It is a veritable “I accuse” that the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has published in an article which recounts the complicity of the World Medical Association (WMA) and two United Nations special rapporteurs on torture, with torture practiced by Israel on the Palestinians. Torture endorsed by Israeli doctors, as the Israeli Committee against Torture has repeatedly denounced, without succeeding in getting things moving.
Read more: WORLD MEDICAL ASSOCIATION ACCUSED OF COMPLICITY IN TORTURE IN ISRAELThis article reports that an appeal was made in 2009 by 725 doctors from 43 countries regarding medical complicity in torture in Israel, which was supported by a large and ever-growing evidence base from international and regional organizations. well-known human rights defenders, listed below. But over the years and during the terms of four presidencies of the World Medical Association (WMA) and two United Nations special rapporteurs on torture, Holocaust denial and impunity have reigned supreme.
“Our findings in the case of Israel suggest that impunity largely operates and that national medical associations or other regulatory bodies operate as shields protecting the State of Israel,” the article concludes.
“A relevant precedent for WMA concerned the Medical Association of South Africa (MASA), a member association, which took no action against police surgeons who stood idly by when the anti- apartheid Steve Biko was tortured and murdered in prison in 1977, recalls the BMJ.
Under threat of imminent expulsion, MASA had withdrawn from the World Medical Association, later conceding that this threat of expulsion had been a force for change in medical ethics in South Africa.
Israel is a signatory to the international treaty against torture, but evidence of the systematic use of torture on Palestinian detainees has long accumulated in the public domain. In May 1998, a Human Rights Watch report stated that Israel “continues to use torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment during interrogations of Palestinian detainees”. The scale of these violations by Israel is well known, having been widely documented by UN bodies and international, Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations.
In November 1999, the Israel Medical Association (IMA) ethics officer, Eran Dolev, was interviewed by a delegation from the London-based Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. During the interview, he said that “a few broken fingers” while interrogating Palestinians was a price to pay for information. In 2007, the Israeli Committee Against Torture published “Ticking Bombs,” the detailed testimony of nine Palestinian men tortured between 2004 and 2006, painting a graphic picture of how Israeli doctors were integral to the functioning interrogation units whose output included torture. They alleged that doctors, several of whom were named, saw the prisoners at various times before, between or after torture experiences (which in one case resulted in spinal damage and disability), did not take appropriate action, made no protests about these cases, as required by the Tokyo Declaration, and generally prescribed simple analgesia before returning them to their interrogators.
The British Medical Association (BMA) is a member of the World Medical Association (WMA) and I brought the matter to the attention of the BMA as early as 1997. I asked them to raise the matter with the WMA, as they had the right. I sent the same document to then-WMA Secretary General Delon Human in 2001, who defended the Israel Medical Association largely on the grounds that it had ratified the Tokyo Declaration.
In 2005, Edwin Borman, president of the WMA International Committee, wrote to me to say that they were “seeking to engage constructively with our Israeli colleagues” and that they would not be “partisan.”
In preparing a formal international appeal to WMA, we were aware that campaigning on human rights issues in Israel-Palestine is qualitatively different from human rights work elsewhere. Publications deemed critical of Israel often refer to vitriolic and ad hominem attacks on an author and a medical journal, without relying on the cited evidence. There have even been calls for journal editors to be disciplined or fired, in response to one of my articles in the BMJ.
We had the public support of Professors Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein in the United States, and Dr Wendy Orr in South Africa. Orr had worked as a doctor for the Port Elizabeth District Surgeon in the 1980s and spoke out against the torture and complicity of state doctors in the cases she had seen – her ethical duty under the Tokyo Declaration .
Our appeal was covered by the BMJ and various newspapers. But the Jewish Chronicle wrote that the call was a “joke”, adding: “You will see that many of the names are Arabic”. The IMA has launched a campaign to collect 10,000 signatures to counter these “slanderous accusations”. In an unprecedented move last July, the IMA officially announced that it was severing all contact with the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights Association (PHRI) because its founder, Israeli psychiatrist Ruchama Marton, was the one of 725 signatories, and because PHRI’s publications “comforted the enemies of Israel”.
*See also : Nazi Medical Experiments | Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org)
Doctors complicit in torture at CIA, military prisons: study (medicalxpress.com)
