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Monday, March 15, 2021

Tel Aviv University vaccinates hundreds of Palestinian and international students, @972mag silent

Earlier this month, +972 Magazine published an article about a Palestinian student at Tel Aviv University who attempted to get a COVID-19 vaccine during a university drive - after she was promised that she was eligible - but was denied the shot,

The article was slanted to show how awful Israel is for denying the shot to this woman who spent hours traveling to receive her shot. However, a close reading of the article shows that there was not an ounce of malice there - it was a snafu, a miscommunication, and TAU was not authorized to provide a shot to anyone who was not under an Israeli insurance plan, including Palestinian and international students. 

Despite the Health Ministry’s insistence on refusing to vaccinate the Palestinian student, she said that Tel Aviv University went to great lengths to try and get her a vaccine. One university coordinator spoke to the medical staff on site and called the Health Ministry, she said, while senior university officials arrived at one point to try to help, to no avail. According to the student, the university staff also spoke to the administration at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, the city’s major hospital, yet nothing helped. She was later told that the university president had sent a letter to the Health Ministry on the matter.

In a comment to +972, the Health Ministry claimed it was not contacted by Tel Aviv University on the matter, and that had the university reached out, the student would have been vaccinated as “an exception.”
The headline of the article was enough, however, for countless posts in social media condemning TAU and Israel for what was just a screw-up.

Now, it seems, Tel Aviv University has solved the paperwork problem and has successfully vaccinated hundreds of students who couldn't get the vaccine a couple of weeks ago - including Palestinians:


Clearly, the evil anti-Palestinian Israeli government approved this. Clearly, no one in Israel has any objection to vaccinating Palestinian students in Israeli universities.

That idea is only in the fevered hallucinations of the anti-Israel crowd.

Of course, +972 didn't issue an update or report this story - which is still on their front page. The truth is not as important as the narrative when it comes to attacking Israel. 

It is also clear from the TAU tweet that this one Palestinian woman was not singled out for not getting the vaccine last month, but that hundreds of non-Israeli students including internationals were not eligible at the time because of insurance and paperwork requirements then. 

There was not an ounce of anti-Palestinian sentiment anywhere - except from the slanderers at +972.