Is this where we’re all headed? Will the “Israeli model” soon be the reality across the West amid the coronavirus pandemic?
After Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced last Saturday that authorities will tap the country’s ‘counter-terror’ technology and systems to combat the “invisible enemy” of Covid-19, Israeli media is now reporting the government is actually considering the “total suspension of individual freedom” — as a new Haaretz headline reads.
Israel’s public health services chief is now urging just that: Sigal Sadetsky told the Knesset Subcommittee on Intelligence and Secret Services this week that “A lockdown and personal monitoring of people, and a total halt to personal freedoms” is urgently necessary.
The public health chief’s alarming remarks raised eyebrows among lawmakers in the emergency session. When pressed on what the “halt to personal freedoms” would entail, she emphasized that going beyond a mere curfew was needed – in short a total lockdown on a national level. Haaretz reports:
Sadetsy and Moshe Bar Siman Tov, the Health Ministry’s director general, tried to persuade committee members to give the Shin Bet the go-ahead to use “special technological means” to detect where people diagnosed with the disease had been and the people they were exposed to while they were contagious, and to isolate them.
Consider too this shocking exchange between an Israeli lawmaker and health services chief Sadetsky, where the latter essentially concedes that the state needs to be given totalitarian powers like China in order to combat the pandemic:’
Read more: Israel Debates “Total Suspension Of Individual Freedom” In Knesset Intel Hearing
