February 7, 2024
There is no effective health care
system left in Gaza.
Infants are dying. Children are
having their limbs amputated without anesthesia.
Thousands of cancer patients and
those in need of dialysis lack treatment. The last cancer hospital in Gaza has
ceased functioning. An estimated 50,000 pregnant women have no safe place to
give birth. They undergo cesarean sections without anesthesia.
Miscarriage rates are up 300 percent
since the Israeli assault began. The wounded bleed to death. There is no
sanitation or clean water. Hospitals have been bombed and shelled. Nasser
Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza, is “near collapse.”
Clinics, along with ambulances — 79
in Gaza and over 212 in the West Bank — have been destroyed. Some 400 doctors,
nurses, medics and healthcare workers have been killed — more than the total of
all healthcare workers killed in conflicts around the world combined since
2016.
Over 100 more have been detained,
interrogated, beaten and tortured, or disappeared by Israeli soldiers.
Israeli soldiers routinely enter
hospitals to carry out forced evacuations — on Jan. 24, troops entered al-Amal
Hospital in Khan Younis and demanded doctors and displaced Palestinians leave —
as well as round up detainees, including the wounded, sick and medical staff.
On Jan. 30, disguised as hospital
workers and civilians, Israeli soldiers entered Jenin’s Ibn Sina Hospital in
the West Bank and assassinated three Palestinians as they slept.
The cuts to funding for the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)
— collective punishment for the alleged involvement in the Oct. 7 attack of 12
of its 13,000 UNRWA workers — will accelerate the horror, turning the
attacks, starvation, lack of health care and spread of infectious diseases in
Gaza into a tidal wave of death.
The evidence-free charges, which
include the accusation that 10 percent of all of UNRWA’s Gaza staff have ties
to Islamist militant groups, appeared in The Wall Street Journal. The reporter,
Carrie-Keller Lynn, served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Given the numerous lies Israel has
employed to justify its genocide, including “beheaded babies” and “mass rape,”
it is reasonable to assume this may be another fabrication.
The allegations, of which details
remain scant, are apparently based on confessions by Palestinian detainees —
most certainly after being beaten or tortured. These allegations were enough to
see 17 countries including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Australia
and Japan cut or delay funding to the vital U.N. agency.
UNRWA is all that stands between the
Palestinians in Gaza and famine. A handful of countries, including Ireland,
Norway and Turkey, maintain their funding.
Eight of the UNRWA employees accused
of participating in the Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel, where 1,139 people
were killed and 240 abducted, were fired. Two have been suspended. UNRWA has
promised an investigation. They account for 0.04 percent of UNRWA’s staff.
Destroying UNRWA
Israel is seeking to destroy not
only Gaza’s health care system and infrastructure, but UNRWA which provides
food and aid to 2 million Palestinians. The object is to make Gaza
uninhabitable and ethnically cleanse the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.
Hundreds of thousands are already
starving. Over 70 percent of the housing has been destroyed. More than 26,700
people have been killed and over 65,600 have been injured. Thousands are
missing. Some 90 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population has been displaced, with
many living in the open. Palestinians have been reduced to eating grass and
drinking contaminated water.
Noga Arbell, a former Israeli
Foreign Ministry official, during a discussion in the Israeli parliament on
Jan. 4, stated:
“It will be impossible to win the war if we do not destroy UNRWA, and this
destruction must begin immediately.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on
Jan. 31, saying UNWRA was “totally infiltrated by Hamas,” reiterated the call
to shut UNRWA down.
If UNWRA is abolished it puts into
question the Palestinians’ status as refugees, imperiling the “Right of
Return,” the demand, long rejected by Israel, that Palestinians be allowed to
go back to their homes in what is now Israel.
“It’s time for the international
community and the U.N. itself to understand that UNRWA’s mission must be
terminated,” Netanyahu told visiting U.N. delegates, according to a statement
from his office.
“It seeks to preserve the issue of Palestinian refugees. We must replace
UNRWA with other U.N. agencies and other aid agencies, if we want to solve the
Gaza problem as we plan to do.”
More than 152 of UNRWA’s employees
in Gaza — including school principals, teachers, health workers, a
gynecologist, engineers, support staff and a psychologist — have been killed
since the Israeli attacks began. Over 141 UNRWA facilities have been bombed
into rubble.
The death toll is the largest loss
of staff during a conflict in the U.N.’s history.
The destruction of healthcare
facilities and targeting of doctors, nurses, medics and staff is especially
repugnant. It means the most vulnerable, the sick, infants, the wounded and
elderly, and those who care for them, are often condemned to death.
Palestinian Doctors’ Global Appeal
Palestinian doctors are pleading
with doctors and medical organizations from around the world to decry the
assault on the healthcare system and mobilize their institutions to protest.
“The world must condemn the acts
against medical professionals happening in Gaza,” writes the director of
Al-Shifa Hospital, Muhammad Abu Salmiya, who was arrested along with other
medical personnel by the Israelis in November 2023 while evacuating with a
World Health Organization (WHO) convoy, and who remains in custody.
“This Correspondence is a call for every human being, all medical
communities, and all health-care professionals around the world to call for
these anti-hospital activities inside and around the hospitals to stop, which
is a civilian obligation according to international law, the UN, and WHO.”
But these institutions — with a few
notable exceptions such as The American Public Health Association that has
called for a ceasefire — have either remained silent or, as with Dr. Matthew K.
Wynia, the director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the
University of Colorado, attempted to justify Israeli war crimes.
These doctors — who somehow find it
acceptable that in Gaza a child is killed every 10 minutes on average — are
accomplices to genocide and stand in violation of the Geneva Convention. They
embrace death as a solution, not life.
Robert Jay Lifton in his book The
Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide writes that
“genocidal projects require the active participation of educated professionals
— physicians, scientists, engineers, military leaders, lawyers, clergy,
university professors and other teachers — who combine to create not only the
technology of genocide but much of its ideological rationale, moral climate,
and organizational process.”
A group of 100 Israeli doctors in
November 2023 defended the bombing of hospitals in Gaza, claiming they were
used as Hamas command centers, a charge Israel has been unable to verify.
The deans of U.S. medical schools
and leading medical organizations, especially the American Medical Association
(AMA) have joined the ranks of universities, law schools, churches and the
media to turn their backs on the Palestinians.
The AMA shut down a debate on a
ceasefire resolution among its members and has called for “medical neutrality,”
although it abandoned “medical neutrality” to denounce Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine.
There is a cost to denouncing this
genocide, a cost they do not intend to pay. They fear being attacked. They fear
destroying their careers. They fear losing funding. They fear a loss of status.
They fear persecution. They fear social isolation. This fear makes them
complicit.
And what of those who do speak out?
They are branded as anti-Semites and supporters of terrorism. George Washington
University clinical psychology professor Lara Sheehi was pushed out of her job.
The former head of Human Rights
Watch, Kenneth Roth, was denied a fellowship at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human
Rights Policy because of his alleged “anti-Israel bias.” San Francisco
professor Rabab Abdulhadi was sued for supporting Palestinian rights.
Shahd Abusalama was suspended from
Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K. after a vicious smear campaign,
although the institution later settled her discrimination claim against it.
Professor Jasbir Puar at Rutgers University is an ongoing target for the Israel
lobby and endures constant harassment.
Medical students and faculty in
Canada face suspension or expulsion if they publicly criticize Israel.
The danger is not only that the
Israeli crimes are denounced. The danger, more importantly, is that the moral
bankruptcy and cowardice of the institutions and their leaders are exposed.
Dr. Rupa Marya
This brings me to Dr. Rupa Marya, a
professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF),
whose call to halt bombing hospitals and to examine the impact of Zionism as a
racist ideology unleashed a torrent of vitriolic attacks against her, attacks
tacitly endorsed by the medical school where she works.
She has been slandered as an
anti-Semite and targeted by the Canary Mission, a Zionist organization that
seeks to defame and destroy the careers of students and faculty that criticize
Israel and defend Palestinian rights.
She has had speaking engagements
rescinded and received death threats and messages such as: “kill yourself you
retarded grifting n*gger,” “Jew baiting c*nt,” and “White people are the
greatest people on Earth. You know this.”
You can see her statement on the
campaign against her here.
There is a striking contrast between
the treatment of Dr. Marya and the physicians who cheer on the genocide. UCSF
physician Matt Cooperberg, who is the Helen Diller Family chair in urology,
“liked” social media posts such as “REMOVE Palestinians FORM [sic] MAP” and a
quote by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir:
“We are able to forgive the the [sic] arabs for killing our children. We
are unable to forgive the arabs for forcing us to kill their children.”
“Cooperberg’s endowed chair comes
from the Helen Diller Family Foundation, UCSF’s largest donor, which to date
has gifted some $1.15 billion dollars to the health campus,” Marya writes.
“In 2018, due to a mistake on a tax
form, the Helen Diller Family Foundation was exposed as a funder of the Canary
Mission. The Foundation attempted to erase its connection after this exposure.”
She continues:
“As a faculty member at UCSF, disgraced dermatologist Howard Maibach
exposed and injected over 2,600 imprisoned Black and brown people with
chemicals in experiments that echoed the experiments put on trial at the
Doctors’ Trial just a few years before he went to medical school in
Pennsylvania.
There he studied under Albert Kligman, who taught him how to exploit Black
people for medical experimentation, documented extensively in the horror
nonfiction book, Acres of Skin. Maibach
also advanced notions of racial differences in skin, furthering racist ideas
from the pseudoscience of eugenics. Race is a social construct that enshrines
supremacism. It is not a biological reality.
Most of Maibach’s experiments were conducted without informed consent, and
while UCSF issued an apology, Maibach is still employed by the University of
California. His family supports the Friends of the IDF, and he is represented
by Alan Dershowitz, who also argued for the bombing of hospitals in Gaza.
Dershowitz attempted to prevent me from speaking at the AMA’s first
National Health Equity Grand Rounds, where scholar Harriet Washington, who
studies medical experimentation on Black people, highlighted Maibach’s racist
practices.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, UCSF faculty, trainees and students
of color brought Maibach’s story to light, and many have expressed their horror
that they have to continue to sit in the same room as this man during
Dermatology Grand Rounds.
But the problem is not just one man. It is a system that allows someone
with these values and actions to continue to be present in our learning and
practicing community.”
The dehumanization of Palestinians
is lifted from the playbook of all settler colonial projects, including that of
the U.S. This racism, where people of color are branded as “human animals,” is
coded within the DNA of U.S. institutions.
It infects those chosen to lead
these institutions. It lies at the core of U.S. national identity. It is why
the two ruling parties and the institutions that sustain them side with Israel.
It feeds the perverted logic of funneling weapons and billions of dollars in
support to sustain Israel’s occupation and genocide.
History will not judge this kindly.
But it will revere those who, under siege, found the courage to say no.
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