Scientists: Debate Over Palestinian Vaccine Responsibility Will Outlast Sun

Partisans will continue to talk past each other after the sun is a white dwarf.

Pasadena, CA, March 2 – Astrophysicists predicted this week that the brouhaha concerning whether Israel must provide COVID immunizations to non-citizens living in areas under Palestinian self-rule will continue far beyond the lifespan of the solar system’s current arrangement, a new article reports.

Writing in the journal Space, researchers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory published an article in this week’s edition to the effect that the debate over responsibility for vaccinating Palestinians – who have their own health care system and government with authority and capacity to fill that niche – will evidently keep raging beyond the sun’s projected remaining five billion years, and certainly beyond its growth into a red giant before that time.

“Partisans will continue to talk past each other after the sun is a white dwarf amid a planetary nebula,” concluded the group of scientists in the article. “One side will stress Israel’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions and International Humanitarian Law, while advocates of the opposing viewpoint will invoke both the Palestinian commitment under the 1993 Oslo Accords to assume public health duties, and the specific treatment the Geneva Convention gives to the issue, assigning such responsibility to the local organs of government and not the occupying power. They will also continue to argue that Israel does not, in fact, constitute an occupying power, either because of Oslo or because the territories in question were never part of any recognized state whose territory is now ‘occupied.'”

“The debate, such as it is, will last far beyond earth’s capacity to sustain any life,” the authors continued. “The sun will begin to run out of hydrogen to fuse into helium, and at that point, at least a billion years from now, it will gradually lose its capacity to cohere as a medium-sized yellow star. The expansion will devour the inner planets and vaporize everything closer-in than Mars, and render even the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn inhospitable to life. Whatever life does persist, either fleeing from here or developing perhaps on a Neptunian moon, Pluto, or some other Kuiper Belt object with complex organic compounds, and water instead of ice, will carry on that pointless point-counterpoint.”

The JPL scientists do not foresee the argument resolving even after the heat death of the universe billions of years beyond that, and they also predict that the partisans currently blaming Israel for the delayed Palestinian vaccine rollout will also blame Israel for the heat death of the universe.

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