28 June 2021; MEMO: Under pressure from the pro-Israel lobby, Scientific American magazine has removed an op-ed disclosing Israeli crimes against Palestinians and calling for solidarity with Palestinians.
On 2 June, the US magazine published a piece written by a group of physicians and medical students reporting details of the recent Israeli offensive on Gaza and pledging support for Palestine and the BDS movement.
"Those of us who work in health care understand well that health care does not exist in a vacuum," the physicians and students wrote.
"We increasingly understand how structural forces, systematised and institutionalised oppression, racism, violence, disinvestment, and displacement, as well as policies meant to deny people their basic human rights, lead to adverse health outcomes and mortality," they added.
The article continues: "We cannot continue to sit idly by and witness the violent erasure of an entire people by what is, as documented by international human rights organisations, an apartheid state, exacting untold physical and psychological damage to the Palestinian people."
This op-ed immediately pushed Stanley Robboy and others from Voice4Israel to write a letter to the magazine, accusing the publication of "one-sided political propaganda".
The magazine agreed to remove the article and claimed that the publication was revising its internal review process to prevent "a repetition of this error by the magazine".
