UK Lawyers for Israel Tried Again — Tribunal Said No

UK Lawyers for Israel have been turned away by another tribunal, and that refusal makes one thing unavoidable: the tactic itself is now the problem. Right, so UK Lawyers for Israel has just lost again, another attempt to strip a British-Palestinian surgeon of his medical licence has gone nowhere, and the cost of that failure isn’t just embarrassment, it’s the slow collapse of a tactic that depends on people not noticing how often it fails. This is the tenth time Ghassan Abu-Sittah has been dragged through legal or regulatory process for highlighting what is going on in Gaza, what he has witnessed, who he has had to treat and why, and the part that should grab you isn’t the allegation, it’s the outcome. That consistent outcome, because when the same group keeps escalating and keeps being knocked back, something bigger starts to jam. What stops working here isn’t one complaint, it’s the assumption that you can keep using law and procedure as a blunt instrument to scare critics into silence over Israel now, without the system learning who’s doing it and why and taking an increasingly dim view of such tactics. Because once that assumption breaks, the whole pressure model changes, not just for Abu-Sittah, but for anyone watching how dissent over Israel gets policed in Britain, who’s been allowed to do the policing and how increasingly they are being found out themselves. Right, so UK Lawyers for Israel has just walked away from another attempt to put British-Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah through the wringer, not for anything medial, but for who he has consistently attacked over what he has witnessed and what he has had to treat whilst operating in Gaza and the part that matters is not so much the allegation but the outcome of the process, because the outcome keeps landing the same way when it reaches a tribunal or a regulator that has to apply an actual test. Abu-Sittah has just been cleared at a tribunal in Manchester, with the accusations thrown out. The move was another attempt to deprive him of his medical licence, it has not succeeded, and it has been reported as the tenth such attempt to do this to him, because of his outspokenness by this pro Israel group of lawyers.