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​Nevertheless, the accusation stuck and has dogged her over the years, resulting in the last-minute can- cellation, in April 2025, of a prestigious invitation from the British Medical Association to speak about her work for Palestinians. This article documents the sequence of events leading up to the cancellation of the BMA invitation. We go on to question the use of allegations of this kind, and the role of organisations like UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) in creating a climate of impunity for the state of Israel, and in triggering unpleasant reprisals against British citizens who support the Palestinians.

 

Swee’s de-platforming

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In April 2025, Dr Swee Ang, co-founder of the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians, was due to give a keynote lecture to 300 medical student leaders, drawn from all the medical schools in UK under the auspices of the British Medical Association, the BMA. Two days before the date of the lecture, she received a letter from the BMA announcing that they had withdrawn the invitation. No explanation was made public, but CAMPAIN learned, through conversations with the BMA, that the cancellation was due to an item mentioned on her Wikipedia page, that eleven years earlier she had forwarded a link to a video by the US white supremacist and antisemite David Duke. CAMPAIN wrote the BMA an open letter, pointing out that at the time Swee did not know who Duke was and that there has never been a pattern of antisemitic statements or behaviour on her part. From the open letter:

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The question the BMA must answer is whether it believes it is reasonable, in the light of these facts, to conclude that Dr Ang’s decades-long humanitarian work is merely a cover for a sinister antisemitic agenda. This is what those calling for Dr Swee’s cancellation are suggesting and your decision to disinvite her implies that you consider this a legitimate point of view. And yet it is absurd for any thinking and rational person to believe that her compassionate concern for Palestinians is not genuine, but rather a proxy for hatred of Jews.

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The letter urged the BMA to recognise its mistake, and to commit to treating Swee with respect and fairness in the future. It garnered 3,600 signatures, among them many distinguished names.

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On 2nd October 2025 Swee, together with CAMPAIN Secretary Jonathan Coulter and Chair Adam Waterhouse, delivered the letter to the BMA, and spoke with the BMA’s Director of Policy and Communications Greg Beales. Mr Beales made it clear that this decision was made by the temporary committee organis- ing the Medical Students Conference for 2025, and that the BMA had not banned Swee from speaking at BMA events. He said that the decision was likely made in order to not to distract attention from the wider issue of what was happening in Gaza, and the BMA’s own response to it.

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The issue wasn’t simply the fact that forwarding Duke’s video was mentioned on her Wikipedia page but also that there didn’t appear to be any publicly published explanation or apology from Swee. He emphasised the importance of having a response on the public record. Unfortunately the lack of an apology in the public record has created a space within which smears and innuendos can continue to damage her reputation and hinder the work of MAP.

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In fact this particular smear campaign had already resulted in withdrawal of dozens of invitations as speaker and participation in mainstream media interviews. The cancellation by BMA was preceded a month earlier by the cancellation of an invitation to speak at Harvard University. But the BMA cancellation was unique as Swee has been a member of the BMA for 49 years and some of the medical students were from her own NHS hospital, Barts (Saint Bartholomew’s). This article, based upon interviews with Swee, has been written to redress this, and to recount the background to the case and the ongoing consequences of Swee Ang’s 2014 misstep.

 

Swee’s background, from Singapore to the UK and the Middle East

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Swee Ang is ethnically Chinese, but grew up in Singapore in the 1950s and 60s, and came to England in 1977 with her husband, the human rights lawyer Francis Khoo, when the political climate in Singapore became too threatening. She had trained as a doctor in Singapore; in London she completed her training as an orthopaedic surgeon, and in 1996 became the first woman consultant orthopedic surgeon at Barts Hospital in London.

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Singapore, a tiny island state only twice the area of Greater London, is mainly ethnically Chinese, and its location in the midst of much larger Muslim states is something of an anomaly. Swee says this naturally inclined her towards sympathy for Israel, which she saw as David to the Arab Goliath. Her adoption of radical Christian belief in her teens accentuated her support for Israel. However this sympathy was severely tested when, in 1982, she answered an appeal from Christian Aid for doctors to help the injured in the Lebanese civil war. She left her job and travelled to work in the Gaza hospital in Beirut, situated in the Sabra Palestinian refugee camp.

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Her initial sympathy for Israel became tinged with doubt when for the first time she met Palestinians, who up till then she had always thought of only as terrorists. And it turned into fierce criticism when she saw the results of Israeli military action against the Palestinians in Lebanon. Besides the systematic targeting of hospitals [1], she witnessed and also treated survivors of what was possibly the most dramatic and horrifying event of the war, when in 1982 Lebanese Christian militias were given the green light by Israel to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. They murdered somewhere between two and three thousand people, many of them the dependents of the PLO fighters who had just departed for Tripoli in Libya under an agreement with the UK- and US-backed Multinational Force in Lebanon. As became clear in the subsequent (Israeli) Kahan Commission of Enquiry, the Israeli army had opened the camps to the Christian militias, prevented their inhabitants from fleeing, and illuminated the scene with flares all night long, facilitating the massacre. The enquiry, at which Swee testified, concluded that Ariel Sharon should be removed from his post as Defence Minister. At the time, the report was celebrated as “a tribute to the vitality of Israeli democracy and to the country’s moral character” (the Washington Post), and as “giving the world a new lesson in democracy” (French Minister of the Interior Gaston Deferre) [2]. In fact in 2001 Sharon was elected Prime Minister of Israel, and held the position until disabled by a stroke in 2006.

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Swee and her husband, together with Major Derek Cooper and his wife, founded the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians, MAP, in 1982, in the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. From 2002 it has had special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Today it is the principal UK-based charity providing medical aid to the Palestinians of Gaza, the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Lebanon [3]. Its current president is the Conservative peer Baroness Morris of Bolton, who succeeded Chris Patten and Baroness Helena Kennedy.

 

Swee’s encounter with Duke’s video

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In 2014, shortly after Israel had for the third time attacked Gaza’s largely unprotected inhabitants, using American weaponry to carry out an aerial bombardment and a ground invasion, Swee was sent, by a colleague, a link to a video which alleged that what Duke called “Zionist Jews” were in control of the United States government, banks and media. She was shocked but also intrigued. She shared the link with a colleague and with some family members in a private e-mail group, with a covering note that said “Dear Friends, This is shocking video please watch. This is not about Palestine - it is about all of us!”. The video, CNN Goldman Sachs and the Zio Matrix was by David Duke, one-time Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, though in the video he is introduced (correctly) as a former member of the US congress, and there is no reference to the KKK [4]. Swee had never heard of him.

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However, as will be shown below, this naive mistake was seized upon by people with an interest in pro- tecting Israel’s reputation (and defaming supporters of Palestinian rights), and it was this that later led to the BMA’s withdrawal of her invitation in 2025. The sequence of events is described below.

 

The July 2014 issue of the medical journal The Lancet had carried an open letter for the people of Gaza, written by Swee and four other doctors and medical scientists, denouncing the Israeli attacks on the population of Gaza and documenting some of its consequences, and calling on colleagues to join in condemning the Israeli actions. From the open letter:​​

 

We are appalled by the military onslaught on civilians in Gaza under the guise of punishing terrorists. This is the third large scale military assault on Gaza since 2008. Each time the death toll is borne mainly by innocent people in Gaza, especially women and children, under the unacceptable pretext of Israel eradicating political parties and resistance to the occupa- tion and siege they impose.[. . . ] Our condemnation and disgust are further compounded by the denial and prohibition for Gaza to receive external help and supplies to alleviate the dire circumstances.

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A tide of defamation ensues

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In August of that year, Dr Gerald Steinberg, president of the Israeli pressure group NGO Monitor, wrote to Elsevier, the publishers of The Lancet, demanding that they withdraw the open letter, on the grounds that Swee and one of the other authors “traded in anti-semitic conspiracy theories”, though his letter does not dispute the letter’s description of the situation in Gaza. The Lancet held its ground, with the support of the publishers – the editor described Steinberg’s allegations as “a witch hunt, pure and simple” – and did not withdraw the open letter, which is still available on its website. Steinberg’s allegation that Swee “traded in anti-semitic conspiracy theories” can only be based on her having shared the link to Duke’s video with a small number of close contacts.

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In September 2014, Jake Wallis-Simons, a Daily Telegraph journalist (and editor of the Jewish Chronicle from 2021 to 2025) interviewed Swee about the allegations from Gerald Steinberg. She explained what had happened, and expressed her regret that she had unwittingly forwarded a video by a white supremacist and antisemite, as she now understood David Duke to be. She wrote to him:

 

Following the conversation last evening with you, I thought about the situation and if it is not too late, please would you kindly include my regret for circulating Dr Duke’s lecture and my apology for the offence I have caused to many of my friends, both Jewish and non-Jewish in doing this. I have done this out of shock at the contents and my ignorance of the undercurrents, and will be more discerning in future about these kind of allegations.

Please let me know if there is time to include this.

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Wallis-Simons did not include Swee’s apology in the article he wrote for the Telegraph, Lancet hijacked in anti-Israel campaign. His article began with a photo of Duke captioned “Two of the authors of the open letter, Dr Paola Manduca and Dr Swee Ang, have sympathies with the views of David Duke, pictured, a white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard”. By the time he wrote this, he had already spo- ken to Swee and knew her views on David Duke. He posted her apology instead on his Facebook page, where it attracted many abusive responses. Swee also publicly apologised at a meeting at University College London, about which she wrote to Aimée Shalan, Director of MAP:

 

Regarding the UCL meeting, I have ample witnesses including video evidence that when they attacked me, I explained that I was really sorry to have forwarded the video, and if I knew who Duke was I would have deleted it. But they continued shouting and would not accept my apology. I hope the same lot will not come to Parliament to harass you. Maybe you should warn the security and tell your host if they start to be uncivilise, they should be removed.

 

In June 2018, the pressure group UK Lawyers for Israel, UKLFI, filed a complaint against MAP to the Charity Commission, alleging that MAP spread political propaganda, promoted antisemitism, and had connections with organisations linked to the Palestinian terrorist organisation, the PFLP. Once again, the complaint of antisemitism was based on Swee’s having forwarded the link to the video of David Duke. The Charity Commission investigation exonerated MAP.

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The various complaints against her have all been based on one leaked email sent to a private email group, which she immediately regretted deeply, as her apologies have made clear. The worst that can reasonably be said about Swee is that she was momentarily taken in by an antisemitic conspiracy theory. And her whole history speaks of unswerving devotion to the well-being of her fellow humans, whatever their religion or ethnic origin.

 

The mysterious power of accusations of antisemitism

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To be deemed antisemitic is to be placed in a special category, to which a singular stigma is attached, so powerful that it apparently outweighs the virtue of every good act, and prompts the cancellation of the person concerned. And the stigma is permanent: Swee’s single misstep in 2014 led to her cancellation in 2025. During the 2nd October 2025 meeting with Swee and CAMPAIN, the BMA’s Director of Policy and Communications, Greg Beales, made clear that they did not regard Swee as antisemitic, but simply that the committee had acted to avoid distraction and public controversy. He emphasised that the absence of any publicly available response from Swee to the original allegation had left a gap that would have made any decision to invite her hard to defend. In other words, she had not been found guilty of anything; she had been quietly set aside because a smear based on a mistake, left unanswered, had been allowed to do its work.

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The BMA’s deplatforming of Swee, even if it was done without animus and merely to avoid controversy, contrasts sharply with its treatment of the Israeli Medical Association, the IMA. Until 2025 it maintained cordial relations with the IMA, some of whose members oversee the torture of Palestinian prisoners, and which has uttered no word of protest at the bombing of hospitals and the killing of Palestinian healthcare workers. A conference vote in 2025 obliged the BMA to sever relations with the IMA, but its long delay in doing this makes clear that it believed that it would damage its reputation more to invite Swee to give a talk than to maintain relations with a medical association that had acquiesced in the systematic destruction of healthcare facilities during a genocide [5]. The fact that they may well be right underlines the singular power of allegations of antisemitism.

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The same disproportion may be seen in the international response to two events in January 2024. The first was the release of an interim ruling by the International Court of Justice on the case, launched by the government of South Africa, that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. The interim ruling stated that the charge, which was supported by copious evidence, was indeed plausible. Under the UN genocide convention, this should have triggered the immediate suspension of all arms sales to Israel, as well as a range of other sanctions. None of this ensued.

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The second event was the charge, made by Israel later the same day, that twelve (out of approximately 13,000) employees of UNWRA, the United Nations Works and Reconstruction Agency, had participated in the Hamas atrocity of October 7th 2023. Israel provided no evidence for this charge, and none has since emerged. Nevertheless, the UK government, along with the governments of the US, Germany, Canada and France, immediately suspended support for UNWRA, thereby allowing Israel to starve the people of Gaza.

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To repeat: a copiously documented accusation of genocide, ruled plausible by the ICJ, had no conse- quence. An unsupported allegation that a tiny proportion of the workforce of UNWRA had participated in an attack on Israel led to the suspension of aid to the starving. That this double standard was apparently acceptable to the UK political class and commentariat shows once again the disproportionate power of accusations of antisemitism.

 

It is time to question the power and the purpose of allegations of antisemitism

 

Swee was momentarily deceived by a video whose deeply unreliable source she was not aware of, and immediately apologised when she was informed about who David Duke was. She has many Jewish friends and there is no record of her ever expressing dislike or prejudice against Jews. Nevertheless, in his Telegraph article Jake Wallis-Simons turned her into a supporter of David Duke who had “hi-jacked” The Lancet; and the hostile audience at the UCL meeting where Swee attempted to apologise, refused even to hear her apology. The unwillingness to receive or transmit an apology speaks to the purpose of the accusation: it is to discredit the accused in order to delegitimise their message.

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Under these circumstances, accusations of antisemitism against critics of Israel must not be allowed immediately to cancel their criticism. The criticisms which prompted the accusations must be examined on their merits, just as must the accusation. Too often, the accusation becomes the focus, and the criticism is ignored. Statements are either true or false, not true, false or antisemitic.

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In recent years such accusations have been deployed in the UK and the US to achieve political aims which have little to do with the welfare of Jews and much to do with defending Israel. And by shielding Israel from criticism, they have helped to generate a climate of impunity which has allowed its leaders to order atrocious acts and its citizens and supporters elsewhere to view them with approval.

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In August 2025 the UK’s Public Interest Law Centre and the European Legal Support Center (ELSC) filed a complaint against UK Lawyers for Israel. Their 114-page report, which has been sent to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, says UKLFI is using the law improperly to threaten civil society groups and is operating as an unregulated legal firm. ELSC’s Monitor Officer in Britain warned:

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UKLFI is actively suppressing solidarity with Palestine. Our research documents how UKLFI’s threatening letters to organisations have triggered concrete reprisals, including workers dis- ciplined or fired for Palestine solidarity, reputations smeared through coordinated campaigns, and events cancelled under pressure. This is a systematic strategy to criminalise solidarity with Palestine and shield genocide complicity. This complaint is a demand for accountability.

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Swee Ang has devoted her life to the relief of suffering, and has done so at considerable personal cost. The attempt to characterise her as an antisemite rests on a single incident, more than a decade ago, in which she was briefly deceived and for which she promptly apologised. The fact that the mere existence of this smear was enough to prompt a BMA committee and others to disinvite her from speaking illustrates the importance of the work of CAMPAIN in addressing this type of politically motivated misrepresentation.

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Footnotes

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[1] See the policy paper from the Institute of Palestine Studies The Systematic Targeting of Healthcare In Palestine: From the British Mandate to the Siege of Gaza and the Harvard Health and Human Rights article Prescribing Death: Israel’s Regional War on Health

 

[2] See The Kahan Commission Report on the Beirut Massacre, by Richard Falk

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[3] Since the start of this year, the Israeli government refuses MAP-affiliated doctors admission to the OPT. In common with Médecins Sans Frontières and 35 other aid organisations, its license to operate in Gaza and the OPT was revoked in January 2026, on the grounds that they had failed to provide the Israeli authorities with complete details of their staff. The aid organisations were unwilling to do so, as large numbers of aid workers and health workers (around 1750) have been killed by the Israelis in military action following the Hamas attack of October 2023, with evidence that many have been deliberately targeted.

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[4] Although Duke’s video concludes with lurid allegations of Zionist control, what he said about Israeli treatment of the Pales- tinians was largely correct, and tallied with Swee’s experience. And there is a strong case that much of what he said about the influence of the Israeli lobby on US foreign policy is also true: the well known 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John Mearsheimer (Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago) and Stephen Walt (Professor of Inter- national Relations at University of Harvard’s Kennedy School) makes persuasive arguments that US support for Israel has not been motivated by US interests but by the power of the Israel Lobby.

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[5] This is documented in the paper of Derek Summerfield in the Journal of Medical Ethics.