Israel Exhibition: Write to the First Minister

Dear Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland

First let me thank you for your remarks made on Question Time about an appropriate governmental response to the use of British passports by an Israeli assassination squad.  Many in Scotland will welcome your position that a review of trade relations with Israel is now in order.

I am writing on this occasion to ask you to register your opposition to the provocative exhibition scheduled to run in the Scottish Parliament on April 27-29, 2010 to promote “Israel’s Contribution to Medicine, Science and Technology”. This is nothing more than a shameless PR exercise to promote Israel in a positive light at a time when the European Parliament has adopted the Goldstone Report, which calls for Israel to be taken to the ICC, the International Criminal Court, for its war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and across the whole of Palestine.

Those wishing to celebrate Israeli medicine might wish to consider the Israeli bombing of Palestinian hospitals, shooting at ambulances, denial of medical treatment to seriously ill Palestinians, and detention of women in labour at checkpoints, forcing them to deliver there. Amnesty International concluded that Israeli doctors working with the security services “formed part of a system in which detainees are tortured, ill treated and humiliated…in conflict with medical ethics”. Not much to celebrate.

An exhibition should not be allowed inside the Scottish Parliament building to celebrate the science of the State that bombed and destroyed the science labs of the Islamic University in Gaza.

To celebrate Israeli technology at this time is to collude in the routine testing of new weapons on the imprisoned Palestinian people, the dropping of white phosphorous on built-up areas of Gaza, the denial of spare parts to water purification plants designed to cause illness and suffering, and the technological edge that enables Israel to kill over 1,400 people in Gaza at little risk to the killers. High-tech methods were used to alter British passports used by Israeli killers in the murder of a Palestinian resistance leader in Dubai recently.

Hosting this exhibition in the Scottish parliament potentially implicates all of us in a whitewashing of Israeli crimes. Cancellation will send a clear message that Scots oppose the heinous crimes of Israel flagged up by Judge Goldstone.

Yours sincerely