The World’s Top Medical Journal Is Giving Cover to Genocide by Mary Turfah and Eric Reinhart

The piece—written by Yasmeen Abu Fraiha, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Israelis Noam Alon and Avner Halperin, and Abdalrahman Ahmed, a Palestinian from Gaza—rejects any rigorous accounting of Israel’s crimes against Gaza’s medical infrastructure in favor of gauzy platitudes about how healthcare can be an avenue for “building trust” between two warring populations. “The four of us, Palestinians and Israelis, firmly believe in the need to foster hope and build trust,” the authors write. “While watching hospitals turn into battlefields, we’ve also witnessed firsthand the power of healthcare to overcome animosity and bridge the divides between populations in conflict.” It takes great pains to describe the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and the deaths of its doctors and patients as an unfortunate byproduct of war, as though bombs simply fell from the sky independent of anyone motivated by genocidal intent and without any connection to a long-standing colonial project.

Fraiha, Halperin, and Alon have appointments at Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative, which last year hosted Jared Kushner to discuss “finishing the job” in Gaza so as to clear the way for developing Gaza’s “very valuable, from a real estate perspective…waterfront property.” (Ahmed’s work is based at Brandeis University.) In a conspicuous conflict of interest that is omitted in NEJM’s author disclosure forms, at least one of the authors, Alon, worked for nearly three years in the IDF Special Intelligence Unit, according to her own LinkedIn page. (The length of compulsory military service for Israeli women is two years, meaning that Alon actively chose to serve in the Special Intelligence Unit for the remaining years.)…Also unusual for an author published in the NEJM is the fact that Alon, according to her LinkedIn profile, has no background in medicine, public health, or health policy.