First-ever direct El Al flight to Australia evacuates stranded Israelis,

Some 1,930 Israelis have been diagnosed with coronavirus as of Tuesday night, the Health Ministry reported. Thirty-four were in serious condition.

About 6% of people tested are infected with coronavirus, according to the Health Ministry, which wants a complete lockdown. The Finance Ministry has said if a full closure is implemented, the economy would not recover.

A draft of the new restrictions, which were expected to be approved overnight Tuesday, was released to the media shortly before the government convened. People will be allowed to leave their homes up to 100 meters, leisure activities will be allowed within walking distance, and sporting events will be forbidden, according to the new rules.

Existing guidelines regarding travel to and from work would not change, but companies would be allowed to check their employees’ temperatures before letting them enter the building. The ability to buy food, medicine or other essential products would not be limited even after the decision is approved, the Prime Minister’s Office said.

Netanyahu on Monday night told the cabinet 10,000 Israelis could die from the coronavirus and 1,000,000 could be infected.

“We could reach a million infected within a month,” he said, N12 reported. “There could also be 10,000 dead Israelis.”

Netanyahu instructed Mossad Director Yossi Cohen to lead a new National Emergency Team that will orchestrate efforts to purchase medical equipment, especially ventilators, that will be needed to treat patients. In addition, he instructed the Israeli Defense Industries to examine options to manufacture the medical equipment here.

Penalties being considered for breaking these orders would be up to six months in prison or fines as high as NIS 3,000.

The Health Ministry guidelines have stung the economy, pushing Israel’s unemployment rate to 19%.

The Israeli Employment Service said some 633,939 people applied for unemployment

possible and having the test kits on hand, to the invasive decision to track people using electronic surveillance, to isolating asymptomatic carriers.

But along with that, the South Koreans, according to a report Tuesday in The New York Times, also succeeded in instilling a “near wartime sense of common purpose” among the population.

And that, too, seems to be what is behind the implementation in Israel of new, dramatic steps almost every third day: to impress upon the population the seriousness of the threat so that they abide by the guidelines.

Leaks from a government meeting on Monday in which Health Ministry director-general Moshe Bar Siman Tov warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel was liable to become the new Italy if the regulations are not made stricter seem designed to scare the population into greater obedience.

“The battle against the corona is the most critical one to have faced Israel since the Yom Kippur War,” former Military Intelligence head Amos Yadlin wrote in Tuesday’s Yediot Aharonot. But with the sun shining, and the birds singing and the number of fatalities not yet piling up, that sense of urgency is not felt by everyone. Tighter, tougher restrictions are meant to instill that sense of urgency and emergency. Right now it is all about creating an environment where people will be obedient.

“I don’t know if I would go so far as to say the government is trying to create a crisis atmosphere,” Mansdorf said. “They are trying to get people to understand that this is serious. You have to put in greater restrictions to ensure that lesser restrictions are met.”

The countries that seem to be most effectively fighting the virus are states where discipline and obedience are an integral part of the culture.

For instance, Mansdorf said, Japan and Germany are having more success at fighting the virus than Italy. Why? “The common denominator is that they have more obedient behavior and respect for authority,” he said. “The Italians are more capricious.”

In order to ensure that – when it comes to dealing with the coronavirus – Israelis behave more obediently like the Germans and Japanese, rather than “capriciously” like the Italians, Spanish and French, creating an atmosphere that feels like a war is critical.

Israelis, like the rest of the world, might not know how to behave during a plague, but they do know how to act with discipline and self-sacrifice in a time of war. •