A physician’s first responsibility is to the patient in front of them.
That simple principle has guided medicine across wars, revolutions and political divides for generations. It is why physicians treat enemies as well as allies, prisoners as well as soldiers, strangers as well as neighbors. Medicine begins with the conviction that every human life possesses equal dignity.
That is why the campaign to expel the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) from the World Medical Association (WMA) should concern every physician, regardless of politics.
Presented as a defense of human rights and medical ethics, the campaign is, in fact, another manifestation of the global anti-Zionist hate movement. It corrupts medical ethics in the guise of upholding them, seeking to transform professional organizations into bigoted instruments of exclusion, with disfavored national groups barred from entry.
This campaign asks physicians to accept a dangerous principle: that doctors should be judged not by how they care for patients, but by how vocally they reinforce moral condemnations of their own government.
The Israeli Medical Association is not the Israeli government. It is the professional association of approximately 30,000 physicians—Jewish, Arab, Druze, secular, religious, conservative and progressive—whose common purpose is caring for patients. Yet the petition asks the World Medical Association to punish these doctors simply for being Israeli.
That is collective punishment. Medicine should reject it.
Anti-Zionism is often presented as criticism of Israel. But genuine criticism addresses specific policies and remains open to evidence, debate and reform. Anti-Zionism is something different. It constructs Israelis and “Zionists” as uniquely colonial, racist, apartheid and genocidal, then disguises discrimination, professional boycotts and institutional exclusion as ethical imperatives.
The campaign against the Israeli Medical Association follows that pattern precisely.
The petition also demands something extraordinary—that a national medical association continually denounce its own government to remain part of the international medical community.
Why should physicians be expected to make political declarations at all? We are not military strategists. We are not diplomats. We are not international tribunals. We are physicians. Our responsibility is to the patient in front of us.
If physicians must demonstrate ideological purity before they are accepted as professional colleagues, medicine ceases to be universal. It serves an ideology and patients will inevitably fear being seen through that lens rather than as individuals in need of medical assistance, regardless of any aspect of their identity or opinions.
History should make us cautious.
This is not the first time that anti-Zionism has specifically targeted Jewish physicians. Soviet anti-Zionist campaigns culminated in the infamous Doctors’ Plot, which falsely portrayed predominantly Jewish doctors as enemies of the state before turning them into targets of persecution.
More broadly, history reminds us how easily medicine can be corrupted once physicians begin dividing humanity into the deserving and the undeserving. Whether directed against Jews in Europe or black Americans in the Tuskegee Study, the abandonment of medical ethics began with dehumanization.
The first duty of medicine is not ideology. It is patients.
Jewish and Israeli patients may reasonably wonder whether prejudice has entered institutions that are meant to treat all people equally. Physicians may begin questioning whether scientific collaboration depends upon politics rather than professionalism. Most importantly, the public begins to lose confidence that medicine is guided by universal ethics and that medical offices are safe spaces.
The World Medical Association was founded after World War II because physicians understood the catastrophic consequences of allowing medicine to become an instrument of ideology. The Israeli Medical Association was one of its founding members. That history should matter.
An organization created to prevent political exclusion is now being asked to expel one of its founders through collective punishment.
The issue is whether medicine will remain faithful to its universal principles or allow the anti-Zionist movement to redefine professional ethics around exclusion and political conformity.
Physicians are not called to morally police the world. We are called to care for human beings.
Our patients do not want to hear political opinions from their doctors. They simply ask whether we will care for them with skill, compassion, dignity and fairness. We owe our colleagues the same commitment.
Medicine advances through collaboration, scientific exchange and our shared devotion to patients—not through ideological purges.
If we forget that, we will have forgotten who we are.
