Tensions similar to those of war are erupting on social media, with concrete consequences.
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Here at The Checkup we don’t cover war and politics, but this week is an exception. The increasing human devastation caused by the clash between Israel and Gaza has led to tensions and clashes within the clinical community. Some of the educational biologists whose paintings we see adhere to having seen their careers ruined due to the backlash of their online statements. Reactions to the war also raise questions about freedom of speech and thought, questions that are at the heart of science.
On October 7, Hamas, the organization that controls the Gaza Strip and is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, launched a stunning attack on Israel, killing more than 1,400 people and taking hostages. Israel responded with a campaign of airstrikes in Gaza that temporarily increased the death toll, with thousands dead, according to media reports.
For a country of less than 10 million people, Israel plays an enormous role in the fields of science and medicine. It’s a land of biotech startups, the country where Covid-19 vaccines were first tested on a giant scale, and home to many prominent people. biologists, including Jacob Hanna, a mobile expert whose paintings covered and whose predictions about the direction of cutting-edge science he enjoyed.
Hanna is an Israeli citizen and professor at the state-funded Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. But he is also a Palestinian of Christian descent whose social media profile features a symbol that reads “the occupation” and “Arabs and Jews refuse to be enemies. “
A day after the attack, Hanna posted a public comment: “Barbarism takes many forms. The profession and the siege that has lasted 18 years are too,” he wrote, referring to the confinement of Palestinians in Gaza.
Hanna was immediately subjected to close scrutiny by other scientists, including some at her university. Why didn’t he condemn Hamas in the first place? The researchers debated whether to maintain their funding, and Jonathan Kipnis, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis. John’s, D. C. , said. Louis said Hanna would leave Israel if she didn’t like it.
“Maybe then he deserves to move to Gaza and become the most productive scientist there and his brothers,” Kipnis wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. (Kipnis later told me, “It was one of my stupid tweets, which I delete and apologize for. “)
The responses were “racist and condescending” and he hasn’t changed his mind. (He opposes all violence and calls Hamas a “terrible, violent and terrorist organization. “)So then, he says, it would simply be playing what he calls “condemnation games” with other people who are unwilling to denounce moves beyond Israel toward the Palestinians.
But the crusade against the strain has done its job. Hanna deleted her post about barbarism and several others. “I didn’t need politics in my news anymore and I didn’t need fights,” he told me. “The messages were not intended to galvanize fights. I was expressing my mind and my frustration.
Doing this has risks. Some Israeli universities have said they will show “zero tolerance” toward anyone who expresses “support for terrorism,” and there are reports of Israeli Arab academics facing disciplinary action for their social media posts.
Meanwhile, here in the U. S. , major donors and former university presidents have insisted that educational establishments obviously condemn the Hamas attack and interact in a “bilateral” approach.
They need these organizations to acknowledge the bloodshed perpetrated through Hamas. And they’re right. This week, the Israeli military organized a screening for journalists of uncensored footage of the attack, with scenes of others being dragged out of their cars, killed in their homes or shot while hiding under tables.
Efforts to secure Hamas’ convictions have been effective, prompting the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, San Diego, among others, to consider more powerful publications. And the crusade continues. About 50 researchers at Hanna University, for example, signed a draft letter to the American Association for Cancer Research after it considered the conflict an incomprehensible question. In the reaction we saw, Israeli investigators complained that they “don’t acknowledge the atrocities. “and its perpetrators. For example, the words ‘Hamas’, ‘Islamic Jihad’ or ‘terrorist attack’ are not even included in the letter. “
It’s as if scientists never take sides in a political conflict. At the annual meeting of the European Society for Gene and Cell Therapy, which is being held this week in Brussels, the society accepts participants whose access is paid through establishments in Russia or Belarus, which brings the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“We know that many Russian academics oppose the war in Ukraine,” the company says. “But we can’t accept your enrollment. “
Josh Dubnau, a geneticist at Stony Brook University, told me I was making a mistake comparing the two situations. “To take sides in Ukraine is to denounce an occupation,” he said. “The defending Ukrainians are fighting an army from a foreign country that targets civilians. “
In Israel and Gaza, he says, there is not as much clarity, as both sides kill civilians. Dubnau says his focus is efforts to “censor the speech” of scientists who “criticize Israeli atrocities. “
“It’s a kind of McCarthyism,” he said, referring to the preoccupation of communists in the 1950s in the United States, which led to blacklists in Hollywood and on college campuses.
If so, one of the first to be affected could be fruit fly biologist Michael Eisen, a prominent and fervent advocate of “open” publishing and, until this week, editor-in-chief of the influential journal eLife.
On October 14, Eisen published a satirical article in the newspaper Onion titled “Gaza’s Dying Are Criticized for Not Using Their Last Words to Condemn Hamas. “He added a summary of his own perspectives in his article on X: “The onion speaks with more courage, insight, and ethical clarity than the leaders of all educational establishments combined. I wish there had been a @TheOnion university.
In response, eLife, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, fired him on Tuesday. In a statement, it said Eisen had already been warned about his (notoriously impetuous) taste for communication and that a “new emergence of this behavior” had led to the decision.
The eLife scenario, whose editors include education scientists, prompted a wave of resignations, both among Eisen’s supporters and among those who believed his comments amounted to intimidation of Israelis.
Fede Pelisch, a member of eLife’s board of directors, said Wednesday that he would resign because he disagreed with the resolution to fire Eisen. In his own open letter, Pelisch states: “I have heard many considerations from other people who no longer feel comfortable expressing their opinion if it does not conform to orthodoxy. She believes that “other people feel silenced,” which she calls “a very negative outcome for a journal that aims to “promote a culture of studies that values openness, integrity and equity, diversity and inclusion. “
So what does this mean for science? Back in Israel, Hanna says her lab is running at full capacity as the fighting continues. And he’s in pain, too. The brother of one of his students was killed in an airstrike on a church in Gaza, he said. When I asked him for the details of how biological studies might be most affected in Israel, he wrote:
“To my Israeli Jewish friends and colleagues in academia and biotechnology. I am jealous of you because you are allowed to express explicit emotions of grief and identity with your innocent victims without being placed under space arrest and without risking harm and cancellation. The risk of cancellation is for companies, laboratories, individual scientists, or all of the above combined through financing, investment, and contracting. In the long run, what is the ability of such an ecosystem to become, in fact, strange and varied in attracting talent?Or does it send signals of fascism and McCarthyism that could sometimes erupt, meaning that many don’t need to be part of such a system?”
Unfortunately, this war is probably still in its infancy. Yesterday it was revealed that Israel had briefly sent tanks into the Gaza Strip and that an invasion of the ground seems imminent. As violence escalates, so will its consequences.
Technology Review is an independent editorial publication of MIT. You can read or pay attention to MIT President Sally Kornbluth’s Oct. 10 article on occasion in the Middle East here: “Our Community and the Violence in Israel and Gaza. “
Small, high-tech, and community-based – that’s why Israel has been such an important player in the fight against Covid-19 from the beginning. The country was the first to attempt to vaccinate all of its citizens, and in 2021 we reported on how it instituted a “green pass” formula to inspire reopening.
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