Israeli Arabs wonder how COVID-19 will shape Ramadan 2021
With vaccination rates still relatively low in Israeli-Arab towns and villages, residents there wonder how the upcoming month of Ramadan will look like.
“We bet on Israel, and we’re glad we did, because what you’ve done here exceeds anything we could have imagined,” said CEO of Pfizer Albert Bourla in a March 11 interview with Israel’s N12 news agency. He was explaining why Pfizer chose Israel to serve as the pilot for his company’s international vaccine distribution project. It has a relatively small population and a health-care system that collects data efficiently. In fact, the successful nationwide campaign turned a small country in the Middle East into a global leader, when it comes to the percentage of the population that has already been vaccinated against the coronavirus.
But there is a problem. At the start of the month, the nationwide infection rate was 1, while the infection rate in the Arab public reached 1.17. Thus, most of the towns still marked “red” by the traffic light model now being used come from the Arab sector.
On March 23 — just a week and a half away — Israel will be holding its fourth election in just two years. For the Arab public, which is mostly Muslim, the really important date will be sometime in mid-April when Ramadan begins. This is when people gather in large groups for the iftar meal to break the daily fast, for special prayers in the mosques and for spending time with family and friends until the wee hours of the morning.
What will happen during the month of Ramadan obviously depends on the success of the vaccination campaign over the next few weeks. Especially since Israel now starts emerging from the lockdown. The more people who get vaccinated, the greater the chances of really celebrating Ramadan, especially when compared to last year after the pandemic first erupted. Back then, celebrations were necessarily curtailed, because of the many restrictions, which included a nighttime curfew. Mosques were closed and the festive iftar meals were limited to the immediate family.
