The political wing of our NHS has moved on from frantically erasing the word ‘woman’ from its cervical cancer awareness-raising campaigns. Urging ‘birthing parents’ to take up ‘chest-feeding’ is no longer its primary concern. Even pronoun badges and rainbow lanyards are old hat. Hard-pressed doctors and nurses have a new cause to rally around: hating on Israel.

When it comes to the abuse of Jewish people, the NHS seems to apply different standards

Transgender activism within the NHS was, and still is, shameful. It alienated women and left those with little English struggling to access the services they needed, and it degraded female nurses who were forced to undress alongside transgender-identifying male colleagues. But at least it focused on what goes on within the NHS rather than events taking place in a tiny country over 2,000 miles away. Squint a bit and rainbow lanyards are quite pretty. But the anti-Semitism unleashed by the campaign against Israel is exceedingly ugly.

In a shocking new documentary, the Campaign Against Antisemitism exposes the horrific prejudice Jewish healthcare professionals experience while going about their working lives and the discrimination Jewish patients experience in the course of seeking treatment. There’s the Jewish nurse, Shelley Lipman, who alleges she was subjected to a Nazi salute from a colleague. There’s the Jewish brain cancer patient, Saul Freeman, who says he was told by his surgeon – mid-operation and while under local anaesthetic – that Jews killed Palestinian children ‘for fun’.

There’s the Jewish medical professor who claims to have received anti-Semitic death threats and the emergency worker who was physically attacked by a colleague. And there’s the Jewish patient who discovered they were being treated by Dr Wahid Asif Shaida, the chairman of the British branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir, going under the name Abdul Wahid. Dr Shaida was suspended from NHS practice when the Islamist terrorist organisation was formally banned, but he stood down from his position after the organisation was proscribed and his suspension was lifted just six months later after it was determined that there was insufficient evidence that he was not fit to practise.

On and on it goes. The Campaign Against Antisemitism has statistics, too. Its polling reveals that one third of British Jews who have used the NHS since Hamas launched its attack on Israel in October 2023 felt uncomfortable due to their Jewish identity, with more than four in ten claiming to have taken steps to hide the fact that they are Jewish.

Yet almost as shocking as the abuse experienced by Jewish doctors, nurses and patients is the NHS’s pathetic response. The member of staff who allegedly served up the Nazi salute remains employed. ‘He’s still there,’ Ms Lipman says, ‘I hate it. I absolutely hate it.’ Mr Freeman, the brain cancer patient, complained about his treatment to Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, but he says the trust told him it was unable to provide details of any investigations into individual members of staff. Jane McNicholas, the Trust’s chief medical officer, claims that Mr Freeman’s allegations are being reviewed ‘as a matter of urgency’. Clearly definitions of ‘urgency’ vary.

It is unimaginable to think that a health professional could get away with donning a KKK robe and keep his job. Or that a doctor could have once led a party like Restore Britain, or have attended rallies alongside Tommy Robinson, and still be in post. It is impossible to think that a surgeon could slander black people, mid-operation, and not be severely disciplined. Yet when it comes to the abuse of Jewish people, the NHS seems to apply different standards.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked by the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s findings. Evidence of the NHS’s growing anti-Semitism has long been there, and some doctors are even punished. In November last year, Rahmeh Aladwan was suspended for social media posts that ‘demonise, or express and encourage hatred towards Jews in general, their history and their way of life’ – a punishment she later blamed on ‘the Jewish lobby’. And in February, Najmiah Ahmad was reprimanded for sharing posts claiming ‘Zionists’ were complicit in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. But these cases barely scratch the surface of a malignant culture of Jew-hatred.

In a bid to tackle hostility towards Jewish patients and staff, government ministers solicited advice from Lord Mann and, in June this year, they accepted all his recommendations which included mandatory anti-Semitism training and restrictions on staff members wearing political symbols. Yet the British Medical Association immediately voted to oppose these recommendations. Again, it is impossible to imagine the BMA rejecting proposals to combat racism.

How have we got to this point? We need to return to the cervix-havers and chest-feeding. For far too long, the NHS has not just blurred the line between politics and medicine but actively sought to make practice political. The whole point of diversity, equity and inclusion managers, who come at a total cost to the NHS of some £40 million a year, and individually earn double the salary of junior doctors, seems to be ensuring the health service engages in political virtue signalling. Yet, as we see, when it comes to Israel, this rapidly morphs into hate-signalling. We urgently need a health service that focuses on just one job: treating the sick.