Israel has rather radically chosen for (presumed) "security" over "privacy" and "freedom". Secret services engaged in phone tracking to make sure people having to quarantine did so, which is very heavy-handed and sets a very dangerous precedent. (I believe this now requires approval, but for a long time it didn't.) What's more, Israel had an Australia-style entry ban to foreigners for more than a year. I also remember Israel had rather tight restrictions with regard to the range outside your house you were allowed to go (with drones flying around to enforce it). A few other countries did this too and I will criticize them just as much, but in the case of Israel, it was quite a heavy combination of all of these things. It's no surprise and I'll cut Israel some slack because it is understandable that every supposed threat is framed as a national security threat, but I do think that Israel has been among the most heavy-handed countries (talking about Western democracies here) in curbing fundamental rights and I am really disappointed by that.
It's true that there was quite a heavy-handed approach at first, but it was really concentrated on a very panic-heavy period when we didn't really know much about Covid- the first lockdown, which took a few weeks at most iirc. After that, we had two "lockdowns" which weren't nearly as restrictive and weren't really felt- I, for one, was traveling around to work normally during those lockdowns.
As for the use of tracking, I agree it's problematic. The problem is, Israel has been using such measures for decades- both in the name of fighting terrorism, and outside of it (just recently the media broke that the police was tracking and spying on activists and protest leaders during 2021). And while I agree that some tracking is necessary to save countless lives, (allegedly) using it to blackmail Palestinians into becoming double agents was never a moral choice and no one is or was making any noise about it. If we oppose these measures, we need to make sure they're not used outside of the most extreme cases of active terrorist threats.
It's the same here (I got vaccinated for this reason) - and it actually makes it a lot worse. Imagine taking an experimental vaccine whose long-term effects are unknown NOT because you think you need it for your health but because the government essentially forces you to do it by banning you from essential parts of society if you don't - while those who produce the vaccine refuse any and all responsibility when things go wrong.
A mandate is worse, but very few democracies have actually done this.
Well, here we'll disagree because in my opinion these vaccines were 100% proven safe and were not just the right choice for personal health but the moral choice for the rest of society- whether it's stopping the spread of the virus before Omicron or making sure vaccinated people who go to the hospital for non-covid reasons can get treatment. The numbers about the pre-Omicron cases, or the hospitalization and critical condition cases before and after Omicron, were irrefutable. Unvaccinated people passed in my opinion a critical line that allows the use of indirect enforcement to make sure as many people as possible are vaccinated, and I have absolutely no problem "pissing them off", as Macron put it.
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