“When I first became the Mayor of Umm al-Fahm, I received an offer to participate in a special training course in the U.S. to prepare for emergencies on the municipality level. The vast majority of Arab municipalities didn’t understand the need. In Arab society, emergency situations seem irrelevant since during wartime, we’re not a part of the story.
But I decided to go. And I already realized then that our main problem in routine times would become much greater in times of emergency; that is, our inability to work in synergy in and amongst ourselves. Every department and every organization in our city works alone. No one sees the next door neighbor who may be doing the same as you or building on your work. I didn’t know how to approach such a complex issue, how to make clear how much we’re missing when everyone sees only their small part. Then COVID-19 happened.
It’s now been exactly two years since I became Mayor of Umm al-Fahm. I’m not originally from this world – I’m not a politician. I’ve worked in education my entire life. I went through the whole track from teacher to principal to mentoring principals. I decided to run for mayor because I felt that our city deserved different leadership. When I won, I sat down and started learning everything from scratch. What a municipality is, how to make decisions. We had an 80-million-shekel deficit. I started with damage limitation, understanding which things we could deal with and what could wait.
When the first wave of COVID-19 hit, we Arabs proudly proclaimed that it hadn’t reached us, that the Jews were the only ones getting infected. Even the outbreaks in Umm al-Fahm were as a result of meetings with Jews, and we managed to keep them under control very easily. We acted fast, closed mosques and collaborated with religious leaders. We asked residents to go into lockdowns and they listened.
After the first wave, the entire country relaxed a bit. We felt that we’d beaten COVID-19. The problem was that this lax behavior came precisely during the Arab wedding season, and the combination of the two resulted in an explosion.
It’s important to understand: weddings for us are events on a different scale than in Jewish society. We plan them one or two years in advance. So when I tried to convince people that they couldn’t have weddings now, that it’s a matter of life or death, I couldn’t get it across. We handed out 5,000 shekel fines, but organizers just calculated it into the budget as another wedding expense.
I felt I was losing control of the city. I was receiving reports every day and calling all the new patients in the city. By the end of August, we had 1,000 active cases, meaning dozens of phone calls each day.
I wrote a letter to Professor Ronni Gamzu and the Minister of Health. I asked them to open wedding halls, now of all times. We can control wedding halls and we know exactly who to penalize. But when weddings are held in people’s private courtyards, we don’t even have legal grounds to enter.
My request went unanswered. But one day they called and told me that Professor Gamzu and police chiefs are coming to visit the city. They expected me to scrub my office clean and take them to a community center that was handing out food packages. But I decided to use the visit to show them what was really happening on the ground. I took them to a wedding. They went in and were shocked. They couldn’t believe how disconnected the situation on the ground was from their instructions. At the end of the visit, Professor Gamzu came to me and thanked me. He said: “It was like being punched in the stomach”.
Now while we didn’t have many cases during the first COVID-19 wave, we were hit hard financially. We brought MAOZ in to accompany us as we worked with the small businesses in our city. We sat with them for the first time around the same table. We realized how many people the owners were keeping afloat, and we thought of ways to help them. All of the Municipality’s departments worked together guided by the data. My dream of working on our internal interfacing started picking up steam.
During the second COVID-19 wave, things looked different. We were a red city, so we started receiving help from all kinds of places. I went into a meeting with the Minister of Defense and came out with a promise to receive massive subsidies. We received money for epidemiological trackers, for food packages, for neighborhood coordinators and for public service announcements. We made many videos, one of which made a particularly big difference: we made a video of one of the residents who had lost his wife to COVID-19. He spoke from the heart and it had a significant influence in Umm al-Fahm and in the Arab society in general. The most dramatic moment, the one that made us all wake up, happened on September 1st. We watched the entire country go back to school while we were the only ones staying at home. It made people understand the situation. And us? We explained that it doesn’t have to be this way; that it depends on us.
I think that was the turning point. People started being more careful and they attended weddings less often. They began realizing that their actions have consequences. When we went back to school after the second lockdown, the first thing I told residents was that it’s thanks to them. We worked hard, we fought the virus and it paid off.
At that time, MAOZ started working with us again, and the main value we received from the process was the ability to disconnect from our desks and work together. What made the difference was not the information we received but the opportunity to work on our internal interfaces.
When I look at the brainstorming, the dialog and the way we listen to each other now—things that were missing before COVID-19—I think that with the right work, the virus can be a great opportunity for us all.”