Professor Steinberg is Editor of www.NGO-Monitor.org and Director, Program on Conflict Management and Negotiation, Political Studies, Bar Ilan University. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East spme.org

If there is one area where the benefits of peace between Arabs and Israelis should be obvious, it is in the area of health care. Indeed, many Palestinians, Jordanians, Saudis and others come to Israeli hospitals for treatments that are not available in their countries. Even when the terrorist attacks were at their most violent and other forms of co-operation between Israelis and Palestinians ended, the health links remained. Medical professionals understand that viruses and diseases such as bird flu are impervious to politics.

For this reason, the intrusion of coarse politics and ugly propaganda via Bridges: An Israeli-Palestinian Public Health Magazine is particularly damaging. This publication is undermining precisely the co-operation that its sponsors claim to be promoting.

Bridges is published by the World Health Organization, an international body based in Geneva that works closely with the United Nations and suffers from many of the same maladies, such as promoting anti-Israel propaganda in every possible realm by exploiting universal norms such as human rights.

Most issues of Bridges, now in its second year, mix soft health care pieces with anti-Israel propaganda written by Palestinians, as well as some fringe Israelis who believe that the key to peace is to accept responsibility for terror and incitement. Substantive non-political articles on health issues do not offset the blatantly political and ideological pieces that are carefully placed between the others.

The political articles follow the standard propaganda line: Palestinians are always portrayed as victims, while Israeli checkpoints, occupation, and other measures are blamed for their suffering. There is no mention of PLO corruption, or the history of Arab rejectionism that led to wars and “occupation” and there are few references to the context and cause of the checkpoints: Palestinian terror.

NGOs that exploit human rights and humanitarian claims in order to demonize Israel, such as Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Palestinian Human Rights Committee, are regularly given space to promote their ideology in Bridges. The February-March 2005 edition included an article authored by a French-based anti-Israel NGO known as Médecins du Monde. Headlined “The Separation Barrier to Health Care,” it was a blatantly political piece on “the wall.” The only references to medical issues were in unverified allegations about “the deterioration of the Palestinian health care system due to the ongoing construction of the wall.” The relation between the separation barrier and terror was surgically removed, and readers are asked to support “healthandwall.org.”

The next article was about an Israeli victim of terror, an artificial attempt to provide false political balance in a health care publication. It was followed in turn by a portrait of a Palestinian who had been crippled after having been allegedly shot by an Israeli soldier.

Medical professionals on both sides live this conflict daily, and superficial political articles are counterproductive. Indeed, a surprisingly honest evaluation published in the December 2005/January 2006 edition reported that readers view the publication as “too politically biased or not well balanced” and ineffective in promoting co-operative projects. Predictably, the evaluation noted that “Palestinian authors openly talked about the conflict and the occupation, whereas Israelis did not.” It said that in the first six issues, of the articles in the magazine’s “Happening in Health” section, “nine addressed the occupation. Yet no news item mentioned terrorism.”

But the editors ignored this evaluation in the next issue (February-March 2006), where, between professional articles on challenges in nursing, the politics and propaganda increased. Moving further away from health, the editors devoted central pages to Hanan Ashrawi – a member of the PLO leadership and keynote speaker at the infamous 2001 World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa – as well as to MK Tamar Gozansky of the Israeli Communist fringe. Ashwari repeated the cliches of Palestinian victimization and Israeli occupation, while Gozansky accused Israel of “the dehumanization of Palestinians.” For medical professionals seeking to go beyond the conflict, these articles mark a dead end.

Since the editors seem committed to this destructive path, if this publication is to continue, its editorial board must be revamped and the political content dropped. Otherwise, funders should pull the plug to prevent greater damage in the name of peace, and put their money into expanding the co-operation in the daily contacts between Israelis and Arabs in hospitals and clinics, and via exchanges of public health information.