I and others submitted the following letter, as an ethically necessary corrective.
“In casting the Israeli military as essentially blameless, Hagay and Borow seek to use the international stature of The Lancet to distort the public record of the Gaza crisis. They dismiss en bloc the International Court of Justice regarding a finding of genocide, the International Criminal Court, United Nations, WHO and major humanitarian agencies.”
The letter continued:
“Pitiless slaughter of helpless, trapped civilians en masse, Geneva Convention violations like recurrent bombings of hospitals and murder of health care staff, Israeli doctors collaborating with interrogators in torture suites, whose victims include abducted doctors, the destruction of all Gazan universities including Gaza’s medical schools, a manufactured famine, and a Gazan landscape rendered uninhabitable.”
In justifying all this, we concluded, “and as chairman and head of the legal department respectively of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA), Hagay and Borow demonstrate the ethical gulf between the IMA and the rest of the international medical community, and why its ongoing membership of bodies like the World Medical Association is untenable.”
Having been “carefully read and discussed,” The Lancet declined publication.
[…]
The Lancet appears willing to publish much of what is submitted by Israeli doctors, including their public support for bombing hospitals, but will not publish evidence-based corrective letters from other doctors and academics.
For defenders of Israel this has been a successful campaign, a famous medical journal and editor brought to heel. As Rosenstock et al put it: “Horton now better understands the realities on the ground.”
This political distortion is not confined to the UK, moreover, but is also evident in the reporting on Gaza by similarly eminent U.S. journals, notably The New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
A key theme in all this is that no critics, including doctors and academics, ever sought to engage with the evidence base cited in the articles they found so offensive. No academic chose to interrogate, say, a report from Human Rights Watch, or Amnesty International or Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.
The attacks were crudely ad hominem, with “anti-Semitism” generally depicted as the basic motivation of the authors.
The “taming” of the The Lancet shows how even in the age of evidence-based medicine, doctors and academics can still ignore evidence placed in the public domain by reputable organizations and go on to attack those who publish it.
Political affinity or social identity trumps medical ethics, posing basic questions about the academic freedom of medical journals to publish on Israel-Palestine.