Dr Paul Keleman

The campaign against medical complicity with Israel’s torture of Palestinians is ‘the best thing I have done in my career’, a senior academic psychiatrist told his audience in Sheffield at a meeting organised by Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Dr.Derek Summerfield has led a campaign to hold to account the medical professions’ cynical disregard of its most sacred ethic, ‘First do no harm’. He has helped to expose that members of the Israeli medical profession have been participating for decades in assisting and covering up the torture of Palestinian prisoners and, still worse, that the organisations which are meant to oversee that the medical profession upholds its professed ethical conduct and international humanitarian law, have turned a blind eye.

In 2016, 71 UK-based doctors made a fresh appeal to the UN’s World Medical Association (WMA) to act. This time, The submission pointed to the 2011 Physicians for Human Rights-Israel report, Doctoring the Evidence, Abandoning the Victim: the Involvement  of the Medical Professionals in Torture and Ill treatment in Israel.  The report detailed the work of Israeli doctors in security units where torture of detainees was routine.

The WMA did not respond.  The British Medical Association’s leadership has responded by exonerating the Israeli Medical Association for failure to act over its members participation in torture. ‘Unfortunately,’ Derek notes,  ‘as the case with Israel illustrates, the WMA seems unwilling to act against those with powerful friends like the US. It is far less hesitant in raising concerns with other less powerful countries like Iran or Bahrain, to name but two.’

See Derek Summerfield’s article on the battle against the medical establishment’s collusion in the torture of Palestinian prisoners: