Shock and horror: Sky News thinks it has an “exclusive” story because it has “obtained copies of leaflets promoting medical clinics in illegal Israeli settlements by a company seeking to recruit British Jewish doctors at an event in London.”
Here’s the offending leaflet:
Terem, for those of you fortunate enough not to have needed treatment at one of its clinics, is a national network of urgent care centers. Like Israeli hospitals, they are staffed by both Jewish and Arab medical professionals and treat everyone regardless of ethnicity or background.
And those “illegal Israeli settlements” they are operating in? Of the 25 locations listed on the leaflet, four are located over the Green Line. Modi’in Illit, Ma’aleh Adumim, and Beitar Illit are some of the largest Jewish communities in the West Bank and have long been regarded as towns and cities that would inevitably remain as part of Israeli territory in the event of any future peace deal with the Palestinians, however distant that may seem. Katzrin is in the Golan Heights, which was annexed in 1981. There, the Druze inhabitants, whether they have Israeli or Syrian citizenship, are as welcome to receive treatment as the Israeli Jews living in the area.
But ultimately, this isn’t about an argument over the legality of Jewish settlements. This is about Sky News criminalizing British Jews who might be seeking to leave the UK and transfer their medical skills to Israel. This is the inevitable result of the UK government’s ill-conceived boycott and sanctions campaign against Jews living in the West Bank.
It’s bad enough that, in theory, an Israeli bank that happens to service customers living in the West Bank could be boycotted and criminalized. But a network of medical clinics? Have we really reached the point where the UK government and anti-Israeli activists are delegitimizing medical clinics?
Apparently so.
Perhaps this story aggravated me more than the usual anti-Israel tripe I see on a daily basis in the media, not only because my family and I have been treated in Terem clinics on numerous occasions but also because of the tragic story of Terem’s founder, Dr. David Applebaum, who was murdered in a Palestinian suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 2003 along with his daughter Naava on the eve of her wedding.
Like the Palestinians responsible for that appalling act of terror, so today’s boycotters are prepared to destroy everything good in their quest to delegitimize and ultimately destroy Israel.
Perhaps Sky News should be considering the real story here: why are British Jewish medical professionals considering giving up their lives in the UK and moving to Israel? Could it have anything to do with the record levels of antisemitism inside the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), not to mention the increasingly uncomfortable environment for many British Jews who identify with Israel and Zionism?
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
