By Zohar Lederman

As I write this, the Jewish Film Festival is playing in Hong Kong After buying tickets, I learned that some people are boycotting the event to protest Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Another friend has suggested that Israeli academics should expect and understand being boycotted for the same reason. In a recent conference I attended in Oslo, in fact, I was practically and quite explicitly boycotted by a Palestinian scholar, and less explicitly by others. In light of the genocide committed by Israel in Gaza and the inability and/or unwillingness of the international community to rein in Israel and force it to uphold international humanitarian and human rights law, these desperate actions and suggestions are understandable. They are not necessarily wrong. My recent paper in the Journal critically examines—and largely supports—another target of boycott.

The paper critically discusses the recent decision by the British Medical Association Board to boycott the Israeli Medical Association. It largely agrees that the IMA should be boycotted, but for specific reasons that are different from the ones offered by the BMA. The main point is that boycotts are sometimes the right thing to do regardless of their (limited) utility, and the main reason to boycott the IMA is its failure to respect the moral foundations of medicine and to lobby the Israeli government to uphold basic human rights and international law. Due to space limitations, the article does not follow this argument to its natural conclusion: that if the IMA ought to be boycotted because it failed to do the right thing, then other national professional medical associations, specifically of countries that have been supporting Israel such as Germany and the United States, should also be boycotted. This article, then, is only the tip of the iceberg of the whole topic of boycotts of national professional medical associations as well as other parties in the context of Israel-Palestine.

The article argues that the IMA fulfils at least two criteria to make it responsible for the conduct of the Israeli government in Gaza. The first is adherence to the moral foundations of medicine: caring for those in need through respect for human dignity, empathy, compassion, justice and evidence- based practice. The second one is power, or the ability and mandate to represent and regulate individual physicians. The IMA is both perceived by the Israeli government and public and perceives itself as fulfilling these criteria. The IMA also explicitly calls on its members to uphold international conventions, such as international law. Since the IMA fulfils these criteria, it has some responsibility for the violation of international humanitarian law and human rights by the Israeli government. Yet, in the past two years it has done too little to hold the Israeli government accountable and to stop the genocide in Gaza (and the apartheid and severe human rights violations in the West Bank and East Jerusalem). As such, the IMA should be boycotted.

This argument has far-reaching implications. In the next couple of months, if the very fragile ceasefire holds despite continuous Israeli attacks, international media would finally be allowed by Israel (or more accurately, be allowed by the US who would then force Israel to allow it) to enter Gaza. Only then could the world truly grasp the extent of the destruction of civic life in Gaza by the hands of Israeli soldiers using German, American, Italian, Canadian, Australian, and British arms.

The respective national professional medical associations which have similarly failed to lobby their governments should also be held accountable. The same goes for national and international bioethics organizations- they may not have the same degree of power as medical organizations, but their commitment to the moral foundations of medicine, and to common morality and human rights more generally, should arguably be higher.

The bioethics community should reflect on the fact that an entire academic discipline that proclaims expertise in applied ethics has done very little to address, let alone stop, the crime of crimes: where are the statements by our professional organizations condemning Israel? Where are the special issues and/or specific conferences discussing at the very least the health-related consequences of violence in Gaza (and the West Bank)? Where is our call to all Palestinians out there, who have been forcefully and unjustly evacuated from their homes and who have been repressed by Israel for 80 years, that we see them, that we stand with them in solidarity, and that their cause is just? What reply can we possibly have for the upcoming Palestinian student who sees no point in joining a profession that fails to live up to its own standards? What could we possibly say to them when they boycott our professional organizations and our profession in its entirety?

Paper title: The Boycott of the Israeli Medical Association by The British Medical Association- A Critical Appraisal

Author: Zohar Lederman

Affiliations: Department of Emergency Medicine, LKS Medical Faculty, Hong Kong University; and the Centre for Medical Ethics and Law, The University of Hong Kong

Competing interests: non relevant.