Concerns have been raised about antisemitism at the British Medical Association’s annual conference, after a Jewish doctor was heckled just hours after religious leaders warned the meeting, which took place on June 24, could become a “vehicle for Jew hatred,” The Telegraph reported on Monday.
Dr. Joanna Sutton-Klein, a Jewish A&E consultant, was heckled by at least two doctors who shouted “shame” at her after she said she was Jewish.
The BMA denounced the incident, calling it “unacceptable” and gave Dr. Sutton-Klein 15 seconds of extra speaking time as a result of the interruption, according to the Telegraph.
Motions against Israel
Union factions of the BMA have been calling for action against Israel, causing fear among the Jewish medical community, said The Telegraph.
According to the Telegraph, 30 motions (about 10% of total submissions) were related to the Israel-Palestine conflict and needed to be removed from proposed debates. Motions are policy proposals voted on by doctors at the conference, which become adopted if passed. For legal reasons, the motions were dismissed due to the risk of them being seen as “discriminatory, more specifically, antisemitic.”
There were 75 mentions of the words “Israel” or “Israeli” in motions put forward to be debated at the meeting, said The Telegraph.
Dr. Sutton-Klein reportedly opposed the decision to block debates on the conflict, saying arguments are essential. She cited the Jewish value of – Machloket l’Shem Shamayim – to argue that disagreements are valuable for the sake of a bigger cause.
The heckling incident came during her conference speech in which she disagreed with the dismissal of the motions: “one of the justifications for the silencing of these motions was that they might be perceived as antisemitic so I want to stand up here today as a practising Jew to say there is nothing Jewish about the attempt to remove motions that you disagree with."
Notions and calls for boycott
The union’s London regional council also reportedly put forward four identical calls to the BMA for boycott of Israeli medical journals, conferences, and academic exchanges, on the claim that Israel has violated human rights and is committing “genocide.”
There were also requests for the BMA to lobby the government to stop supplying weapons to Israel due to claims that Israel commits systematic apartheid. One request for lobbying came from the Cardiff and Vale of Glamorgan regional committee.
In the meeting, the doctors voted in favor of a motion that protects doctors from repercussions should they be involved in activism. Any doctor who is involved in activism will now not risk losing their license.
“No doctor or medical student should ever be afraid to stand up for what they believe in,’ the BMA said.
Medical student Bethan Stanley, who voted in favor, said the motion would allow her to continue to protest over the war in Gaza, according to the BMA statement.
“For me, and many of my colleagues, it’s because of our medical backgrounds that we feel so strongly that we have a duty to stand up and speak up against the ongoing atrocities in Palestine,” she told the BMA’s representative body.
“It’s because we care about protecting and saving human life that we cannot stay silent. Yet for so many medics, particularly those from ethnic minority and Muslim backgrounds, they have been or are being threatened with repercussions to their medical career for doing so.”
Responses
The chairman of the Jewish Medical Association (JMA), Prof David R Katz, had previously stated that he felt Jewish doctors at the conference would “encounter a mix of overt antisemitism, bullying, harassment and flag-waving activism”, The Telegraph reported.
Katz also wrote that: “JMA members – including the small number still engaged actively within the BMA itself – are deeply concerned that the meeting environment could become itself a vehicle for discrimination and Jew hatred.”
BMA spokesperson said: “The BMA takes extremely seriously behaviour which is discriminatory, racist or offensive in any way.”
“In this instance, one or two members chose to disrupt the speech by a Jewish doctor who was speaking out in defense of the Palestinian community in Gaza.”
They continued by saying that the action was called out straight away, and was being investigated.
“We have not been contacted directly by the Jewish Medical Association with regard to the specific points made in their letter, but nonetheless we are deeply sorry to learn of the contents and we will be making contact with them to discuss this further.”
Community Security Trust, an organization that fights antisemitism in the UK, said the “rise of anti-Jewish hate incidents in the medical profession has been particularly disturbing” since the October 7 Hamas massacre.
Reported incidents
The sphere of medicine in England has been faced with multiple accusations of antisemitism in recent months.
According to a BBC freedom of information request from the GMC, a body which regulates UK doctors, there were eight complaints of antisemitism by doctors between January and October 2023.
However, this rose to 60 complaints of antisemitic conduct against medical professionals in the four months after the Hamas attacks.
In March 2024, an investigation by the Jewish Chronicle found that a British-Palestinian doctor, Dr. Hassan Abu Sittah, who had just been elected as rector of the University of Glasgow, had praised terrorists, prompting fears for the safety of Jewish students.
The JC investigation found that the doctor had praised a terrorist in a newspaper article, sat beside terrorist hijacker Leila Khaled at a memorial and delivered a tearful eulogy to the founder of the PFLP, a group that was involved in the October 7 massacre.
The article penned by Dr. Abu Sittah for Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar in 2018, featured a eulogy of Ahmad Jarrar, who planned the murder of father-of-six Rabbi Raziel Shevach in a shooting near Nablus.
In the piece, Abu Sittah called Jarrar a “hero” and spoke of “The martyrdom of the resistance member Ahmed Nasr Jarrar, the hero of the Nablus operation, at the hands of the Zionist occupation army.”
In a separate incident, a letter sent by the BMA chair of council to the government in January 2024 led to Jewish doctors canceling their membership to the association.
The letter accused Israel of disregarding “international humanitarian law,” but made no mention of hostages.
A Jewish consultant psychiatrist in London cancelled her BMA membership as a result of the letter. A Jewish News article quoted her as saying: “I feel totally devastated and unsafe as a Jewish doctor working in the NHS. The BMA’s statement dated 12/1/24 is entirely unilateral and biased against Israel, and I am disgusted that they couldn’t bring themselves to mention anything about the 7th October Hamas massacre, torture and kidnapping of Israelis, Hamas’s use of Gaza hospitals as military bases, and their continued rocket fire and attacks against Israeli civilians.”
In another Jewish News piece on October 16, 2023, a London doctor, whose relative was a victim of the Hamas October 7 attacks, was reportedly called a “baby killer” by another doctor in his hospital.
In March, a report by the telegraph said a doctor had been suspended after saying London would be better ‘Jew free’. Dr. Dimitrios Psaroudakis was investigated by the Health Secretary, Victoria Atkins, who was asked to take “a tougher stance on extremism.”
Complaints were made to the GMC about the President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, Dr. Camilla Kingdon, who equated Israel to Hamas in a blog post ten days after October 7.
“One act of barbarity cannot and must not justify a wider descent into barbarism,” she wrote.
According to the GMC, 1,903 doctors identified as Jewish in 2023, amounting to 1% of total doctors in the UK.
There are 53,359 doctors in the UK who identify as Muslim, amounting to 17%.