Ex-Minister Naftali Bennet on Israel's COVID blunders:“This is the Yom Kippur War of the Israeli economy. But it’s a war without a general and without an army”
But with his Yemina party in opposition, Bennett has emerged as a vocal backseat critic of a government he says was negligent in preparing for a fierce second wave of COVID-19.
“Israel extinguished the first coronavirus wave with a huge blanket, at the expense of the independently employed and the unemployed,” he says. “This gave it a generous amount of time to prepare, and Israel did not do that. The citizens put out the fire; it was up to the government to extinguish the embers.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Bennett details the chain of failures that led to more than 1,000 daily infections, and offers policy recommendations: Don’t impose closures on infected areas — it’s expensive and ineffective; reopen the corona hotels that he instituted during the first wave; encourage domestic tourism; and direct economic stimulus to preparing students for life in a COVID economy.
With a politician’s ear for a sound bite, Bennett repeats the analogy that he’s used to bludgeon the government from TV studios and across the airwaves. The right way to stem the pandemic while keeping the economy open, he says, is to use “tweezers, not a hammer.”
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