This book offers a novel understanding of Israeli bioethics that is a milestone in the comparative literature of bioethics. Bringing together a range of experts, the book's interdisciplinary structure employs a contemporary, sociopolitical-oriented approach to bioethics issues, with an emphasis on empirical analysis, that will appeal not only to scholars of bioethics, but also to students of law, medicine, humanities, and social sciences around the world. Its focus on the development of bioethics in Israel makes it especially relevant to scholars (...) of Israeli society- both in and out of Israel-as well as medical practitioners and health policymakers in Israel. (shrink)

While bioethicist Arthur Caplan claims that “The Nazi analogy is equivalent to dropping a nuclear bomb in ethical battles about science and medicine”, we claim that such total exclusion of this analogy is equally problematic. Our analysis builds on Roberto Esposito’s conceptualization of immunitas and communitas as key elements of biopolitics. Within public health theories and practices there is an inherent tension between exclusion (immunitas) and inclusion (communitas) forces. Taking the immunitas logic to the extreme, as National Socialist medicine did (...) in the name of securing the German race, is a constant danger that needs to be taken seriously into consideration when discussing public health policies. The tension between the silencing of the Holocaust in bioethical debates on one side, and the persistent use of National Socialist medicine metaphors, on the other hand, is the focus of this paper. By delving into the meanings and the implications of this two‐edged discourse, we argue that comparing post‐war bioethics with pre‐war medical practices from a biopolitical perspective has the potential to depict a more nuanced account of continuities and discontinuities in bioethics. (shrink)

One Health, as an international movement and as a research methodology, aspires to cross boundaries between disciplines. However, One Health has also been viewed as “reductionist” due to its overemphasize on physicians-veterinarians cooperation and surveillance capacity enhancement, while limiting the involvement with socio-political preconditioning factors that shape the impact of diseases, and the ethical questions that eventually structure interventions. The current article draws on a qualitative study of Brucellosis control in Israel, to address the benefits of broadening the One Health (...) perspective to include ethical considerations and the socio-political aspects of health. Using in-depth-interviews, observations and document review, the article analyzes stakeholders’ knowledge (policy makers, practitioners and livestock owners) to understand Brucellosis control interventions in the Negev region of Israel. The analysis highlights four different types of boundaries: geographical, professional, disciplinary and participatory. The variety of boundaries going beyond disciplinary ones, are often neglected by traditional One Health discourses, however they provide clearer understanding regarding the role of the Israel and Palestine relations; enforcement activities and trust creation; and mechanisms of decision-making and public participation, in Brucellosis interventions. A broad One Health analysis that addresses ethical concerns and socio-political environments, as well as human and veterinary medicine, encourages re-framing of causes and solutions when dealing particularly with Brucellosis in the Negev, but more generally with zoonotic diseases, low-trust settings and inequitable distribution of power. The inclusion of historical, political and bioethical considerations of Public Health in One Health creates opportunities to increase the relevance of One Health and expand its scope as a novel scientific paradigm. (shrink)

Scientific medicine carries within it an inherent contradiction. On the one hand, given its general scientific inquiry into health and disease, their conditions, etiologies, and treatments, it makes a claim for universality. To justify this claim, at different times and in different places, scientific medicine has prioritized techniques such as the medical gaze and autopsies to assure its diagnoses; it has applied numerical methods in order to have a better grasp of diseases and their possible treatments; it has used laboratory (...) analyses in order to understand life at its molecular level; and more recently it has introduced Randomized Clinical Trials in order to generalize clinical treatments. On the other hand, contrary to its universalistic claims, scientific medicine sets up and reifies boundaries. It creates distinctions between the healthy and the sick and defines categories, such as gender and race, that have deep political and social meanings. (shrink)

In this essay, we analyze the case study of mass ringworm irradiation conducted in Israel during its first years of existence and its consequences. We analyzed the case study of ringworm irradiation in the framework of racial construction of illness and its treatment, showing the elasticity of race and ethnicity as medical and social categories.

The BiDil affair brought once again to the fore questions of race and medicine. As discussed in other essays in this collection, the emergence of BiDil as the first medication approved and marketed for treating specific racial groups raises important questions for medicine and society: How are race and ethnicity framing our understanding of health and illness? Should treatment decisions be based on the race and ethnicity of patients? Should we encourage the development of race-specific medical treatments in order to (...) reduce health disparities? Or is this approach dangerous, and can it lead to unwanted consequences including racial stigmatization? These questions are not new, and since the introduction of race as a scientific construct in the late-19th century, race has played an important part in the history of medicine, most notoriously during World War II and the Holocaust. Yet the identification of race medicine with Nazi science tends to obscure the vast use of race as a medical construct by a wide range of medical scientists and practitioners across the political spectrum. In many instances, racial minorities were preoccupied with race medicine in order to promote the health of their own communities. One such group was that of Jewish physicians. (shrink)

ArgumentWe examine the creation and functioning of the “Pasteur Institute in Palestine” focusing on the relationship between biological science, health policy, and the creation of a “new society” within the framework of Zionism. Similar to other bacteriological institutes founded by colonial powers, this laboratory was developed in response to public health needs. But it also had a political role. Dr. Leo Böhm, a Zionist physician, strived to establish his institution along the lines of the Zionist aspiration to develop a national (...) entity based on strong scientific foundations. Even though the institute enjoyed several fruitful years of operation, mainly during World War I, it achieved no lasting national or scientific importance in the country. Böhm failed to adapt to new ways of knowledge production, scientifically and socially. The case study of the “Pasteur Institute in Palestine” serves as a prism to view the role of the public health laboratory in the history of Palestine with its ongoing changes of scientific, organizational, and political context. (shrink)

Three thousand belligerents, mostly belonging to the military arm of Hamas, stormed Southern Israel on October 7th, 2023. Along with 3,000 rockets fired at Israel from Gaza, these belligerents inva...

The introduction of respiratory machines in the 1950s may have saved the lives of many, but it also challenged the notion of death itself. This development endowed “machines” with the power to form a unique ontological creature: a live body with a “dead” brain. While technology may be blamed for complicating things in the first place, it is also called on to solve the resulting quandaries. Indeed, it is not the birth of the “brain-dead” that concerns us most, but rather (...) its association with a web of epistemological and ethical considerations, where technology plays a central role. The brain death debate in Israel introduces highly sophisticated religious thought and authoritative medical expertise. At focus are the religious acceptance and rejection of brain death by a technologically savvy group of rabbis whose religious doctrine––along with a particular form of religious reasoning––is used to support the truth claims made from the scientific community but challenge the ways in which they are made credible. In our case, brain death as “true” death is made religiously viable with the very use of technological apparatus and scientific rhetoric that stand at the heart of the scientific ethos. (shrink)

AbstractWe propose an emerging conceptualization of “intervention hesitancy” to address a broad spectrum of hesitancy to disease prevention interventions among healthcare personnel (HCP) beyond vaccine hesitancy. To demonstrate this concept and its analytical benefits, we used a qualitative case-study methodology, identifying a “spectrum” of disease prevention interventions based on (1) the intervention’s effectiveness, (2) how the intervention is regulated among HCP in the Israeli healthcare system, and (3) uptake among HCP in the Israeli healthcare system. Our cases ultimately contribute to (...) a more nuanced conceptualization of hesitancy that HCP express towards disease prevention interventions. Our case interventions included the seasonal influenza vaccine, the Mantoux test, and the hepatitis B (HBV) vaccine. Influenza and HBV are vaccine-preventable diseases, though their respective vaccines vary significantly in effectiveness and uptake among HCP. The Mantoux test is a tuberculin skin test which provides a prevention benchmark for tuberculosis (TB), a non-vaccine preventable disease. We conducted semi-structured interviews with relevant stakeholders and analyzed them within Israeli and international policy context between 2016 and 2019, a period just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose the conceptualization of “intervention hesitancy”—beyond “vaccine hesitancy”—as “hesitancy towards a wide range of public health interventions, including but not limited to vaccines”. Results suggested that intervention hesitancy among HCP is rooted in weak trust in their employer, poor employment conditions, as well as mixed institutional guidelines and culture. Conceptualizing intervention hesitancy expands the ability of healthcare systems to understand the root of hesitancy and foster a supportive institutional culture and trust, cognizant of diverse disease prevention interventions beyond vaccination. (shrink)

Figuring out what pushes individuals to become organ donors has become the holy grail of social scientists interested in transplantations. In this paper I concentrate on solidarity as a determinant of organ donation and examine it through the history of organ donation in Israel. By following the history of transplantation policies since 1968 and examining them in relation to different types of solidarities, this paper leads to a nuanced understanding of the ties between solidarity and health policy. Attempts to foster (...) an all-encompassing consensus on the definition of brain death yielded the Transplantation and the Brain-Respiratory Death Laws of 2008. It was hoped that a wide “civic solidarity” would render Israel self-sufficient in its organ economy. However, the failure of the law led to the breakdown of civic solidarity in organ donation. As a result, initiatives such as the priority policy and non-directed living organ donations, developed out of a narrower conception of solidarity. Juxtaposing these initiatives sheds light on macro level processes for policy makers and suggests solidarity as a key bioethical concept to understand organ donation policies. (shrink)

ArgumentTwo medical delegations, one from Palestine and one from the United States, were sent to detainment camps in Cyprus in the summer of 1947. The British Mandatory government had set up these camps in the summer of 1946 to stem the flow of Jewish immigrants into Palestine after World War II. The purpose of the medical delegations was to screen the camps' inhabitants and to propose a mental-health program for their life in Palestine. We examine the activities of these two (...) delegations within the context of their scientific interest in the psycho-pathology of displaced persons after World War II and as part of a broader project of mental hygiene. According to the delegations, the detainees would be a potential source of strength for building a new society if they adapted to life in Palestine. However, they would become a burden if they failed to be absorbed. At the same time, the medical delegations also saw the detainee camps as a potential “living laboratory” for scientific exploration. The case of the two medical delegations in Cyprus is also a story about constructing and transgressing medical borders. Apart from the obvious fact that this case study deals with movement of people, refugees as well as health-care workers, it is also about the transmission of knowledge and professions across the ocean. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper focuses on the Jewish nursing profession in Poland during the interwar period. We argue that the integration of Jewish women in medical activity under the AJDC (American Jewish Distribution Committee) and TOZ (Towarzystwa Ochrony Zdrowia Ludności Żydowskiej [the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish People]) emerged in Poland less from the adoption of gender equality and more out of necessity. On the one hand, JDC and TOZ needed Jewish nurses and public health nurses to (...) carry out their health campaigns and build a public health infrastructure. On the other hand, a new generation of Jewish women needed job opportunities that would enable them to make a living and be independent. More broadly this case study shows that the implementation of American “reformative” ideals into the local Polish reality, including in the newly emerging public health field, involved adaptation, negotiation, and in some cases, resentment. (shrink)

The present article focuses on the case of the 2012 hunger-strike of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. We analyze the ethical dilemma involved in the way the Israeli medical community reacted to these hunger-strikes and the question of force feeding within the context of the fundamental dual-loyalty structure inherent in the Israeli Prison Services—system. We argue that the liberal perspective that focuses the discussion on the dilemma between the principle of individual autonomy and the sanctity of life tends to be (...) oblivious to the asymmetrical relation of power that characterizes the prison system and to the socio-political context in which hunger-strikes take place. Emphasizing hunger-strikes as political acts implies that health practitioners’ conducts cannot be analyzed only through the prism of clinical medical ethics. It requires a public health ethics’ approach, an approach that understands health in the context of the complex relationship between society, state, organizations, communities and individuals. The authors are both academics and volunteers in Physicians for Human Rights—Israel thus our analysis is based both on sociological and public health ethics principles and on the continuous work and advocacy for the right to health of prisoners. (shrink)

How do the organization and presentation of large-scale social media images recondition the process by which visual knowledge, value, and meaning are made in contemporary conditions? Analyzing fundamental elements in the changing syntax of existing visual software ontology—the ways current social media platforms and aggregators organize and categorize social media images—this article relates how visual materials created within social media platforms manifest distinct modes of knowledge production and acquisition. First, I analyze the structure of social media images within data streams (...) as opposed to previous information organization in a structured database. While the database has no pre-defined notions of time and thus challenges traditional linear forms, the data stream re-emphasizes the linearity of a particular data sequence and activates a set of new relations to contemporary temporalities. Next, I show how these visual arrangements and temporal principles are manifested and discussed in three artworks: “Untitled” by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, The Clock by Christian Marclay, and Last Clock by Jussi Ängeslevä and Ross Cooper. By emphasizing the technical and poetic ways in which social media situate the present as a “thick” historical unit that embodies multiple and synchronous temporalities, this article illuminates some of the conditions, challenges, and tensions between former visual structures and current ones, and unfolds the cultural significations of contemporary big visual data. (shrink)

In The interpretation of dreams Freud famously claimed to have finally solved the riddle of dreams. Yet amidst all the heated debates and intense controversies that ensued in the wake of this groundbreaking work, one fundamental question has been entirely overlooked, namely: in what sense, exactly, are dreams analogous to riddles? It will be the burden of this paper to show that a critical investigation of this seemingly simple question reveals a fundamental and hereto unnoticed discrepancy between Freud's rhetoric on (...) his method of dream interpretation and its application in practice. More specifically, whereas Freud argues that the psychoanalytic method can effectively solve the riddles of dreams by uncovering their pre-existing solutions, careful examination reveals that dream interpretations of this kind are the product of a very different solving technique, one that proceeds along a retroactive timeline rather than a linear one. Drawing on Wittgenstein's distinction between two kinds of riddles and the manner in which they are solved, I expound on the nature of retroactive riddle-solving, thus generating a distinctly different picture of psychoanalytic dream interpretation than the one envisioned and advocated by Freud. (shrink)

We give an example of two ordered structures $\mathcal {M},\mathcal {N}$ in the same language $\mathcal {L}$ with the same universe, the same order and admitting the same one-variable definable subsets such that $\mathcal {M}$ is a model of the common theory of o-minimal $\mathcal {L}$ -structures and $\mathcal {N}$ admits a definable, closed, bounded, and discrete subset and a definable injective self-mapping of that subset which is not surjective. This answers negatively two question by Schoutens; the first being whether (...) there is an axiomatization of the common theory of o-minimal structures in a given language by conditions on one-variable definable sets alone. The second being whether definable completeness and type completeness imply the pigeonhole principle. It also partially answers a question by Fornasiero asking whether definable completeness of an expansion of a real closed field implies the pigeonhole principle. (shrink)

Journal of Human Values, Volume 28, Issue 2, Page 115-128, May 2022. Is emotional labour a burden or a boon to service providers who have greater workplace spirituality? We test a moderated mediation model in which emotional exhaustion mediates the conjoint effect of WS and emotional labour on job satisfaction. Linking conservation of resources theory with the mechanism of ‘value congruence’ in person–environment fit theory, we theorize that spiritual values are a key factor in generating necessary resource gains for deep (...) acting due to the value fit of these two motivational vectors. As a boundary condition for use of the benefits of DA, WS can bridge the gap between theoretical assumptions concerning the benefits of DA and the lack of empirical evidence that DA mitigates emotional exhaustion. Concurrently, we challenge the perception of WS as universally beneficial to employees’ wellbeing by proposing that WS amplifies the detrimental effects of surface acting because the externalized and inauthentic nature of this type of emotional regulation transgresses basic spiritual values. Our hypotheses find support in a study of 196 Israeli service providers at inbound call centres. (shrink)

PurposePrevious studies examining the relationship between health-related quality of life and speech perception ability in cochlear implant users have yielded variable results, due to a range of factors, such as a variety of different HRQoL questionnaires and CI speech testing materials in addition to CI configuration. In order to decrease inherent variability and better understand the relationship between these measures in CI users, we administered a commonly used clinical CI speech testing battery as well as two popular HRQoL questionnaires in (...) bimodal and bilateral CI users.MethodsThe Glasgow Benefit Inventory, a modified five-factor version of the GBI, and the Nijmegen Cochlear Implant Questionnaire were administered to 25 CI users. Speech perception abilities were measured with the AzBio sentence test in several conditions.ResultsHigher performance scores on the GBI general subscore were related to greater binaural speech perception ability in noise. There were no other relationships between the GBI or NCIQ and speech perception ability under any condition. Scores on many of the GBI-5F factors were substantially skewed and asymmetrical; therefore, correlational analyses could not be applied. Across all participants, binaural speech perception scores were greater than first-ear CI only scores.ConclusionThe GBI general subscore was related to binaural speech perception, which is considered the everyday listening condition of bimodal and bilateral CI users, in noise; while the more CI-specific NCIQ did not relate to speech perception ability in any listening condition. Future research exploring the relationships between the GBI, GBI-5F, and NCIQ considering bimodal and bilateral CI configurations separately is warranted. (shrink)

Distinguishability plays a major role in quantum and statistical physics. When particles are identical their wave function must be either symmetric or antisymmetric under permutations and the number of microscopic states, which determines entropy, is counted up to permutations. When the particles are distinguishable, wavefunctions have no symmetry and each permutation is a different microstate. This binary and discontinuous classification raises a few questions: one may wonder what happens if particles are almost identical, or when the property that distinguishes between (...) them is irrelevant to the physical interactions in a given system. Here I sketch a general answer to these questions. For any pair of non-identical particles there is a timescale, \, required for a measurement to resolve the differences between them. Below \, particles seem identical, above it - different, and the uncertainty principle provides a lower bound for \. Thermal systems admit a conjugate temperature scale, \. Above this temperature the system appears to equilibrate before it resolves the differences between particles, below this temperature the system identifies these differences before equilibration. As the physical differences between particles decline towards zero, \ and \. (shrink)

The events of September 11th, 2001 have irreversibly marked the outlook of the entire world in the beginning of the twentieth-first century and its consequences will certainly continue to be felt for years to come. Although relatively new, such events have not passed without receiving attention from some among the foremost thinkers of our time. Given that, we intend to develop an interpretative hypothesis which, starting from the perspective opened by the reflections of Friedrich Nietzsche concerning the nihilism and the (...) great politics, seeks to understand both the violent actions which try to justify themselves from a fundamentalist world view as well as the recent political and military configuration of the U.S. liberal democracy as different forms of reaction against the deepening of the value crisis ​​through which the Western world passes. (shrink)

This article is a within- and cross-country examination of the impact of fair trade certification on consumers’ evaluations and attitudes toward ethically certified products. Across three experimental studies, the authors analyze how different levels of brand familiarity and fair trade expertise impact consumer decisions. The authors study this phenomenon across markets with different social orientation cultures to analyze potential dissimilarities in the way consumers evaluate and behave toward ethically certified products. Findings suggest that fair trade certifications enhance product valuations. However, (...) this effect is especially observed for low familiar brands, once the level of fair trade expertise increases. Findings also suggest that there are individual cultural differences with respect to social and environmental labeling expertise that may account for some of the unexplained variation in choice behaviors observed across countries. Results indicate that especially in more (mature) individualistic markets (vs. collectivistic) consumer ethical behavior seems to be greatly influenced by consumers’ perceptions about the eligibility of brands using (or not) fair trade. This effect is strengthened by the significant mediating role of consumers’ ethicality perceptions on the relationship between fair trade and the willingness to pay for brands. (shrink)