In an opinion piece for Local Call I criticize calls by Israeli Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked to “accept” a modicum of death and severe infection during the pandemic. I point to the cruel politics behind the apparent banality that “there is a global pandemic, and in pandemics people die” – urging the public to accept a politics of pandemic management that makes no pretension of trying to end the pandemic. The fact that the dead and severely ill disproportionately come from marginalized groups makes it easy for far-right neoliberal Shaked and those on the center-left who lauded her “frankness” to “accept” these horrors.