Israeli and PA health departments meet regularly to coordinate action and share vital information. Troops from the IDF's Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) are organising joint training for medical teams. Israel provides test kits, laboratory supplies, medicines and personal protective equipment for Palestinian health workers.

Some Palestinian Arab leaders today seem to prefer that their own people succumb to disease rather than cooperate with Israel. While Palestinians and Israelis on the ground pull together against Coronavirus.... articles in official Palestinian Authority publications assert that Israel is deliberately spreading the infection and trying to contaminate Palestinian prisoners, using Coronavirus as a biological weapon. Of course, Israel-haters in both mainstream and social media are only too eager to amplify such defamatory and divisive outbursts.

A recent Coronavirus op-ed in the Washington Post demanded that Israel "lift the siege on Gaza". Predictably, the author ignores the fact that Israel's lawful blockade of the Gaza Strip -- also imposed by Egypt -- is in place for one reason only: the regime there remains intent on using Gaza as a base for terrorist attacks against both Israel and Egypt. But even in Gaza, a form of cooperation has been achieved.

Israel-haters don't want to know this, but what the author calls for is of course exactly what has been happening since the Coronavirus outbreak.

"If you want to use the state of emergency for more encroachment [on public freedoms], we prefer to die from coronavirus and not from coercion, repression, and authoritarianism." — Yousef Shayeb, Palestinian journalist, to Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh, Facebook post, April 22, 2020.

"Some of the detainees complained that they had been tortured while they were held in prison." — Muhanad Karajah, Director of Lawyers for Justice, YouTube, April 22, 2020.

Palestinians who thought that the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic would prompt their leaders to replace bad habits with good ones are in for disappointment.

For these leaders, the state of emergency is a suitable occasion to intimidate and silence critics. The suspension of the salaries of the two journalists aims to send a warning to all journalists: "If you dare to say anything negative about your leaders, you will lose your bread and butter."

Once freedoms were surrendered, [Chief Justice William] Rehnquist warned, they would be even easier to take away when a future crisis or greater good came calling.

The very orders that citizens across this land were protesting have been delivered wrapped in lack of transparency: forbidding only some assemblies; preferring big box stores; shutting down churches and gun stores but not liquor or cannabis stores; motor-boating prohibited but sailing is not; vacation rentals banned but not lodges; among many more disparities.

It is vital that "We the people" keep on overseeing this process to ensure that the attempted power grabs -- for instance by those who would use this crisis to "restructure things to fit our vision" -- continue to be judged as intolerable acts.