[News] UC San Francisco fired me for speaking out against genocide, but as a physician I could not remain silent

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/uc-san-francisco-fired-me-for-speaking-out-against-genocide-but-as-a-physician-i-could-not-remain-silent/?ml_recipient=157455920598615134&ml_link=157455894694593852&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2025-06-17&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation>
UC San Francisco fired me for speaking out against genocide, but as a
physician I could not remain silent
Rupa Marya
June 16, 2025
------------------------------

In May 2025, after 23 years of service, I was fired from my position
<https://theintercept.com/2025/06/05/gaza-israel-san-francisco-ucsf-doctor-professor/>
as a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco
(UCSF). As healthcare workers were being targeted, tortured, and killed in
Gaza by Israel’s US-backed genocide, I could not remain quiet. I spoke out
as Gaza’s hospitals were bombed. I brought everything I had as a physician
dedicated to building a world of health for all, as a scholar of
colonialism and health, as an activist who has stood with Indigenous
grandmothers at Standing Rock and survivors of racist police violence in
San Francisco, and as a mother who cares for my own children and as a
corollary, all children. For my protected speech, which was supportive of
Palestinian rights and critical of Israel’s violence and the racism that
leads to genocide, I was maligned, attacked, and ultimately fired.

But my university’s attacks on me started long before October 7th. For
several years, when I would advocate for hospitalized Black or poor
patients who were not getting the standard of care, UCSF leadership would
call me into the office and chastise me. When I advocated outside the
hospital walls for unhoused and other marginalized people who were shot by
the police in San Francisco, university lawyers would call me, attempting
to harass me into silence.

I have been targeted because the stories I share challenge the powers that
be. I am attacked because of my worldview that all beings deserve
health–including Palestinians–and because my scholarship reveals that
health for all <https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374602529/inflamed/>is
impossible under colonial dynamics of power, which will always entrench a
supremacist logic, thereby relegating certain classes of people to
sickness. Our duty as healthcare workers is to put a finger on what ails us
and to speak up when we have come to an understanding that can help prevent
illness and death. In order to do that, healthcare workers need our voices
to be protected and unfettered.
*The narrative battlefield*

While I endured years of harassment at UCSF when advocating for Black
patients’ healthcare, the university’s attacks on me escalated sharply
after I started articulating the health impacts of settler colonialism in
Palestine. Settler colonialism is a form of colonization where a group of
settlers takes over land from a native population, establishing long-term
occupation, denying the native group basic rights. Ireland used to be a
settler colony, but achieved its liberation in 1922, after over 700 years
of brutal British colonization. The U.S., Canada, and Australia are ongoing
settler colonial nations. Settler colonial states require systems of
supremacy to enforce their legitimacy. Racism is a founding principle of
their origin and is a requisite component for their continuity. While the
British went around the world characterizing the Black and brown people
whose land they stole as “savage,” that racist epithet was first used on
the Irish.

When I asked questions
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TrioXH-4gi-Ig12xBLPo5LoDa9FmaWYs/view>
about the impact of a supremacist logic in medicine–a worldview that has
led to more than 77 years of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and now
genocide–California State Senator Scott Wiener vilified me
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/07/rupa-marya-university-of-california-san-francisco>
and then my university followed suit,
<https://theintercept.com/2024/11/19/ucsf-medical-palestine-speech/> both
twisting my words to cast me as “antisemitic.” The same “reality bending”
<https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780429487880/psychoanalysis-occupation-lara-sheehi-stephen-sheehi>
attacks happened when I spoke publicly about concerns raised by UCSF
medical students who were uncomfortable when a new student arrived,
announcing they had come from a country with mandatory service in a
military that is actively committing genocide. I asked urgent questions of
medical ethics: how do we, as a profession, handle situations in which
medical schools admit students from a country with mandatory military
service that is actively committing genocide?

Although State Senator Wiener
<https://x.com/Scott_Wiener/status/1837570677492404558> framed me as
“targeting a 1st year med student for harassment b/c he’s Israeli,” what my
questions probed was not about a specific nationality. Israel has mandatory
military service and allows people of multiple nationalities to serve in
its military. There are currently over 23,000 U.S. citizens
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/22/israel-gaza-war-americans-killed/>
participating in the Israeli military, and by extension its war crimes. My
concern was neither the student’s nationality, and certainly not their
religion, but rather the context of genocide and the action: possible
participation in perpetrating genocide. The urgent issue at hand is not my
job or the particulars of what I said. It is about our ability to speak out
about the brutal genocide in Palestine, which is funded by our taxes. The
broader issue is the way settler colonialism creates narratives that
justify oppression and silence those who resist.

Distorting and mischaracterizing my words as State Senator Wiener did led
to threats to rape or murder me
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1914YTxWEn0fSW6lDpaMuOPnYEtZ50jND/view?usp=sharing>
that continued for months. Sponsors cancelled speaking opportunities, and
the press repeatedly smeared me. UCSF suspended me, attacked my medical
license, and then fired me without due process. No one with a public voice
is immune from this treatment. In the most bizarre twist of my case, UCSF’s
investigative report, which they compiled with the disgraced Paul Weiss
<https://www.globallegalpost.com/news/seventh-paul-weiss-partner-exits-for-litigation-boutique-in-wake-of-trump-deal-493984>
law firm to build a case to fire me, states that there is no first-year
Israeli medical student
<https://jweekly.com/2025/06/06/israeli-medical-student-targeted-by-ucsf-professor-may-not-exist/>.
I was suspended and fired, in part for allegedly harassing someone who may
not exist. This twist led my legal team to consider, in the free speech
lawsuits filed
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/07/rupa-marya-university-of-california-san-francisco>
in state and federal court, the manner in which the overblown reaction to
my words was manufactured to silence me. The legitimate ethical concerns I
raised about medical professionals being involved in committing acts of
genocide remain unaddressed. And the genocide still rages in Gaza.
*Shared histories, shared resistance*

Settler colonial realities are, by definition, authoritarian. Under the
current Trump administration, we see its teeth laid bare, with judges
arrested, students abducted, immigrants deported, and doctors fired. The
brutal processes we are witnessing in Palestine are not too distant history
in the U.S. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act
<https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/civil_war/MorrillLandGrantCollegeAct_FeaturedDoc.htm#:~:text=First%20proposed%20when%20Morrill%20was,law%20on%20July%202%2C%201862.>Land
Grant College Act, which gave an estimated 11 million acres of land stolen
<https://www.hcn.org/issues/52-4/indigenous-affairs-education-land-grab-universities/>
through violent dispossession of Indigenous people to universities across
the US. California received 150,000 acres,
<https://www.library.ca.gov/crb/quick-hits/uc-history/origin/#:~:text=The%20Morrill%20Act,-In%201862%2C%20the&text=Land%2Dgrant%20colleges%20were%20required,states.%20California%20received%20150%2C000%20acres.>
which was used to start the University of California.

UCSF has its own specific colonial role towards California’s Indigenous
people. When Ishi walked out of the woods
<https://history.library.ucsf.edu/ishi.html>in Oroville in 1911, the last
surviving member of his tribe who was massacred by the State of
California’s genocide
<https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300230697/an-american-genocide/> to
clear land for American/European settlers, he was brought to UCSF for care.
That care included putting him on display as a “living artifact,” and when
he died, stealing his brain
<https://synapse.ucsf.edu/articles/2014/05/29/ishi-greatest-anthropological-treasure>
and sending it to the Smithsonian. Organ theft and trafficking,
<https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/109/2/388/6747682> morbidly,
are other hallmarks of settler colonial violence. Indigenous resistance to
these and other gross indignities is criminalized as the stories of our
outrage are silenced.

The inconvenient stories I share counter the narrative attempts by my
university to brand itself as “Redefining Possible” in health. But what can
actually be possible for Black and brown patients from a university that is
actively involved in harming them? UCSF lab workers claim they were exposed
to harmful radiation
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/shipyard-ucsf-radiation-19566083.php>at
its animal lab located on the Hunters Point Shipyard EPA Superfund site.
While expanding the health campus into historically Black neighborhoods
<https://missionlocal.org/2021/09/census-2020-as-san-francisco-grew-the-ethnic-makeup-of-its-neighborhoods-changed-heres-how/>
upending longtime residents
<https://www.urbandisplacement.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/bay_area_re-segregation_rising_housing_costs_report_2019.pdf>,
UCSF offers to study homelessness in Black communit
<https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/resources/reports/toward-equity-understanding-black-californians-experiences-homelessness>ies,
instead of securing their right to remain. From the Right to Remain
<https://righttoremain.org.uk/> to Right to Return,
<https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-210170/> these rights get
at the heart of dynamics of power in a world structured through Western
imperialism and ultimately dictate who gets to be healthy and who gets to
be sick.

The questions I asked that triggered my university to illegally fire me
shed light on a patterned trifecta
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/14/chris-rufo-jo-boaler-academics-woke>made
up of billionaire donors, their lackeys in government and university
administrators who work together to target students and academics for their
free speech across the U.S., because they do not like the narrative we are
speaking, which right now is calling to stop the genocide in Gaza and
liberate Palestine. This unholy alliance of oppression
<https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/18/us/project-esther-heritage-foundation-palestine.html>,
designed to crush support for Palestinians, has been violating the U.S.
Constitution by denying our rights to free speech on university campuses
and in public across the U.S.. Their activity is not to stop racism. Their
goal, in fact, is to reinforce it.

To demonstrate this bias, in the face of glaring racism, UCSF was not
inspired to fire Dr. Howard Maibach, after it was publicly revealed that he
injected and exposed over 2600 Black and brown imprisoned people
<https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1176506772/faculty-of-color-fought-to-shed-light-on-universitys-unethical-experiments>
to industrial chemicals, without informed consent, while on faculty. These
occurred just years after the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trials
<https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4515&context=faculty_scholarship>,
which established the field of medical ethics. When this horror came to
light in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, UCSF responded with a “*mi
culpa*”
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/UCSF-apologizes-for-unethical-experiments-17670940.php>
and suggested an oral history project as remediation. As of 2022, Maibach
was still receiving a $211,417 paycheck as a professor at UCSF. He is
represented by “Israel’s lawyer,” Alan Dershowitz, who tried to pressure my
university to stop me from speaking at the American Medical Association’s
National Health Equity’s Grand Rounds
<https://www.healthequitygrandrounds.org/history-racism-us-health-care-root-causes-todays-hierarchy-and-systems-power>
in February 2023, where we explored Maibach’s illegal and unethical
behavior through the lens of the legacy of racism in medicine. These are
the kinds of stories they hope to silence, because these narratives expose
dynamics of history and power alive today that relegate marginalized people
to poor health. To make health possible for all, power must be shared,
which is exactly what the people invested in settler colonialism fear.
*Silencing as genocide enablement*

The effect of silencing doctors and other healthcare workers has a
particularly grave impact. Because when doctors are silenced, people die.
In fact, silencing doctors is a key tactical aspect of how the US-sponsored
Israeli genocide has unfolded and accelerated. For six weeks starting in
October 2023, I was in daily contact
<https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2023/11/01/medicine-palestine-israel-hospital>
with Palestinian-British surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who was operating
in Gaza’s hospitals under a state of complete Israeli siege and continued
bombardment. He relayed the horrors of operating by phone light after
Israel cut the electricity, of amputating without adequate anesthesia
because Israel blocked the entry of medicines into Gaza, and of caring for
children that Israeli soldiers had deliberately shot in the head.

I shared these reports with colleagues, editors, and organizations across
the U.S. and was stunned to see the immediacy of silencing. No one wanted
to broadcast the doctor’s alarms about these evolving war crimes. One
academic physician said, “I’m afraid to speak up because of my racist boss.
He has to sign off on my grant application.” Leadership in medicine across
the West made it clear that sharing the suffering and deaths of
Palestinians was considered a direct affront to the feelings of people who
support Israel. What a callous and depraved arithmetic.

Later in 2024, Dr. Abu Sittah was working in Beirut and throughout southern
Lebanon, caring for some of the thousands of people injured in Israel’s
synchronised pager attacks, which wounded and killed civilians and
children. We observed that as Dr. Abu Sittah worked amid attacks that
threatened his life and the lives of thousands of others, I and many others
faced attacks on our livelihoods, with suspensions, threats to professional
accreditation, along with character smear campaigns launched by our own
institutions. Recognizing this pattern, Dr. Abu-Sittah coined the phrase
“Genocide Enablement Apparatus,” which we and a dozen other physicians and
human rights advocates detailed in a report submitted to the UN
<https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/health/sr/cfis/health-and-care-workers/subm-health-care-workers-ind-43-rupa-marya.pdf>
and now published on their website.

The “Genocide Enablement Apparatus” framework outlines how healthcare
workers are targeted and killed and healthcare infrastructure destroyed in
Gaza, while healthcare workers across the West are intimidated and silenced
in professional and civic spaces–in hospitals, clinics, professional
associations, and in the pages of medical journals. Together these attacks
on healthcare workers–one on our bodies, and the other on our voices–have
accelerated the annihilation of the Palestinian people. There are fewer
people left to provide care, and fewer people willing or able to speak up.
This two-pronged effort functioned to undermine the “avalanche of
solidarity”
<https://www.goisc.org/englishblog/2023/11/30/gazas-doctors-speak-we-need-an-avalanche-of-solidarity>
that is needed to stop the genocide, as Dr. Mads Gilbert, a physician and
advocate of solidarity medicine, has remarked.

If my employer wants to fire me for saying ‘Stop Bombing Hospitals,’ then
they cannot claim to be a place in which medicine is truly practiced. My
duty as a physician is to speak up for the health of all people. If a job
requires me to stay quiet as children are killed, that’s not a job worth
having. Healthcare workers have an obligation to speak up–now more than
ever. We must not be silent when our words and actions together can resist
the erasure of the people of Palestine. To deny healthcare workers the
right to speech is to deny our very humanity, as Israel and the US deny
Palestinians theirs.

When liberal institutions slide towards authoritarianism, we must walk away
from them. We must refuse to legitimize their immorality with our presence
and our brilliance.  It should be clear to us all that our labor and
talents should not be rendered in places that enable genocide, especially
as healthcare workers. We must instead put our efforts into building a new
kind of medicine, one that liberates through the act of healing, one that
centers love for humankind in our care, one that teaches the practice of
principled solidarity, and one that requires that we speak up in the face
of injustice and violence. This is the medicine of the future borne out of
our collective stories that insist on a world of care. It is the only kind
of medicine that can truly achieve health for all.
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