Boycotting Israel is now costing lives.

Israel leads the world in cancer prevention — but now, "activists" are blocking the very research, screening systems, and medical knowledge that could save patients worldwide.

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This is guest essay by Joelle Kaufman, a former corporate executive, speaker, and best-selling author.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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In 1933, Germany forced out the 15 percent of physicists who produced 64 percent of its citations. The pattern is back, and this time the cost is counted in cancer deaths.

Imagine what saves most people from cancer. It usually is not the breakthrough that makes headlines. It is not the celebrity scientist standing beside a microscope or the experimental drug celebrated as a miracle.

Those discoveries matter enormously, but most cancer outcomes are determined much earlier, through systems so ordinary that we barely notice them.

It is the mammogram that catches a tumor at stage one instead of stage three. The colonoscopy that finds a polyp before it becomes something worse. The family doctor who notices that a patient has missed a screening and calls again. The nurse who explains the test in a language the patient understands. The electronic record that flags the person who has fallen through the cracks.

It is prevention, repetition, follow-up, and reach.

It is the primary care doctor in an ordinary clinic, nowhere near a famous cancer center, who orders the screening and makes sure the result does not disappear into a computer system. Most cancer outcomes are decided there, in the community, long before anyone reaches for a novel drug.

This kind of medicine is less glamorous than inventing a new treatment. It does not produce the same headlines or fundraising photographs. But a treatment can only help the patients who receive it. A prevention system can change the fate of an entire population.

Israel does this as well as any country on earth.

Cancer screening runs through primary care as a national quality program, tracked across the entire population through electronic health records. Breast screening participation sits around 70 percent, colorectal screening above 64 percent, measured across more than 1.5 million women’s records, and both climbed after the program launched.

Those numbers represent something larger than compliance with a test. They represent a health system capable of identifying who needs care, reaching them, tracking what happens next, and learning from the results.

Israel’s health system covers everyone. It follows patients not merely through one appointment or one insurance plan, but often across decades. It can connect what happens in a neighborhood clinic today with what happens to that patient years later. That continuity turns everyday medicine into knowledge.

It allows researchers to ask questions other countries struggle to answer. Which outreach methods actually persuade people to get screened? Which communities are being missed? How early does a particular intervention begin to save lives? What happens when screening is coordinated nationally instead of left to individual doctors and patients?

Israel turns the answers into research the rest of the world can use.

Its laboratories have also built artificial intelligence systems that can read pathology slides, expanding access to expertise in places that may never have enough trained pathologists of their own. That is what Israeli medicine often looks like at its best: a small country using scale, data, necessity, and ingenuity to solve problems far beyond its borders.

So when a global congress convenes the world to improve cancer care in the community — the exact thing Israel does best — you would expect Israeli names throughout the program. You would expect Israeli doctors discussing national screening systems, Israeli researchers presenting population-level evidence, and Israeli health organizations explaining how primary care, technology, and long-term records can work together.

There were none. Not one Israeli voice in a room devoted to a field in which Israel has something unusually valuable to contribute.

That absence matters. Conferences do more than distribute information. They decide who is considered legitimate, which research enters the conversation, which institutions form partnerships, and which ideas travel from one health system to another. A conference program is not merely a schedule. It is a map of who is permitted to shape the future of a field.

Erase a country from that map often enough, and its knowledge begins to disappear with it. This is a boycott, and it works the way the boycott of Israel usually works now: quietly. Not with a banner announcing that Israeli scientists are forbidden. Not with a resolution that can be circulated, challenged, and condemned. The modern academic boycott is usually administered through silence.

A name never makes the list. An invitation never arrives. A paper is rejected for reasons vague enough to defend. A partnership is suddenly “under review.” A colleague who once answered emails stops responding. An institution insists that politics had nothing to do with the decision, even when the only thing that changed was the nationality of the people involved.

One Israeli university task force counted roughly 500 boycott incidents in the six months through early 2025, a 66 percent jump. Researchers blocked from conferences, papers turned away, medical exchange programs suspended, and universities severing ties. An absence here. A disinvitation there. Each incident deniable on its own, all of them adding up to a wall.

That deniability is the point. An open boycott creates a scandal. A quiet boycott creates a pattern no single institution must take responsibility for. Everyone can claim that their decision was isolated, procedural, or unrelated to politics. Meanwhile, Israeli scholars gradually discover that the international world in which they once participated has become smaller.

The boycott succeeds not by proving that Israeli research is bad, but by ensuring fewer people encounter it at all.

We have seen this before, and we know exactly what it costs. In 1933, Germany began dismissing Jewish scientists from its universities. The 15 percent of physicists forced out accounted for 64 percent of the field’s citations. Einstein, Franck, and Schrödinger were among the extraordinary scientific figures driven from the German academic world, along with five more future Nobel laureates.

The regime did not only end Jewish careers. It exiled its own best science. It treated the removal of Jews as an act of national purification and discovered, too late, that it had purified itself of brilliance. Laboratories lost their leaders. Universities lost their prestige. Students lost their teachers. Germany’s enemies gained many of the minds Germany had rejected.

And the world lost the discoveries those scientists might have made sooner (or might have made at all) had their work not been shattered by persecution and exile.

Prejudice always takes the best first, because talent is never evenly distributed according to the political categories prejudice invents. Once a society decides that identity matters more than contribution, excellence becomes irrelevant. The scientist is no longer a scientist. He becomes a Jew. The physician is no longer a physician. She becomes an Israeli.

The work is judged only after the identity has already rendered it suspect.

The version running now is quieter. No laws are being posted on university doors. No single global authority has ordered Israeli researchers to leave. The machinery is decentralized, informal, and protected by the language of activism. But its target is prevention, which makes it worse in one specific way.

Excluding a leader in cancer prevention does not cost the world an abstraction. It costs screening protocols that catch disease early. It costs systems capable of reaching whole populations. It costs evidence that other countries could copy tomorrow without waiting twenty years for a revolutionary cure.

Medical knowledge spreads through relationships. Researchers meet at conferences, compare findings, challenge assumptions, begin collaborations, and bring ideas back to their own institutions. A screening model tested in one country may influence a public health program in another. A doctor may hear a presentation, recognize that a similar system could work in her community, and begin the process of adapting it.

Remove Israeli experts from those rooms and no one can calculate exactly what disappears. That is what makes the damage so easy to ignore.

There will be no patient whose chart says, “Cancer detected late because an Israeli researcher was excluded from a conference.” There will be no death certificate listing academic boycotts as a contributing cause. The consequences will be scattered and anonymous.

A health system will continue using a weaker outreach method because its administrators never encountered a better one. A doctor will not learn about a screening strategy that could have reached more patients. A research partnership that might have produced an answer will never begin. A country with too few specialists will adopt useful technology years later than it otherwise might have.

Keep a leader in prevention out of the conversation, and the bill eventually comes due somewhere. It comes due as cancers found late that could have been found early. As treatment that begins after the easiest window has closed. As surgeries that become more invasive, therapies that become more punishing, and families that hear news they might not have had to hear. It comes due as people who die who did not have to — most of whom will never know that a boycott had anything to do with it.

There is a bitter symmetry here: The same prejudice that once drove Jews out of the laboratory is now removing Jewish and Israeli science that would save Jew and gentile alike. The language has changed. The mechanisms have changed. The people enforcing the exclusion tell themselves an entirely different story. But the underlying bargain remains the same: sacrifice knowledge in order to preserve prejudice.

Cancer does not check the nationality of the researcher who developed the screening protocol. It does not ask how the scientist voted, what flag hangs outside her institution, or whether activists approve of her government. It only cares whether the disease is found, and whether it is found in time.

A mammogram developed through Israeli research does not work only on Israelis. An artificial intelligence system trained in an Israeli laboratory does not refuse to read the pathology slide of an Arab, a European, an African, or an American. Knowledge does not inherit the nationality of the person who produced it.

Boycotters understand this when the innovation benefits them. They are perfectly willing to use Israeli technology, medicine, cybersecurity, agriculture, and research while trying to remove Israelis from the institutions that create them. They want the discovery without the discoverer; the medicine without the Jew.

That arrangement cannot last. Science depends on exchange, criticism, replication, and contact. You cannot indefinitely isolate the people producing knowledge while expecting the knowledge to keep arriving on schedule.

So name this plainly, because the quiet version depends on no one naming it: When a room is built to improve care for everyone and the people who do it best are edited out for being Israeli, that is not scientific judgment. It is not humanitarianism. It is not principle. It is discrimination with a conference badge.

It is the oldest prejudice wearing this decade’s clothes. And on this subject, its consequences will not be measured only in canceled invitations, damaged careers, or diminished universities. They will be counted in lives.

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