[News] As genocide rages, doctors must choose: Care or collaborationism

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 As genocide rages, doctors must choose: Care or collaborationism

*Healthcare workers in Gaza are refusing to abandon their patients and
communities. American doctors should be doing all we can to protect them.
Why aren’t we?*

   - [image: Eric Reinhart] <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/eric-reinhart>
   Eric Reinhart <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/eric-reinhart>
   Political anthropologist of law, psychiatry, and public health
   - [image: Bram Wispelwey]
   <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/bram-wispelwey>
   Bram Wispelwey <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/bram-wispelwey>
   Co-founder of Health for Palestine

Published On 25 Nov 2023
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/25/as-genocide-rages-doctors-must-choose-care-or-collaborationism
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[image: Doctors treat injured children in Israeli attacks at Al-Aqsa
Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al Balah, Gaza]
A doctor treats children injured by Israeli bombardment at Al-Aqsa Martyrs
Hospital in Deir Al Balah, Gaza on November 05, 2023 [Anadolu Agency/Ashraf
Amra]

“The physician is the natural attorney of the poor” was a slogan Rudolf
Virchow, a wealthy German pathologist, politician and social medicine
activist, helped popularise in the mid-nineteenth century. More than 100
years later, Frantz Fanon – a Martinican-born psychiatrist who resigned
from his position in the French medical system in protest against French
colonial violence in Algeria – expressed a less-idealised impression of the
profession.

Although the physician presents himself as “the doctor who heals the wounds
of humanity”, he is in reality “an integral part of colonisation, of
domination, of exploitation”, Fanon wrote.

Doctors across the world are familiar with Virchow’s affirming portrait of
ourselves as virtuous advocates for the oppressed. But based on the
prevailing responses of American, European, and Israeli medical
professionals to the US-backed genocide in Gaza, Fanon’s damning assessment
of doctors’ complicity with state violence rings far truer.

As the world has been witnessing daily mass killings perpetrated by the
far-right Israeli government against Palestinian civilians, including
deliberate attacks on hospitals that have killed and maimed medical staff
and patients, doctors outside Gaza have been sorting themselves into two
camps: collaborationists and resisters.

The majority of us in the Global North appear to have gathered into the
first category. Collaboration with colonial violence comes in many forms,
from passive silence or prevaricating commentaries
<https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2811877> that foster
evasion of ethical-political responsibility to active censorship by journal
editors
<https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/06/02/political-censorship-in-academic-journals-sets-a-dangerous-new-precedent/>
of Palestinian conditions, history, and perspectives, alongside public
calls by Israeli doctors
<https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/11/israel-is-bombing-hospitals-in-gaza-with-israeli-doctors-approval>
for the murder of their Palestinian counterparts by bombing Gaza’s
hospitals.

Especially pernicious are intellectually and ethically bankrupt claims that
invoking historical and political-economic analyses of the root causes of
current violence <https://gh.bmj.com/content/8/10/e014269> linked to
occupation and apartheid policies is tantamount to justifying violence
committed by Hamas, and is thus impermissible.

Such claims are a standard tactic for manufacturing consent for the
perpetuation of colonial domination. They aim to obscure its enduring
cruelty and inhibit would-be resisters from using their voices and
influence to stop it.

The incentives for collaboration and disincentives for dissent are clear.
The US House of Representatives has sanctioned the sole
Palestinian-American congressperson, Rashida Tlaib, for calling for a
ceasefire and repeating aspirations for Palestinian liberation
<https://jewishcurrents.org/what-does-from-the-river-to-the-sea-really-mean>
.

A large number of billionaire donors have used the power of their
checkbooks to demand McCarthyist policies on campuses across the country.

In response, most well-protected faculty have remained cooperatively
silent, while donor-responsive university presidents at elite institutions
like Columbia, Harvard, and University of Pennsylvania have suspended
pro-Palestinian and Jewish student groups that have protested against
continuing violence in the occupied Palestinian territory.

In this climate of intimidation in which criticism of racist Zionist
violence and sympathy for Palestinian lives are cynically conflated with
anti-Semitism, various federal and state initiatives have been launched to
investigate claims of anti-Semitism on university campuses.

This reality has not been lost on the most powerful figures in American
medicine, who generally depend upon university appointments and associated
academic honours for advancing their careers.

Not a single major medical professional organisation in the US has come out
against the acute-on-chronic genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, let alone
rallied their substantial lobbying power to oppose US lawmakers’ active
support for it.

Despite this and the risks entailed
<https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/8/health-institutions-must-demand-an-end-to-israels-atrocities-in-gaza>,
many US doctors have begun organising among themselves, joining larger
movements beyond our profession, and banding together with a broad array of
healthcare workers in search of ways to stop the violence.

Many of those in the US medical field who, to date, have fallen into the
collaborationist camp would no doubt vehemently deny the accusation if
confronted and express outrage that anyone would dare to impugn their moral
standing.

Some might point to their abundant publications, lectures, and research
grants related to diversity and inclusion, health equity, global health, or
human rights as evidence of their unimpeachable virtue.

But when measured by their effects for those subjected to US-sponsored
colonial violence and dispossession in Gaza and the West Bank right now,
such defences are worse than hollow. They function to provide cover for the
ethical failure of the US medical profession to leverage our substantial
political influence to condemn colonial violence and demand that our
government stop enabling it.

We can, however, do otherwise. As Fanon noted in “Medicine and Colonialism”
and demonstrated through his own life, despite doctors’ structurally
conditioned tendencies to align with colonial oppression, we are also fully
capable of opposing it – provided that we have the courage to refuse the
comforts of complicity and accept personal risks.

When doctors leave their upper-class, professional value systems to instead
embrace “sleeping on the ground” beside dispossessed groups while “living
the drama of the people”, as Fanon put it, commitment to the trappings of
polite “professionalism” gives way to active solidarity. The doctor who
commits to working shoulder-to-shoulder with the displaced and dispossessed
can transform from an “agent of colonialism” into a physician worthy of the
term caregiver.

Few American doctors have delivered care in the occupied Palestinian
territory or accompanied the residents of Gaza or the West Bank as they
negotiate everyday deprivations under Israeli blockades and occupation.

By what means, then, are we to join in solidarity with an oppressed people
thousands of miles away? We should look to and take direction from the
Palestinian
healthcare workers
<https://jewishcurrents.org/we-have-lost-the-ability-to-provide-true-care>
and the foreign colleagues alongside them who have devoted themselves to
caring for the sick and wounded no matter the cost.

While providing medical help under conditions that would cause most doctors
in the Global North to give up, one doctor in Gaza
<https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/palestinians-sue-biden-failure-prevent-genocide-seek-emergency>
has even found time to fill the vacuum of ethical-political initiative left
by ineffectual American physicians, suing US President Joe Biden for
failing to prevent an unfolding genocide and for his active complicity in
it.

“We will not abandon our patients or our communities,” Gaza’s healthcare
workers have repeatedly said as their workplaces have been bombed.

We should, in turn, refuse to abandon them.

When we cannot or will not join in caring for the most dispossessed, our
minimal ethical responsibility as doctors who claim to value human life is
to do all we can to protect our colleagues who are doing this difficult,
essential work. As a professional community, we have been refusing to meet
even this barest of ethical standards.

Some will dismiss this appeal for doctors to reject collaborationism and to
join in action-oriented solidarity with our Palestinian colleagues who are
risking – and losing – their lives to care for those in greatest need as
“divisive” and lacking “nuance”.

For anyone genuinely interested, dispassionately presented historical
accounts of Zionist settler colonialism, the resultant apartheid system
<https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/>,
the chronic destruction of Palestinian public health, and nuanced legal
appeals to protect the rights of Palestinians have been presented countless
times before and are readily available.

But as the murders of Palestinian civilians continue to mount by the
hundreds with each passing day, we should refuse to nuance or debate
preventable atrocity or to permit the fantasy of a middle ground for those
who wish to abstain from “taking a side”.

There is no possible justification for what the Israeli and US governments
have been doing in Gaza. The only ethical stance for physicians – or anyone
else – is to demand a permanent ceasefire, an immediate end to ethnic
cleansing in both Gaza and the West Bank, and the dismantling of the
apartheid system that ensures an unending stream of both perpetual and
punctuated violence.

In the face of genocide, drawing lines and forcing decisive action is a
basic ethical duty, no matter who it offends nor what personal or
professional costs it may entail.

*The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.*
------------------------------

   - [image: Eric Reinhart] <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/eric-reinhart>
   Eric Reinhart <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/eric-reinhart>
   Political anthropologist of law, psychiatry, and public health
   Eric Reinhart, MD, is a political anthropologist of law, psychiatry, and
   public health.
   - [image: Bram Wispelwey]
   <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/bram-wispelwey>
   Bram Wispelwey <https://www.aljazeera.com/author/bram-wispelwey>
   Co-founder of Health for Palestine
   Bram Wispelwey, MD, is a member of the leadership collective of the
   Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights and co-founder of Health for
   Palestine, a community organising initiative in Palestinian refugee camps.
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