Netanyahu gambles political fate on reopening Israel
Fighting for his political life after three inconclusive elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows that the pandemic will determine his fate on March 23.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla couldn't have dreamed he would play a lead role in Israel’s ongoing election drama. He was scheduled to conduct an official visit to Israel this month [March 2021] and celebrate with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the success of the vaccination campaign. But on March 4, the pharmaceutical giant announced that Bourla’s visit had been postponed indefinitely. Someone had rained on Netanyahu’s parade.
Bourla was looking for somewhere to conduct a pilot of his company’s experimental vaccine, a state-of-the-art laboratory from which to test Pfizer’s pioneering technology on millions of people as quickly and efficiently as possible. Israel was the ideal test site and the deal was equally advantageous for both sides. Pfizer would prove to the world that its inoculations were safe and effective, while Israel would become the first country in the world to have most of its population protected from the deadly coronavirus and emerge in weeks from the horrors of the past year.
The prime minister, who has boasted of holding 17 phone calls with the Greek-American executive to nudge him into agreeing to the deal, is taking all the credit for the project, designed to immunize him against failure in the March 23 elections.
In the three elections since April 2019, Netanyahu billed himself as being in “a different league” than his rivals. His billboards featured him shaking hands with then-US President Donald Trump. With Trump gone, Netanyahu’s prospects hinge on the vaccine. When he found out that Bourla was not coming to provide him with a photo op, Netanyahu rushed to recite his talking points on Fox News this week, declaring with great fanfare that Israel has triumphed over the pandemic.
