As Israel wrestled with the assault of COVID-19 on its health care system, politics and public life, Professor Haggai Levine, an epidemiologist and chairman of Israel’s Association of Public Health Physicians, became a familiar face on Israeli television screens.

Today, Levine has moved from battling the coronavirus to fighting the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul. He is a founding member of the “White Coats” collective, a grass-roots organization of doctors fighting the judicial coup, and has, each week, spoken at the mass protests against the overhaul, delivering the message that “in order for Israel's citizens to be healthy, we need a healthy government and a healthy democracy.”

Speaking to Haaretz Weekly host Allison Kaplan Sommer, Levine said that in his view, the threat to democracy - and the related threat to public health - “feels worse than the pandemic in terms of how we feel and in terms of what the future looks like.” He attributes this to the fact that this time, the country is facing an “internal threat” instead of battling together against a hostile nation or a rampaging virus.

Levine notes that he wasn’t totally taken by surprise by the current crisis since “we know from history, that after pandemics, there are often aftershocks… I expected that we would have several very tough years in Israel, and that there would be an unstable government.”

In addition to other reasons that the overhaul is bad for health in Israel, he discusses the alarming brain drain statistics regarding the number of young doctors planning to emigrate after their training if the overhaul moves forward, and his colleagues who are training abroad “and are now extending the fellowship because they feel it's not a good time to go back to Israel.”

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