In October, delegates to the World Medical Association (WMA) Congress will gather in Rotterdam to consider a petition that, if approved, would establish a dangerous precedent for violating medical ethics.
The petition, published by The Lancet and backed by several health advocacy groups, seeks to punish the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) over its “failure to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians.” The petition’s supporters argue that medical professionals have a moral obligation to condemn violations of international law and attacks on healthcare workers.
In the first instance, expelling Israel’s doctors from one of the world’s most important professional medical bodies would only create new injustices in a thinly veiled attempt to rectify others.
Founded in the aftermath of World War II, the WMA came into being precisely because medicine should transcend politics at all costs. The organization’s intent is to ensure physicians uphold universal ethical principles for all patients, regardless of nationality, religion, or political circumstance.
Any decision to suspend the IMA would move the organization in the opposite direction. It would establish a precedent that national medical associations can be expelled not for violating medical ethics themselves, but for perceived failures to oppose the policies of their governments. Once that line is crossed, the WMA risks contaminating medicine with the politics it must avoid.
IMA complicit through silence?
Furthermore, the portrayal of the IMA as complicit through silence in what was described as atrocities committed by Israeli forces in Gaza is both inaccurate and shortsighted. This perfectly illustrates the line between criticism of Israeli government policy and the demand, made by some health organizations, for Israelis to join the choir of blood libels against their nation as part of an ethical “litmus test.”
Notably, in July last year, IMA chairman Prof. Zion Hagay penned an open letter warning Defense Minister Israel Katz of the risk of widespread famine in Gaza and including a public call to “ensure medical equipment and basic humanitarian conditions” for the Gaza Strip’s civilian population.
There is also an unavoidable question of consistency.
Critics of Israel are entitled to their views, but many have noted that no comparable campaign has been mounted against medical associations representing countries whose governments have imprisoned physicians, denied healthcare to political dissidents, or committed grave human rights abuses.
The National Medical Chamber of Russia is still a member despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal war in Ukraine, and the Medical Council of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a member despite the regime’s routine killing of protesters.
Suspending the IMA would not punish the Israeli political echelon whose actions are being protested by the health groups behind the petition.
Even the WMA itself has rightly warned against such an approach, as reported by The Jerusalem Post’s Mathilda Heller.
The WMA said in a published response that it stands against the exclusion of any of its members for the actions of their governments, as “doing so diminishes our ability to call out injustices, and threatens shrinking the dialogue among physicians at this critical time when consensus in support of our medical ethics is so needed,” while also pointing out that the IMA is one of the founding members of the WMA and a “strong advocate for WMA ethics and policies.”
Israel - a world leader of medical innovation
In addition to being a founding member, Israel is also one of the world’s leading centers of medical innovation, and Israeli researchers and physicians have helped develop technologies that are used daily in hospitals across the globe. The beneficiaries of those innovations are not only in Israel – they are in Europe, North America, Africa, Asia, and across the Middle East.
Would physicians in support of the petition refuse treatment based on an Israeli-developed diagnostic tool? Would they reject an Israeli medical breakthrough if it could save a patient’s life?
Of course not – because medicine’s value lies in its universality.
Medical organizations should remain places where doctors cooperate across borders, share research, establish ethical standards, and improve patient care. They should not become instruments of political boycotts.
Therefore, the World Medical Association Congress must resist the temptation to turn medicine into a political front and reaffirm a principle that has guided medicine for generations: Doctors save all of humanity.