From the Editor

I am pleased that correspondence about Martin Kemp's ‘Dehumanization, guilt and large group dynamics with reference to the West, Israel and the Palestinians’ continues in this issue of the BJP. My purpose here is to respond to the substantive questions about the editorial process for the article that were posed in the last issue by Mary Adams, Jane Polden, and James Astor (Letters, BJP 28(2): 264-267). Among other strands, three themes stand out from their letters: why was the article treated differently from other submissions, in being framed by an Editor's Note? What were the peer reviewers' assessments of the original article? Why the neutral tone of the published article, and why was it imposed on the author by the BJP? These are all valid questions, cogently argued, and I welcome the opportunity to respond.

To start with, the rationale for the Editor's Note. There was, in the first place, both the political sensitivity of the topic and the question ‘why a clinical journal?’ for publication of the article. In my view, these called for acknowledgement and commentary, in both online and print formats. In addition, I took the view that the publishing history of the article was significant in and of itself, in terms of process, and that it would be valuable, on scholarly grounds, to provide a brief account of this process.

Jane Polden suggests that the peer review process was used ‘for some other purpose than to address issues of academic quality and relevance’. I can reassure her, and readers who may have had the same thought, that the intention was precisely to address academic quality and relevance, from different perspectives on the situation in the Middle East. It is also true, as my Editor's Note indicated, that the political and psychic sensitivities of the topic led me to select peer reviewers who had their own experience of - and view of - the conflict. Not to have done so would have introduced bias. The phrase ‘constituences in the conflict’ was however not