Medical apartheid: US agribusiness and Israel

MARCH 4, 2021

CounterPunch

U.S. Agricultural System’s Deadly Apartheid

BY BRUCE NEUBURGER

U.S. Agricultural System's Deadly Apartheid - CounterPunch.org

 

The NY Times of March 1, 2021 cited some chilling facts about agricultural workers and Covid 19:

“In some areas, up to 40 percent of the workers tested for the virus had positive results. The Rev. Francisco Gómez at Our Lady of Soledad church in Coachella said his parish had been averaging 10 burials a week. “You’re talking about an apocalyptic situation,” he said.

“Hundreds of coronavirus outbreaks have crippled the work force on farms and in food processing centers across the country. Researchers from Purdue University estimate that about 500,000 agricultural workers have tested positive for the virus and at least 9,000 have died from it.”

Some of the infections are to shed and meat packing workers who work inside in crowded and unsafe conditions in the best of times.  But many of these workers work outside.  So their infections likely don’t come in the course of work but in the places where they live and during the ride to and from work, especially if they ride in labor contractor buses and so on.

Agricultural workers often live in poor and overcrowded housing, and lack access to proper hygiene and medical care.  These are part of the picture. And it needs to be said that not only are workers trapped in these conditions but their ability to protest and change them are limited by the deprivation of basic human and civil rights.

It’s been 35 years since there has been a pathway to legalization for millions of farmworkers and many millions of other workers. When “amnesty” – an absurd word because people forced to leave their homelands through no fault of their own and systematically denied their rights should not have to be “forgiven” – was granted, it was in the years when growers were still trying to reverse the gains of the farm worker movement of the 1970s which had pushed up wages and improved conditions.  After the bitterly fought 1979 lettuce strike in California, for example, wages in the fields went up to $5.60 an hour which would be more than $21.00 an hour today.

The growers not only accepted the 1986 immigration reform act (IRCA) they went one step further.  They endorsed a Special Agricultural Workers addition which allowed up to a million farm workers to gain legal status.  Were the growers suddenly struck by the need to respect human rights for their workers?  Not exactly. They saw the legalization as a means to flood the fields with workers and force wages down.  They even sent recruiters to Mexico to entice young workers to come north with the promise of legalization!

The results were predictable.  The employers created a surplus of workers which allowed for wages to fall and conditions to be undermined.

The toll Covid 19 has exacted on farm workers would seem to point to another example of employers’ callous disregard for the well-being, to say nothing of the survival of the very workers who make their businesses possible.  But it’s pointless to demonize individual growers or companies.  We’re talking here about a system which is bigger and more pervasive than any grower or meat packing operation.

The system referred to goes by two names, capitalism and apartheid.  Capitalism rewards the most ruthless exploiters, by allowing them to bring their product to the “free market” at a competitive advantage and thereby inflate their profits.   Apartheid, the system by which one racial or ethnic group is marginalized and deprived of basic rights, allows for the more “efficient” and extreme exploitation.  Apartheid is a caste-like system that perpetuates deadly conditions in work, housing, access to medical care, social services, and so on, by enforcing a special category of people.  By denying people their rights, by maintaining a force of repression (ICE) to threaten and harass them, leaving them in fear of deportation, incarceration and family separation — this apartheid system perpetuates itself by deterring those thus enslaved from rising in their own defense.

There is, once again, a call for a “comprehensive immigration reform”.  The Biden government has done so because of the promises he made in the lead up to the election.  We can expect the Republifascists, playing the nativist, overt racist card to oppose any effort to “reward law breakers” while they talk about “rapists”, “gangs” and the like, while never allowing words like farmworkers, meatpackers, construction workers, home care workers, housekeepers, cooks, etc. to cross their ‘patriotic’ lips.

But it is the people who are not mesmerized or lobotomized by fascist or white supremacist delusions and understand and sympathize with the conditions of the people upon whose work the entire society depends, who should come under scrutiny at a moment like this.  Those who oppose these brutal conditions of exploitation – such as those the deadly spread of Covid 19 among farm workers — those who oppose fascism and who looked on in horror as a near coup took place on January 6 – should now rise themselves and demand that the people who have most born the brunt of this apartheid system, who have born the brunt of the fascist race-mongering, be granted a path to full rights, to legalization and citizenship.

Democrats in power at other recent times failed to take any meaningful steps towards eliminating the apartheid system.  If any progress is going to be made, it is going to have to come from the sustained and powerful movement from the people.

Whether from the churches, mosques, or synagogues, or from the unions, civic groups, schools and colleges and city halls – there needs to be an outcry and appropriate public action to put anti-fascism and anti-apartheid politics squarely and powerfully into play with a demand that the actions now being given lip service by the Biden government, be realized.

1-20-21

Science/The Wire

HEALTH,RIGHTS,WORLD

Israel Is Demonstrating Medical Apartheid, Not Vaccine Leadership

ARIEL GOLD

The media is abuzz these days with headlines such as “How Israel Became a World Leader in Vaccinating Against COVID-19.” While the U.S. has so far vaccinated only 1.3% of its population against COVID-19, Israel has already given the vaccine to over 14% of its citizens. In explaining this, the media cites Israel’s socialised medicine, the fact that the country is small but wealthy (allowing Israel to pay $62 a dose, compared to the $19.50 the U.S. is paying), and the heavily digitised nature of Israel’s health care system. But below the headlines celebrating Israel’s vaccination rates lies a far darker story about health inequality.

Israel has a population of around nine million. 20% of Israel’s population are Palestinian citizens of Israel. These people can vote in elections, have representation in the Knesset, and are being vaccinated against COVID-19. But, there are another around five million Palestinians who live under Israeli rule, without rights, and like the rest of the world, are suffering from the pandemic.

Since 1967, Israel’s settler population has ballooned to close to 500,000, with Israeli settler regional councils controlling 40% of West Bank land. Despite the US-facilitated normalisation deals with the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco that occurred during the latter half of the year, that were supposed to have halted Israel’s annexing of the West Bank, 2020 has seen the largest number of settlement unit approvals since the watchdog group Peace Now began tracking in 2012.

Despite the Palestinian Authority and Hamas supposedly being the official governments of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is really in charge. Israel controls the borders, currency, central bank and even collects taxes on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA). It maintains the right to carry out military operations on Palestinian land and controls the amount of freedom, or lack thereof, that Palestinians are granted. Even in areas like Ramallah, supposedly under the complete control of the Palestinian Authority, Israel reserves the right to enter the city at any time, to close streets and shops, to burst into homes, and to make warrantless military arrests.

Israel’s distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine is far from the country’s only system of inequality. Israeli elections do not include the approximately five million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians in East Jerusalem, while they can vote in municipal elections, cannot cast ballots in national elections, such as the one slated to take place in March (the fourth in two years).

Perhaps Israel’s most flagrant demonstration of having two sets of laws for two groups of people is its court system in the West Bank. While Israeli settlers, residing there illegally according to international law, are subject to Israeli civilian law, their Palestinian neighbours live under Israeli military law. This makes them subject to statutes such as Military Order 101, which bans even peaceful protest.

According to the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, the Palestinian Authority is solely responsible for the health care of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. However, those deals were part of the vision that contemplated a more complete peace agreement being signed within five years. Almost three decades later, this larger peace agreement still hasn’t happened and Israel has entrenched its settlement enterprise occupation while flouting international law and dodging its moral, legal, and humanitarian obligations as an occupying power. Providing the COVID-19 vaccine to Palestinians is one of these obligations.

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza direly need the COVID-19 vaccine. As of January 6, 2021, there have been 144,257 cases and 1,663 COVID-19 deaths in the Palestinian territories. The infection and death rates are climbing dangerously. In a period of just 24 hours, 1,191 new cases and 20 deaths from the virus were announced. The situation in Gaza is particularly worrisome. Gaza suffers from up to 12 hours a day without electricity. Thanks to Israel’s air, land, and sea siege, as well as multiple military assaults on the crowded enclave, there is a severe shortage of medicine and medical equipment in Gaza along with significant poverty and unemployment. Quarantining and maintaining sanitation in Gaza is extremely difficult.

The World Health Organisation’s Covax system, aimed at assisting impoverished countries, has pledged to vaccinate 20% of the Palestinian territories. But Covax vaccines don’t yet have the necessary “emergency use” approval of the WHO. Gerald Rockenschaub, head of the WHO office in Jerusalem, said Covax vaccines aren’t likely to be available for distribution in the Palestinian territories until “early to mid-2021.” According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, the territories have been in a financial crisis, leaving them next to no funds to purchase vaccine doses. Even when they were able to find the money, the vaccines they attempted to purchase from Russia in December could not be delivered as Russia determined that they did not have enough doses to sell.

In the first week of 2021, the Palestinian Authority began to inquire if Israel would help them obtain the vaccine. So far, Israeli officials have said that they might offer whatever they have leftover to the West Bank and Gaza after vaccinating Israeli citizens and East Jerusalem Palestinians. If that isn’t medical apartheid, I don’t know what is.

This article was originally published on Mondoweiss and has been republished here via Progressive International.