The EconomistJuly 25th 2020 Middle East & Africa 352 Public-health experts say the govern-
ment opened things up too fast, while ne-
glecting to take steps to keep the virus un-
der control. Israel is a world leader in
testing per person, but its contact-tracing
system has been overwhelmed. The health
ministry has too few nurses to track people
who may have been infected. Some politi-
cians have called on Mr Netanyahu to
transfer responsibility to the defence min-
istry, which has more manpower. But he is
loth to let anyone else take credit for fight-
ing the pandemic—and the defence minis-
try is run by his political rival, Benny
Gantz. (Mr Gantz joined the government
only after Mr Netanyahu promised to hand
him the premiership next year.)
Mr Netanyahu is instead banking on a
controversial mobile-phone surveillance
program created by Shin Bet, the security
service. The program, designed to track ter-
rorists, was used early in the outbreak,
then halted. In June the prime minister
brought it back over objections from the
head of Shin Bet. The program is meant to
identify those who have recently been in
contact with an infected person. The
health ministry then sends them a text
message telling them to quarantine. But
there has been a high number of false posi-
tives, say experts, and the public’s trust in
the government is so low that many Israelis
leave their mobile phones at home to avoid
being tracked and ordered to quarantine.
One silver lining of Israel’s covid-19 cri-
sis is that relatively few people have died.
With a population of 9m, Israel has report-
ed over 56,000 cases but just 430 deaths.
That is probably because of a young popu-
lation and good health care. But criticism
of Mr Netanyahu is growing for other rea-
sons, too. On July 19th a court said the next
stage of his trial on corruption charges,
postponed because of the lockdown, would
begin in January. The court will convene
three times a week, with the prime minis-
ter in attendance. Mr Netanyahu is report-
edly trying to wriggle out of both his legal
troubles and his agreement with Mr Gantz
by calling an early election. 7
Sicker and sicker
Israel, covid-19, seven-day moving average
To July 22nd 2020Source:JohnsHopkinsCSSE2,000
1,5001,000
5000
JJMAMFNew confirmed
cases
10
8
6
4
2
0
JJMAMFNew confirmed
deathsD
ay after day, week after week, the cars
pulled up outside the Ethiopian em-
bassy in Beirut and ejected their passen-
gers: tired-looking black women, their
modest possessions stuffed into cheap
suitcases (pictured). With the economy in
free fall, many Lebanese families could no
longer afford to pay their domestic work-
ers. Nor could they easily send them home.
The price of repatriation flights had surged
because of covid-19. So their solution was
to dump the women outside their embassy.
Dozens were left to fend for themselves.
The protests in America over racism
and police brutality have drawn much in-
terest in the Middle East. Some people re-
acted with shock, some with Schaden-
freude. For others, though, America’s
unrest was an opportunity to discuss the
problems with race in their own countries.
Most Arab states have a black minority.
Black communities in north Africa trace
their roots to antiquity: the Nubians, for
example, called Egypt home long before
their country acquired its Arab identity. In
the Levant and the Gulf many people are
the descendants of slaves taken by Islamic
empires, or of African Muslims who made
pilgrimages east and decided to stay.
All face discrimination. Dark-skinned
people are referred to with terms like abd
(“slave”). Egypt’s dark-skinned former
president, Anwar Sadat, was called his pre-
decessor’s “black poodle”. Blackface is a
common sight on Arabic television. In a
widely shared video a black Palestinian ac-
tress, Maryam Abu Khaled, recounted the
casual bigotry she encounters, such as a
mother telling her daughter to get out of
the sun lest she, too, turn black.
Skin colour can make marriages fraught
when families see it as a marker of socio-
economic status or pedigree. Discrimina-
tion exists in the workplace, too. Black Ira-
qis, a community with more than a
thousand years of recorded history, strug-
gle to get government jobs and are typically
relegated to menial work.
The worst treatment, though, is re-
served not for citizens but for migrants. In
wealthy Gulf states it manifests in a tacit
racial hierarchy. Fancy hotels might em-
ploy black migrants as security guards or
porters. They are less common in jobs that
require interaction with customers, like
waiters or hairdressers. Those better-paid
roles often go to lighter-skinned workers
from Asian or Arab countries.Egypt is thought to host around 5m Afri-
can migrants, many of whom fled war and
oppression in places like South Sudan and
Eritrea. They have faced years of abuse.
About two dozen Sudanese were killed in
2005 when police raided a protest camp. In
years past some tried to reach Israel, a long
journey across Sinai’s desert that left them
prey for human traffickers. Those who
crossed the border met discrimination and
frequent attempts to deport them—regard-
less of conditions in their home countries.
Some Lebanese advertise their house-
keepers on Facebook as if they were proper-
ty. A post in April offered a Nigerian maid,
“very active and clean”, for 1.5m Lebanese
pounds ($1,000 at the official exchange
rate). Bigotry can trump class: a black dip-
lomat recalled being pursued in malls by
security guards who thought her a house-
keeper and wanted to know why she was
shopping without her madame.
Faustina Tay, a Ghanaian maid in Leba-
non, was found dead in March in the car
park underneath the home where she
worked. Doctors ruled her death the result
of a fall. Her case was not unusual. Even be-
fore the economic crisis, human-rights
groups estimated that around two domes-
tic workers died each week in Lebanon,
mostly by suicide. (Not all are African.)
For years activists have urged the gov-
ernment to scrap the kafalasystem, which
prevents foreign workers from leaving an
abusive employer without also leaving the
country. Economic crisis may make the is-
sue less pressing: fewer Lebanese can af-
ford to employ foreign maids. In June a
Ghanaian television channel covered the
return of 211 citizens from Lebanon, most of
them female domestics. They described
long hours, beatings and having to steal
food to survive. “No one should make that
mistake and go back to Lebanon,” one
woman said. “They don’t respect us.”^7BEIRUT
Bigotry against black people poisons
the Arab world, tooRacism in the Middle EastMaids for sale
Now she needs help