I was born in London during the blitz and enjoyed a happy childhood growing up in an orthodox Jewish household. I had a very successful academic career, as did my three brothers, sharing five professorial chairs between us. My youngest brother ended his life as President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. Although much more secular in outlook now, we always clearly identified ourselves as Jews and defenders of the Jewish State. Furthermore we all spent time working in Israel and I even started my surgical training in the central hospital of the Jezreal Valley, Afula. None of us experienced anti-Semitism and our Jewishness was treated as a charming eccentricity or even as an enviable cultural chic, by our tolerant non Jewish friends and colleagues. It was always my assumption that, at last, the Jews in the UK could unpack their emergency suit cases and settle down without paranoia, to a new golden age that could match that of Jews in the USA. Now I realize how foolish and naïve I was. I never anticipated the influx of 2,000,000 Islamic immigrants and their hate mongering mullahs that swamped our meagre 250,000 Jewish community, tipping the demography of some electoral constituencies in a way, that the more unscrupulous members of the left wing political parties couldn’t resist. On the basis of the principle of my enemies, enemies are my friends, and the hatred by our left wing politicians for the USA; we now have an unholy alliance of fundamental Islamic groups and unreconstructed Marxists, marching through our streets bearing banners of hatred for Israel and the Jews, in the name of support for the Palestinians. I no longer feel safe and I worry about the future for my grandchildren in the UK which has been our family’s home for more than 100 years. The boycott of Israel supported by the Journalist Union and the call for a boycott by the Union of University teachers, although mostly posturing by politically correct lefty liberals, looks to me as the first sign of an outbreak of neo-anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Israel rhetoric.
So what’s to be done? Finding comfort a dinner parties with our Jewish friends or joining an entirely Jewish audience to listen to visiting Israeli academics, doesn’t help. Writing letters to the papers or journals may provide a degree of catharsis, but for every one of our letters published in the BMJ or Lancet after every attack on Israeli Institutions in the journals, there will be two in response by people with Arabic names. Although most of the serious broadsheets are reasonable in their attempts at balance, the “Independent” is so virulently anti-Israel that some of its front pages and cartoons would have looked at home in De Stürmer and amount to nothing less than blood libel. Once the anti-Semites hold the streets and can boast a broadsheet that provides succour then maybe it’s time to take to the boats. Britain has a long history of tolerance and the freedom of expression that is wickedly exploited by the ideologues whose long term aim is to impose on our society a new creed where freedom of expression is a capital offence.
Fortunately our government and loyal opposition are holding their ground by condemning the boycott calls but I believe that every academic, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, has a responsibility to challenge these attacks on academic freedom. From my point of view the best way to mount a challenge is to pre-empt the boycott by actively promoting the alternative, in establishing links with our Israeli colleagues.
In April 2006 I chaired an Anglo-Israeli workshop in Tel Aviv to look at the problems of genetic predisposition to breast cancer for women carrying the BRCA1/2 “Ashkenazi” mutations. [1] This lead to a collaborative clinical trial for the treatment of such breast cancers, using British bioscience to develop the interventions and Israeli epidemiology and genetic testing, to identify the cases. An amusing episode that illustrates the propaganda value of these exercises occurred on the first evening of our visit before work began. I took my British (mostly non Jewish) colleagues to my favourite fish restaurant on the sea front just North of Jaffa. Walking back on a balmy evening we encountered many Israeli Arab families enjoying barbecue picnics and smoking their traditional hookahs. My friends were alarmed at first at encountering “Palestinians” first hand and then incredulous on learning that 20% of the Israeli population were Arabs.
My second initiative was to set up Anglo Israeli collaboration in a study of intra-operative radiotherapy at the time of surgery for breast cancer in Haifa. In January of this year I took them through the first three cases of this new technique that in the fullness of time should allow breast conserving surgery for our Arab neighbours without the need to travel to a radiotherapy centre hundreds of miles from their homes. [2]
Finally, like the King of Denmark, who pre-empted the Nazi decree for all Jews to wear the yellow star, I would urge all my academic friends, both Jewish and non Jewish, to affiliate themselves officially to an Israeli University.
I am in the process of becoming a visiting professor of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. I’m not so proud as to believe that asking to be boycotted will have any effect on its own but if we all claim to be Israeli academics then a boycott of Israel would lead to the collapse of research activity world wide.
[1] Report on the Anglo-Israeli workshop on the genetic risk of breast cancer, Tel Aviv, 22-26 April 2006, Michael Baum, IMAJ 2007;9:1-3
[2] Vaidya JS, Baum M, Tobias JS, Massarut S, Wenz F, Murphy O, Hilaris B, Houghton J, Saunders C, Corica T, Roncadin M, Kraus-Tiefenbacher U, Melchaert F, Keshtgar M, Sainsbury R, Douek M, Harrison E, Thompson A, Joseph D. Targeted intraoperative radiotherapy (TARGIT) yields very low recurrence rates when given as a boost.
Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys. 2006 Dec 1;66(5):1335-8. Epub 2006 Nov 2.
Dr. Baum is Emeritus Professor of Surgery.
