The campaign to boycott and to sanction Israel and Jerusalem argues that such actions will promote the rights of Palestinians. As I and many other commentators argued earlier this week, the politically correct elements of this statement are actually coated in the repulsiveness of raw racism.

With no small amount of irony, this week has also seen the release of two news items that must count as ‘big fail notices’ in the BDS corner. First, Jordan and Israel have released the details for a tender to build a canal together that will link the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. In parallel, it appears that during the Paris conference of world leaders,  the honoured guests were protected by a healthy chunk of Israel aerial technology.

And then there are ‘the gates of the righteous’ in Jerusalem.

This is the translation of the phrase “Sha’are Zedek“, which is the name of what is probably Jerusalem’s biggest hospital. And it is an institution that I have written about before. In a city of around 850,000 citizens, they carried out around 3,000 operations in November alone.

Walk into the hospital, you see visitors and patients of all persuasions from ultra-orthodox Jews in their own garb to observant Muslims with their own dress code. In the children’s dialysis unit, the receivers of treatment from whatever their socio-ethnic-ethnic background sit side-by-side for weeks and become ‘almost’ friends.

As for the doctors, there are around 25 Israeli non-Jews. In addition, there are about 20 Palestinian doctors, who are receiving training and then return to the various towns and cities in the West Bank. And you will find these post grads in most parts of the hospital; gastro, diagnostic imaging, surgery, etc. And I should quickly add that Sha’are Zeek is not alone in this multicultural approach, even when it comes to treating terrorists.

There is an alternative to these practices in a hospital in Israel: A boycott. But then how many lives – in Israel, in the Palestinian territories or even elsewhere – would be lost? How many families would suffer? So BDS is not just racism, it can kill. That to me is a double evil.