Why you can't call yourself a Covid Conscious Zionist

On why health, disability, and disease will never not be political

Photo by Jonathan J. Castellon on Unsplash

Note: I already know this piece is going to upset and anger quite a few folks, lead to numerous unsubscribes, and invite comments accusing me of anti-Semitism (which could not be further from the truth). We don’t have to agree, but I do hope you read the piece in full before making any judgements or comments. If you have disagreements with any claims made, feel free to respond, but please cite your sources. Any hateful or anti-Semitic comments will be deleted and users making those comments blocked. I do not tolerate hate speech. NB: Anti-Zionism is not hate speech.

You might be wondering why I’m writing a piece about all this, and asking yourself how it relates to living with disability and/or Long Covid. As many of you know, I write about my life with Long Covid and ME/CFS. I have been disabled by Covid, and have learned firsthand over the last few years that disability is political. Disease is political. And health is political. We cannot look at our disabilities in a vacuum. We can also not ignore the role that governments and nations play in disabling those in the global south. I am writing this piece because as a Long Covid activist, I see Zionism as directly in opposition to the idea of disability justice for all.

I am a firm believer that injustice somewhere is a threat to justice anywhere. I am a person who holds anti-apartheid, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and anti-eugenics values. I am a clean air and also a disability activist and have written before about how our struggle for disability justice in the U.S. is directly linked to the struggle for disability justice in Palestine. I also believe that Israel’s actions (since the start of the pandemic, but also prior to that) have actively and directly contributed to the proliferation of Covid as well as disability (including Long Covid) in Palestine, which I will explain in this piece. Given that I am an American taxpayer funding the Israeli occupation with my tax dollars (when I can barely afford my own medical bills like most Americans), I am directly implicated in the public health crisis that Israel has unleashed and actively fostered in Palestine, including (but not limited to) the spread of Covid and Long Covid in the Palestinian population. This is why I care, this is why I’m writing this piece, and this is why it does indeed relate directly to Covid and Long Covid. Let’s begin.

I’m writing this post now because in recent months, I’ve come across a number of self-identified Covid Conscious/Cautious (CC) people who also identify as Zionists, both online in community groups and organizing spaces I’m part of. It truly confuses me to see both identifiers back to back because these are two ideologies that I find diametrically opposed (which I will explain further in this piece).

While not all CC people are CC for community care-based reasons (maybe they simply want to protect themselves and don’t care about whether or not others get sick), I have encountered these people in virtual CC community groups, which makes me think they do have some sense that being CC is about the greater good - not just individual protection. Hence my bewilderment why one would think these two identities (Covid Cautious/Conscious and Zionist) can peacefully exist (spoiler: they cannot). This post may anger many, but I think it’s an important topic to discuss, especially in the context of disability justice - which as Long Covid activists and survivors, many of us are actively fighting for in the United States right now and abroad.

For context, I am not Jewish. I am firmly anti-Zionist, but this does not mean that I am anti-Semitic (though Zionists will assure you it does). Again, I do not tolerate anti-Semitism in any form (any anti-Semitic comments will be deleted and I will block you immediately. I will also not debate with Zionists in the comments.). What are my qualifications when it comes to writing about Zionism? I have two degrees on the studies of this particular region (including an advanced degree), have visited both Palestine and Israel (for an academic trip as part of my Master’s program), have spent a lot of my free time researching Palestine and Israel, and have read dozens and dozens of (academic) books about Palestine and Israel (from both Israeli and Palestinian historians, academics, and other leading experts) since 2009, when I first learned about what was going on.

Let’s clarify some definitions before we get started.

What is Zionism? Zionism is an ethno-cultural nationalist movement that aimed/aims to establish a national home for the Jewish people in historic Palestine. Since the early 20th century, this goal has been accomplished through the effective ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 indigenous Palestinians beginning in 1948 (and continuing to the present day), supported financially and materially by powers including the United States and the United Kingdom. The founders of Zionism explicitly stated their desire to colonize the land of Palestine and rid the land of all Palestinians, by whatever means necessary, including force. Much like the U.S., Israel is a settler colonial entity founded on the core values of violence and racism.

Per the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, adopted on November 10 1975, Zionism is “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Countless Israeli scholars, academics, historians, and NGOs agree (along with many international experts) that what has been and is happening in Palestine is apartheid (which is policy of segregation and political, social, racial, and economic discrimination against a minority group).

Anti-Semitism is “prejudice, hostility, or discrimination toward Jewish people on religious, cultural, or ethnic grounds.”

Zionists aren’t necessarily Jewish. In fact, there are far more Christian Zionists than Jewish Zionists. But the one thing they do all have in common (albeit for very different reasons) is the belief in Jewish supremacy in the historical land of Palestine, at the expense of the rights and freedoms of indigenous Palestinians (whether Muslim, Christian, or even Jewish…and yes Jewish Palestinians exist). Any ethno-nationalist movement is inherently going to be discriminatory and violent in order to achieve and maintain the desired supremacy. Such is the case when it comes to Zionism.

To me, anti-Zionism is simply opposition to this ideology that I and many others find to be racist, white supremacist, ethno-supremacist, violent, discriminatory, and colonialist. Anti-Zionism is not inherently antisemitic, though unfortunately many (like the ADL) have weaponized anti-Semitism to shut down any critiques of Israel, the occupation, and the Zionist ideology.

Now, let’s define what being Covid Cautious/Conscious (CC) entails. This obviously varies tremendously by person and should be considered to be a spectrum, but very basically this usually this entails taking precautions to prevent Covid transmission (including but not limited to wearing a well-fitted, high-quality respirator in indoor/crowded spaces, not dining indoors at restaurants, getting vaccinated and boosted, staying home when sick, letting others know if/when you’ve tested positive for Covid, etc.). On a broader scale, the CC community generally understands how deadly and disabling Covid can be, and believes in the importance of layered interventions on both a personal and societal level to stop the spread of Covid. The CC community generally understands the value of access to healthcare for all and how important access to things like clear air, testing, personal protective equipment (PPE), and vaccines are in combating a pandemic.

I should also note that CC people are not paragons of virtue. We are not morally superior to others. Being CC doesn’t make you a “good” person. In fact, I’ve met a lot of shitty CC people. I am not making the argument that CC people are always noble or righteous just by virtue of being CC.

So what’s the linkage between being CC and Zionism? Let’s get down to it.

For years, Israel has been systematically decimating Palestinian public health through multiple means including but not limited to: the installation of checkpoints and illegal border walls to prevent ambulances from reaching hospitals (which I have personally witnessed); the bombing of hospitals and healthcare centers; the targeting and destruction of ambulances; the targeting, torture, and killing of medical professionals; the stifling of the Palestinian pharmaceutical industry; the prevention of goods (including PPE, drugs, medical devices and supplies, and vaccines) from entering Palestinian territories; and more. The list is endless. And has very real consequences.

These attacks on Palestinian public health are not new, but have come into even clearer focus since October 2023. In April 2024, the WHO declared that “The systematic dismantling of healthcare must end.” Unfortunately, by the January 2025 ceasefire, most of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza had been decimated (the West Bank is no less important and has also faced relentless attacks and limitations when it comes to health infrastructure and access). According to the U.K. government, “Gaza’s healthcare system is in crisis. Most facilities are damaged beyond use, and those remaining open face shortages of water, fuel and medical supplies. Gaza’s 1.9 million displaced people are at risk of malnutrition, starvation and the spread of infectious diseases.”

This should be of major concern to anyone calling themselves CC and purportedly caring about access to health. In the U.S., where we have a relatively “robust” and extensive healthcare system, we still saw overwhelmed and underfunded facilities (and providers) across the nation, unable to handle the consequences of the pandemic. We saw over 1.2 million Americans who died of Covid (and this is only counting direct deaths). In 2020, we saw hospitals unable to handle the influx of patients. We saw how the shortages of PPE, ventilators, and treatments led to additional (yet preventable) deaths. If this was the case in the U.S., we can only imagine how catastrophic the situation was in Palestine.

When it comes to how Israel specifically dealt with Covid, the case is not any better.

When the Covid vaccines were released, Israel actively hampered equitable access to the vaccines for Palestinians. According to Doctors Without Borders, in early 2021, a person living in Israel was “60 times more likely to have a COVID vaccine than [a person living] in Palestine.” While the world was applauding Israel’s pro-active and accelerated vaccination campaign, many Palestinians remained unable to access the vaccine.

By February 2021, Israel had vaccinated half of its population (4.2 million people), while “only several thousand doses [were] available in the Palestinian West Bank, and a delivery of 20,000 reported to have arrived last weekend in Gaza scarcely scratches at the surface of the needs. At a generous maximum, assuming that the 35,000 reported Sputnik and Moderna vaccines are all available, that would be around 0.8 percent of the Palestinian population” [my emphasis]. The discrepancy was enormous.

In 2021, even the WHO said that in Palestine, “unequal access to essential vaccines is hardly anywhere as visible as it is in this particular context.”

By March 2021, Covid cases were surging in the West Bank and Gaza, as vaccination rates in Palestine remained much lower than in Israel due to Israeli limitations on vaccine access. According to the BBC, in 2021, “Israel did not initially offer the vaccine to other Palestinians until early March, when it decided to start vaccinating all Palestinians who come to work in Israel or in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.” Though the UN told Israel it is responsible for ensuring Palestinians receive access to vaccines, the Israeli health minister at the time said that it’s basically not Israel’s problem (despite maintaining a virtually full blockade over Gaza, controlling the purse strings of the Palestinian Authority (including the Palestinian Health Ministry), controlling what comes in and out of the Palestinian territories, and effectively maintaining military control over all Palestinians’ lives).

In Gaza, vaccine shipments were delayed, and when they finally arrived, there were only enough doses to vaccinate 1000 people, despite the population of Gaza being two million at the time.

In the summer of 2021, Israel also tried to give the Palestinian Authority nearly expired vaccines.

By August 2021, only one quarter of Palestinians had been vaccinated.

One 2022 analysis of the vaccination campaign succinctly explains that:

Despite Israel’s responsibility under international law to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics in its occupied territories, Israeli officials have refused to distribute COVID-19 vaccines to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Through a critical discourse analysis of Israeli officials’ statements regarding Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign, this paper explores how Israel evades this responsibility while presenting itself as committed to public health and human rights…Israeli officials strategically present Palestinians as an autonomous nation when discussing COVID-19 vaccinations, despite Israel’s ongoing attempts to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Relatedly, Israel justifies its refusal to vaccinate Palestinians on the grounds of the Palestinian Authority’s economic independence, thereby obscuring Israel’s control over the Palestinian economy. In this way, Israel relies on citizenship and economic inequality, as internationally sanctioned forms of exclusion, to deny Palestinians their right to health.

How can someone that calls themselves CC be okay with what happened in Israel? How do they sleep at night? Why are some people worthy of the vaccine and others not? How is that justifiable?

Apart from vaccines, medical equipment is often prohibited from entering Gaza. Despite famine and disease, “Humanitarian workers and government officials working to deliver urgently needed aid for Gaza say a clear pattern has emerged of Israeli obstruction” when it comes to urgently needed supplies being let into Gaza, often characterized by “arbitrary and contradictory criteria.”

Supplies that Israel prevents from entering include (but are not limited to): anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, oxygen concentrators, ventilators, hospital generators, x-ray machines, wheelchairs, crutches, cardiac catheters, field hospital boxes, and surgical tools for doctors - but these obstructions are nothing new for Palestinians and Palestinian medical professionals. They’ve faced a blockade for years, hampering their ability to get basic supplies.

The lack of medical equipment (like ventilators, lab equipment, and rapid tests), PPE, and medicine caused a veritable catastrophe in Gaza in 2020 amidst a burgeoning Covid crisis. Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world, which enabled Covid to spread rapidly among the population in 2020. In November 2020, Dr. Fathi Abuwarda, an adviser to the minister of health, said that infection rates were becoming “uncontrollable,” and that they lacked sufficient healthcare facilities and equipment to treat them. He said, “We have entered the catastrophe stage and if we continue like this, the healthcare system will collapse.” A dearth of testing equipment, PPE, and other medical supplies made fighting Covid nearly impossible for Gaza’s doctors to stem infections. (These shortages remain in place to this day.)

Many Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank live in refugee camps (originally established to accommodate refugees from the 1948 Nakba but given that Israel has prevented the right of return of Palestinians to their homes (despite UN Resolution 194), countless families are stuck in such camps to this day). There are 19 refugee camps in the West Bank/East Jerusalem and eight in Gaza. As you can imagine, these camps are overcrowded. There is no privacy. There is minimal access to clean water and sanitation. But don’t take my word for it; here’s a 2016 account of what it’s like to live in a Gazan refugee camp. Here’s a 2019 overview. And another account from 2023.

The point here is that Israel’s systematic expulsion of Palestinians from their homes has led to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians being forced to live in squalid conditions ripe for public health crises and disease outbreaks. The situation became so dire in 2024 that polio - which had been eradicated 25 years before in Gaza - returned, aided in part by “Israel’s continued destruction of water and waste management infrastructure in Gaza” and the living conditions of the refugee camps. According to an article in Science, “The conditions in which the 1.9 million displaced Gazans are living—crammed into unhygienic camps with little access to clean water and sanitation and untreated sewage flowing openly between tents—create an ideal environment for the virus to thrive.”

Such conditions - created by Israel - are also ones that allow other communicable diseases, like Covid, to thrive as well. Are Zionists who call themselves CC okay with all this? If a basic tenet of being CC is understanding the importance of breaking the transmission cycle of Covid, how is this acceptable?

In short, the ongoing Zionist occupation has prevented and continues to prevent Palestinians from staying safe from Covid, and is in part directly responsible for high rates of Long Covid there. Palestinians do not have adequate access to vaccines, PPE, clean air, ventilators, medicines to treat acute Covid cases and Long Covid, and general healthcare access. The limitations imposed by Israel on Palestinians when it comes to Covid specifically have meant that Israel’s eugenics-based policies have killed and will continue to kill Palestinians, and subject many more to the nightmare of life with Long Covid. I cannot stand for that.

To many of us in this community, being CC means we want access to things like respirators, air purifiers, vaccines, ventilators, and medicines for all people, not just some. It means that we understand that no one is more deserving of protection from Covid than another. It means that we understand that we share air and have a responsibility to each other to keep each other safe. In a world that ignores Covid and Long Covid, we keep fighting for both recognition and our literal survival on a daily basis.

For these reasons, I believe it is simply and fundamentally antithetical and hypocritical to call oneself both a Zionist and CC. You cannot simultaneously champion the right to clean air, masks, and vaccines for all, and the actions of the Israeli government toward the Palestinians and the Palestinian healthcare system, especially when it comes to Covid. You cannot say you want to prevent Covid transmission and Long Covid cases, and support an entity that has actively created the conditions for Covid to thrive in and decimate communities. You cannot say that you want everyone to have the healthcare they need (to address things like Covid infections and reinfections), and also cheer on the utter and total destruction of the healthcare infrastructure across Palestine.

If we use the identifier “CC” to describe ourselves, we cannot be okay with an entity (many of us are actively funding with our tax dollars) actively and consciously disabling the population it is occupying illegally. Governments - especially capitalist ones built on white supremacy (like in the U.S. and Israel) - hold the power to determine our health outcomes (for more on this, I highly recommend this book “What Is Antiracism?: And Why It Means Anticapitalism” by Arun Kundnani).

The withholding of universal healthcare; the racist, sexist, and ableist policies that continue to disable and kill citizens; the denial of services and coverage; the elimination or lack of vaccines coverage; the removal of health funding; the criminalization of medical debt; the carceral systems that have proliferated after mental asylums were shuttered…in 2025, disability is political. Long Covid is political. In fact, health has always been political, but some of us are only finding out now thanks to years of being shielded by racial and economic privilege. And for all these reasons, we must be championing the right to health and clean air for everyone, not just some.

For further reading on the ongoing medical apartheid in Palestine:

• Moolla, M & Jacub, A. (2024). Healthcare and genocide: BDS as an entry point to health justice. South African Journal of Bioethics and Law.

• The pharmaceutical landscape in occupied Palestine

• Qato, D.M., Guadamuz, J.S., Al-Shehri, B., Al-Sultan, R., Shahin, R. (2021). Pharmaceutical Sector in Palestine. In: Laher, I. (eds) Handbook of Healthcare in the Arab World. Springer, Cham.

• Captive Economy: The Pharmaceutical Industry and the Israeli Occupation

• Gaza Strip: Interim Damage Assessment (March 2024)

• Dealing with Death and Distress: The Impact of Covid-19 on the Mental Health of Palestinian Healthcare Workers

• Healthcare workers preparedness for COVID-19 pandemic in the occupied Palestinian territory: a cross-sectional survey

• Barhoush, Y., & Amon, J. J. (2023). Medical apartheid in Palestine. Global Public Health, 18(1).

Note: Most of what I write is stream of consciousness, mostly because I’m too tired and brainfogged with my LC and ME/CFS, but also because it’s a nice experiment to be (mostly) unfiltered. Thanks in advance for excusing any typos, spelling mistakes, etc.