Collective Punishment

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Professor of Medicine
 Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA 19107 USA

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/eletters/335/7611/124#172783

Academic boycotts are antithetical to the free exchange of ideas, fundamental to such institutions. A boycott of Israeli institutions has been proposed. One justification of the boycott’s backers is alleged Israeli “collective punishment” of Palestinians(1), as reflected in defensive measures to prevent attacks on their citizens-attacks which have taken over a thousand lives. Those measures, at least, have military justification and have saved lives on both sides. The proposed boycott, “collective punishment” of Israel’s academic institutions, is retribution for its own sake with no practical value but to inflict pain.

Israel’s academic and medical communities have tried to deliver education and healthcare to Palestinians, but they have been stymied by the Palestinians themselves. Checkpoints and barriers are a response to attacks on Israeli cities and towns and were largely absent prior to 2000 and Yasir Arafat’s intifada. Palestinians have abused traditional medical neutrality, impairing Israeli efforts to deliver care, using ambulances, patients, and “pregnant women” to deliver the means of destruction(2).

Tens of millions of refugees from around the world during the last century were resettled. Only the descendants of Arabs who left Israel were placed in permanent refugee status. At the urging of their Arab brethren, the United Nations created a unique bureaucracy, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), for that purpose. Among the 21 members of the Arab League, all but Jordan denied citizenship and homes to those displaced.

There has been considerable tragedy on both sides of this nearly sixty-year-old conflict. Beginning with rejection of partition in 1948; through 19 years of Jordanian and Egyptian occupation of Gaza and the West Bank; the 1967 Khartoum conference where assembled Arab leaders pledged “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it”(3); the 2000 negotiations at Camp David, when Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat responded to yet another Israeli offer of self-determination and statehood with the second intifada; to the 2006 Palestinian election of Hamas, unalterably and unabashedly opposed to Israel’s existence(4), Palestinians and their leaders in the Arab world have repeatedly refused a peaceful resolution and statehood because it required not just acknowledgement but acceptance of Israel’s existence.

Despite their responsibility for the Palestinians’ suffering, I am opposed to a boycott of Arab League or United Nations members as morally wrong collective punishment and counterproductive to the cause of peace.

1 Hickey T. Should we consider a boycott of Israeli academic institutions? Yes. BMJ 2007;335:124 (24 July).

2 Cohn JR, Romirowsky A, Marcus JM. Abuse of health-care workers’ neutral status. Lancet. 363:1473, May 1, 2004.

3 Khartoum resolutions. http://www.mideastweb.org/khartoum.htm , accessed 22 July, 2007.

4 The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hamas_Covenant , accessed 22 July, 2007.

Collective Punishment

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AUTHOR

John R. Cohn

John R. Cohn, Thomas Jefferson University, SPME Board of Directors

John R. Cohn, M.D., is a physician at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital (TJUH), in Philadelphia, PA, where he is the chief of the adult allergy and immunology section and Professor of Medicine. He is the immediate past president of the medical staff at TJUH.

In his Israel advocacy work he is a prolific letter writer whose letters and columns have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Jerusalem Post, the Philadelphia Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Haaretz, the Jewish Exponent, Lancet (an international medical journal based in the UK), and others. He was CAMERA’s “Letter Writer of the year” in 2003. He maintains a large email distribution of the original essays which he authors on various Israel-related topics.

He has spoken for numerous Jewish organizations, including Hadassah, the Philadelphia Jewish Federation and to a student group at Oxford University (UK). He and his wife were honored by Israel Bonds.

He wrote the monograph: “Advocating for Israel: A Resource Guide” for the 2010 CAMERA conference. It is valuable resource for all interested in maximizing their effectiveness in correcting the endless errors of fact and omission in our mainstream media. One piece of very valuable advice that he offers to other letter writers is: “Journalists and media are not our enemies, even those we don't agree with". Particularly for those of us in the academic community he urges a respectful and educational approach to journalists who have taken a wayward course.

In addition to the SPME board, Dr. Cohn is a member of a variety of professional and Jewish organizations, including serving on the boards of Hillel of Greater Philadelphia, the CAMERA regional advisory board, and Allergists for Israel (American allergists helping the Israeli allergist community). In the past he served on the board of the Philadelphia ADL. He participated in the 2010 CAMERA conference (“War by Other Means,” Boston University) where he led a panel with students on “Getting the Message Out,” and a break-out session called “Getting Published in the Mainstream Media.”

He is married, has three children and one grandchild. He belongs to two synagogues--he says with a chuckle, "So I always have one not to go to". He has been to Israel many times, including as a visiting professor at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. His first trip was at age 10, when Jerusalem was still a divided city; and he remembers vividly standing before the Mandelbaum Gate, wondering why he could not go through it to the Old City on the other side.

He adroitly balances his wide-ranging volunteer activities on behalf of Israel with his broad and complex medical and teaching practice (including authoring numerous professional publications) while successfully maintaining good relations with a broad spectrum of Jewish community leaders and organizations -- no small feat.

Regarding his involvement with SPME, Dr. Cohn acknowledged first and foremost SPME’s Immediate Past President, Professor Ed Beck. Dr. Cohn has long perceived that under Professor Beck’s guidance, SPME has been doing an essential job on college campuses; so he was honored when Professor Beck invited him to join the board.

He finds it easy to support and be active in SPME because being a Jewish American and a supporter of Israel presents no conflict due to the congruence of both countries’ interests, policies and priorities. It is clear that Israel’s cause is not a parochial issue. It is a just cause and its advocacy is advocacy for justice.

For Dr. Cohn, the need for SPME is clear. The resources of those who speak out on behalf of Israel are dwarfed by the funding sources available to those who seek to denigrate Israel. Israel's supporters don’t have large oil fields to underwrite their work. And the campus is a critical arena for work today on behalf of Israel, because this generation’s students are next generation’s leaders.

For advancing SPME’s work in the future, he would like to see the continued development of academically sound analyses to counter the prevailing anti-Israel ideology of all too much academic research and teaching on campuses and in professional fields today. He points to Lancet’s creation of a “Lancet Palestinian Health Alliance,” which asserts that Israel is to blame for poor health care for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The documented reality, however, is that life expectancy, infant mortality and other measures of health are better for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza than in many of the countries so critical of Israel This is in large part thanks to Israel.

Dr. Cohn asserts that we need more research, analysis and publications to counteract such misleading allegations.


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