Sir

Your Opinion article “Don't boycott Israel's scientists” (Nature 417, 1; 2002) expresses concern that a European boycott of Israeli scientists will harm three-way collaboration involving Palestinian scientists as well. This argument would have gained in cogency by including a Palestinian perspective.

Were there reason to believe that Palestinian scientists could participate freely in such collaborations, unimpeded by arbitrary and unpredictable curfews imposed by an occupying army, denying them access to their own laboratories, not to mention European hosts, those of us who signed the call for a moratorium — not an unlimited boycott — might not have felt compelled to take such a drastic step.