פרס מקס גלקמן 2023

Between February and April 2021, the staff of the "VeAhavta" clinic in Haifa, a voluntary clinic for people without civil status, initiated a COVID-19 vaccination campaign for those without civil status, in northern Israel. This thesis follows the sequence of events, from the Ministry of Health's preliminary decision not to allow Palestinians without status to receive the vaccine; through the five vaccination days during which the staff was required to show bureaucratic creativity in order to make the vaccine available to as many men and women as possible; until its decision to finally stop doing so, due to the many difficulties encountered by the team from the Ministry of Health. Therefore, this thesis follows the meeting between bureaucracy, civil status, capital, activism, and medicine, as these are reflected in the meeting between state representatives, voluntary-civilian medical staff and the people without status themselves.
The main research question of the thesis is "How is violence used through bureaucratic mechanisms in the medical field?" And besides, "How can medical teams use bureaucracy to reduce structural violence?" In order to answer these questions, I will analyze the role of administrative documents, infrastructures and the body itself, in the preservation, reproduction and sometimes also change of violent social situations. I argue that the clinic staff is in a liminal position, which expanded during the emergency period, and by virtue of this is able to bring in people who are outside the health system, into it.
By following an event during an emergency, it is possible to better understand the mechanisms by which the health system regularly operates – disguising violence as routine bureaucratic processes, creating moral contradictions for its employees, and cannibalizing many resources (hundreds of millions of shekels per year and a lot of staff time in hospitals). As I will show, the paradoxical conduct of the Ministry of Health harms not only those without status, but also the interests of the Ministry of Health, the medical teams and those with status in the country.