“I think our donors will take it in stride.”
Ramallah, December 21 – Activists seeking to frame every Middle East development as a function of Israeli perfidy and depravity have in recent days admitted feeling compelled to shift rhetorical stances on the fluid situation that the coronavirus immunization has generated, deciding to convey messaging that the Jewish State refuses to provide the serum to the Palestinian healthcare system, instead of the message they had planned under the assumption that Israel would, in fact, deliver such supplies: that Israel wants Palestinians to stab one another with needles attached to syringes.
Human rights activists who use their credentials in that capacity to cover for their desire to see the world’s only Jewish state weakened or dismantled conceded they had to retool their propaganda over the last week as Israel began to administer COVID-19 vaccines to certain vulnerable segments of its population. Representatives of at least three activist groups disclosed that they had counted on Israel’s maintenance of a longstanding policy to provide medical supplies to Palestinian heath facilities, in which case the groups could accuse Israel of promoting dangerous abuse of needles. However, as soon became clear, Israel has yet to obtain anywhere near the number of doses it needs for its own citizens, let alone for millions of Palestinians, and then the Palestinian Authority secured shipments of the Pfizer-developed vaccine through the World Health Organization. The shift in circumstances forced the activists to recast Israeli maliciousness in terms of withholding vital medical supplies, but not in terms of promoting dangerous activities among Palestinians such as sticking needles in their arms.
“We’ve faced a real challenge,” acknowledged Médecins Sans Frontières spokeswoman Aniha Mor. “We though it would be a straightforward adaptation of our standard propaganda for Gaza, for example, which is always good for a few hundred thousand dollars in grants every couple of months. But then things changed more or less overnight, and our entire framing of the situation had to change. I think our donors will take it in stride though.”
“I think we handled the pivot well,” reported B’tselem representative Ben Zona. “We have experience with this kind of development, though. It’s just a different version of our normal messaging flow chart. Once we have the precedent of framing the lack of incidence of rape of Palestinian women by IDF soldiers as evidence of Israeli racism, other situations don’t pose such a demanding conceptual challenge.”
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