Bennett’s UN speech stirs controversy in Israel over pandemic efforts
In his speech at the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett made it clear that he, not the health authorities, have the final say on the national campaign against the coronavirus.
Only a few minutes before entering the plane that would fly him to Israel, and after his first speech to the United Nations, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett delivered a quick statement to the media. The Sept. 28 statement did not deal with the warnings he had delivered a day earlier in his UN speech regarding Iran, which is advancing toward a nuclear bomb. Rather, his statement targeted another topic brought up in his UN address: the government’s policy on battling the coronavirus.
Bennett said in his UN speech, “Running a country during a pandemic is not only about health. It’s about carefully balancing all aspects of life that are affected by [the coronavirus], especially jobs and education. While doctors are an important input, they cannot be the ones running the national initiative. The only person that has a good vantage point of all considerations is the national leader of any given country.”
Health officials who listened to the speech came out with the impression that Bennett criticized them directly for their management of the crisis. These sentiments generated a real political and media-related storm in Israel. More so, Bennett was forced to explain why he chose to wash his political dirty laundry in the UN forum, which seemed to put the Iranian threat on the back burner. He also chose to ignore in his speech the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
In order to understand how his words against the health system were so problematic in the forum in which he chose to express them, we must examine the context of Bennett’s UN appearance and the atmosphere in Israel right before the event.
