Malaria in Palestine: the elephant in the room.

This paper examines the overlooked, forgotten or even ignored role played by malaria when considering the start of the Arab-Israel conflict in the Middle East. It would seem that anything associated with Zionism or Israel today is vilified, boycotted or shunned in certain quarters. Thus, by choosing to boycott anything that had a connection with Zionism or Israel, a study of the steps and events leading to the launch of the first start of sustainable malaria control has been missed, discouraging the malaria community of an opportunity to consider why and how certain methods were employed to achieve a desired successful outcome. In particular, there appears to be an attempt to suppress the fact that Palestine over 100 years ago was desolate, in many rural areas it was either almost empty or uninhabitable, due to the severity of the disease.