How the Lancet abuses medicine for political ends.

Totalitarian regimes have a long tradition of coercing doctors and medical institutions to politicize medical practice and ethics. Physicians has participated in locking up dissidents in mental hospitals and covered up, or been forced to cover up degrading or inhumane treatment of prisoners of war and prison inmates. This time it is not an oppressive regime but the UK medical journal The Lancet that tries to mobilize doctors and medical institutions for unethical political ends.
On July 23rd a group of pro-Palestinian activists with ties to the extreme groups are given space for a full-blown verbal assault on Israel’s military efforts to stop the rocket barrage from Gaza (1).

According to the authors the present conflict is a construct of Israel’s “perverse propaganda” to get a pretext for a massacre and a ruthless assault ” of unlimited dimensions.” The aim is to “target civilians” in Gaza under the guise of punishing terrorists.
The tone and the verbiage of article have striking similarities with hate documents on extremist Internet sites that commonly describe the Gaza conflict as emanating from “the Zionist thirst for Palestinian blood.”
This is no coincidence as several of the authors are affiliated with organizations that spread this type of messages. The Norwegian physician Mads Gilbert is not only a frequent guest of the Hamas regime, but also active in NORWAC a Norwegian NGO that has funneled large financial contributions to the terrorist group Hezbollah. The psychiatrist Derek Summerfield has according to British doctors organized ethniccleansing boycotts aimed at Israeli physicians and accused Jewish doctors in the UK to be “accomplices to Israel’s crimes.”

Epidemiologist Ian Chalmers has for years collaborated with the Palestinian groups that advocate destruction of Israel as Jewish state. Ian Chalmers other collaborations came unexpectedly to light through Wikileaks. Chalmers traveled to Syria in 2011 in the midst of a conflict that killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians to be a keynote speaker at a regime orchestrated Palestinian Conference in Damascus.
We consider the Lancet’s decision to publish this article unethical as it tries to whitewash a regime, which cynically exploits the hardship of civilians for political ends.
Civilians in Gaza have for years suffered from a shortage of all supplies. At the same time the ruling Hamas regime has been able to use unlimited financial resources on arms and advanced military installations like an immense underground tunnel system. The civilians of Gaza has no say whether thousands of missiles should be fired at Israeli cities from their homes schools or neighborhoods, but they ultimately have to pay the price in terms of human life, health and property damage when Israel strikes back at Hamas military infrastructure.
The first Geneva Convention was signed in 1864, one year after the foundation of the International Red Cross. The purpose was to enable medical staff of all countries to collaborate for the benefit of all sick or wounded in battle, friend or foe. Regrettably Lancet is trying to turn back the clock. Instead of creating a venue where medical personnel of Israel and Gaza could start collaboration in spite of all political tensions, it incites hatred and distrust by one-sided reporting and distortion of basic facts.

We call on all medical workers and researchers irrespective of their stands on the Israeli – Gaza conflict to renounce medical journalism that spurs hatred, division, and racism and ultimately erects political stumble blocks to international collaboration. Please support groups and journals working in the spirit of Geneva Convention. Please spread this appeal through your networks.

References
1. Manduca P, Chalmers I, Summerfield D, Gilbert M , Ang S. An open letter for the people in Gaza. Lancet 2014; 384 397-398

Joseph Milerad, pediatrician, medical editor, and member of the friends’ society of the Israeli Red Cross Branch Magen David Adom.