eLife’s Michael Eisen ousted for social media posts perceived as siding with Palestinians over Israel
and longtime critic of traditional journals, says he is losing that job for publicly endorsing a satirical article that criticized people dying in Gaza for not condemning the recent attacks on Israel by the Palestinian group Hamas.
Criticism of Eisen, who is Jewish, for a perceived lack of sympathy for the Israelis killed by Hamas immediately erupted. But the scientist, who is known for being provocative, did not retreat. A day later,, “Every sane person on Earth is horrified and traumatized by what Hamas did and wants it to never happen again. All the more so as a Jew with Israeli family. But I am also horrified by the collective punishment already being meted out on Gazans, and the worse that is about to come.
“The whole enterprise we’re engaged in rests on the ability to have open intellectual exchange about any topic and express our views honestly,” says Josh Dubnau, a neurobiologist at Stony Brook University and one of the letter’s authors. “Nothing he said was repugnant or hateful. There shouldn’t be consequences for minority views in academia.” Dubnau went on to ask whetherwould define acceptable positions on other controversial issues, such as abortion or the war in Ukraine.
Eisen says the board told him he would be fired if he did not resign, but he refused. “I think this was a terrible decision byleadership,” Eisen says. “They’re going to alienate and have alienated a huge part of the community: people who don’t think it’s bad to express political opinions that not everybody agrees with.”
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