16 and under 256 becomes 5% and 79%, respectively, for women ages 45-65, and 6% and 81% for a woman older than 65.
For healthy men, the numbers are moderately higher in the first age group (respectively 4% and 75%) and the gap with women widens as they are older: A healthy man between 45 and 65 has an 11% probability of having an antibody level below 16, and 89% probability of having one below 256. For men over 65, the percentages are 15% and 92%.
When it comes to immunocompromised people, all age groups, men and women, have between 93% and 99% probability of having an antibody level under 256 after six months, and one in two men over 65 has an antibody level below 16.
Surprisingly however, obese individuals, who are known to be at risk of a more severe form of disease, appeared to have a less significant decrease in antibody level than healthy individuals. Whether this means that they are also better protected remains to be seen, Regev-Yochay noted.
“Eventually, I hope we will understand the correlation between the antibody level and the degree of disease,” she said. “We know that there is some form of correlation, but we are looking for thresholds. For example, we would like to be able to know that people whose level is under 256 might not be protected any more from getting infected but are protected from severe disease, or those who are under 32 might get ill enough to be hospitalized in intensive care, but not to die, and so on and so forth.”
In the future, these evaluations might help understand who needs further shots and when.
Asked about whether the rapid decline in antibody level is also going to occur after the booster, the professor said the study does not offer answers.
“We can see that after the booster the starting antibody level is much higher than after two shots, which is an encouraging sign,” Regev-Yochay remarked.
The expert expressed support for Israel’s decision to give a booster to all the population in light of the epidemiological situation it found itself.
In addition, she said that other studies, especially conducted in the United Kingdom, appear to suggest that a longer interval between the first two doses might offer
•• this coalition can do this .... I don’t think that if we [try to] force someone to marry in the rabbinate it will make him get married in the rabbinate, and so I am convinced that in the State of Israel people need to be able to actualize their relationship even if they don’t want to do so through the rabbinate,” he said.
“I think we’ll find ways to do it,” Kahana concluded.
During the last election, the mostly religious Yamina Party, to which Kahana, who is himself religious-Zionist, belongs, had virtually no concrete policy proposals on religion and state matters.
One proposal advanced by moderate religious-Zionist rabbis, some of whom Kahana is close to, is known as the “civil partnership” option that would have the same legal status as marriage in Israel, but reserves the term “marriage” specifically for religious ceremonies.
Although Kahana’s spokesman said the minister was not specifically referring to civil partnerships, it is possible that this is the kind of direction he could take.
MK Yoav Ben-Tzur, of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, condemned the minister’s comments, saying, “Since Matan Kahana took office, he has worked to undermine the principles of Judaism through dangerous reforms on kashrut, conversion, marriage and Jewish identity. Kahana is not the minister of religious services, he is the minister of destroying religion and the destruction of Judaism.”
The liberal religious-Zionist lobbying group Ne’emanei Torah Va’Avodah welcomed Kahana’s comments, however, saying the current situation is untenable and that solutions commensurate with Jewish law are available.
“We call for the advancement of an appropriate solution for all couples which would strengthen the institution of religious marriage,” the organization said.