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<h1>As genocide rages, doctors must choose: Care or collaborationism</h1><p class="gmail-article__subhead gmail-css-1wt8oh6"><em>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?</em></p><div class="gmail-article-info-block gmail-opinion-info-block gmail-css-ti04u9"><div class="gmail-article-b-l" style="border-color:rgb(250,144,0)"><ul class="gmail-article-author"><li class="gmail-article-author__item"><a class="gmail-article-author__link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/eric-reinhart"><img class="gmail-article-author__image" src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Reinhart-1700922808.jpg?resize=96%2C96&quality=80" alt="Eric Reinhart" height="60" width="60"></a><div class="gmail-article-author__info"><div class="gmail-article-author__name"><a class="gmail-author-link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/eric-reinhart">Eric Reinhart</a></div><div class="gmail-article-author__title">Political anthropologist of law, psychiatry, and public health</div></div></li><li class="gmail-article-author__item"><a class="gmail-article-author__link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/bram-wispelwey"><img class="gmail-article-author__image" src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Bram-Wispelwey-headshot-500x500-1700922798.jpg?resize=96%2C96&quality=80" alt="Bram Wispelwey" height="60" width="60"></a><div class="gmail-article-author__info"><div class="gmail-article-author__name"><a class="gmail-author-link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/bram-wispelwey">Bram Wispelwey</a></div><div class="gmail-article-author__title">Co-founder of Health for Palestine</div></div></li></ul><div class="gmail-article-dates" style="border-color:rgb(250,144,0)"><div class="gmail-date-simple gmail-css-1yjq2zp"><span class="gmail-screen-reader-text">Published On 25 Nov 2023</span><span aria-hidden="true"><br></span></div><div class="gmail-date-simple gmail-css-1yjq2zp"><font size="1"><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/25/as-genocide-rages-doctors-must-choose-care-or-collaborationism">https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/25/as-genocide-rages-doctors-must-choose-care-or-collaborationism</a></font></div></div></div><div class="gmail-social-share-buttons"><a class="gmail-social-share-button" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-label="Share on Facebook" href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Faje.io%2Fedgk8z"></a></div></div><a class="gmail-social-share-button" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-label="Share on Twitter" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=As%20genocide%20rages%2C%20doctors%20must%20choose%3A%20Care%20or%20collaborationism&source=sharethiscom&related=sharethis&via=AJEnglish&url=https%3A%2F%2Faje.io%2Fedgk8z"></a><div class="gmail-article-info-block gmail-opinion-info-block gmail-css-ti04u9"><div class="gmail-social-share-buttons"></div></div><div class="gmail-responsive-image"><img src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/AA-20231106-32701487-32701477-ISRAELI_ATTACKS_ON_GAZA_CONTINUE-1699333714.jpg?resize=770%2C513&quality=80" alt="Doctors treat injured children in Israeli attacks at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al Balah, Gaza" width="391" height="260" style="margin-right: 25px;"></div>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]<div class="gmail-wysiwyg gmail-wysiwyg--all-content gmail-css-ibbk12"><p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2811877" target="_blank">prevaricating commentaries</a> that foster evasion of ethical-political responsibility to active censorship by <a href="https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/06/02/political-censorship-in-academic-journals-sets-a-dangerous-new-precedent/">journal editors</a> of Palestinian conditions, history, and perspectives, alongside <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/11/israel-is-bombing-hospitals-in-gaza-with-israeli-doctors-approval">public calls by Israeli doctors</a> for the murder of their Palestinian counterparts by bombing Gaza’s hospitals.</p>
<p>Especially pernicious are intellectually and ethically bankrupt
claims that invoking historical and political-economic analyses of <a href="https://gh.bmj.com/content/8/10/e014269">the root causes of current violence</a> linked to occupation and apartheid policies is tantamount to justifying violence committed by Hamas, and is thus impermissible.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/what-does-from-the-river-to-the-sea-really-mean">repeating aspirations for Palestinian liberation</a>.</p>
<p>A large number of billionaire donors have used the power of their
checkbooks to demand McCarthyist policies on campuses across the
country.</p>
<p>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.</p><p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Despite this and the <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/8/health-institutions-must-demand-an-end-to-israels-atrocities-in-gaza">risks entailed</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://jewishcurrents.org/we-have-lost-the-ability-to-provide-true-care">Palestinian healthcare workers</a> and the foreign colleagues alongside them who have devoted themselves to caring for the sick and wounded no matter the cost.</p>
<p>While providing medical help under conditions that would cause most doctors in the Global North to give up, one <a href="https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/palestinians-sue-biden-failure-prevent-genocide-seek-emergency">doctor in Gaza</a>
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.</p>
<p>“We will not abandon our patients or our communities,” Gaza’s
healthcare workers have repeatedly said as their workplaces have been
bombed.</p>
<p>We should, in turn, refuse to abandon them.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>For anyone genuinely interested, dispassionately presented historical accounts of Zionist settler colonialism, the resultant <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/">apartheid system</a>,
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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em><strong>The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.</strong></em></p>
</div><hr><ul class="gmail-article-author"><li class="gmail-article-author__item"><a class="gmail-article-author__link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/eric-reinhart"><img class="gmail-article-author__image" src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Reinhart-1700922808.jpg?resize=96%2C96&quality=80" alt="Eric Reinhart" height="60" width="60"></a><div class="gmail-article-author__info"><div class="gmail-article-author__name"><a class="gmail-author-link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/eric-reinhart">Eric Reinhart</a></div><div class="gmail-article-author__title">Political anthropologist of law, psychiatry, and public health</div><div class="gmail-article-author__desc gmail-css-1wt8oh6">Eric Reinhart, MD, is a political anthropologist of law, psychiatry, and public health.</div></div></li><li class="gmail-article-author__item"><a class="gmail-article-author__link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/bram-wispelwey"><img class="gmail-article-author__image" src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Bram-Wispelwey-headshot-500x500-1700922798.jpg?resize=96%2C96&quality=80" alt="Bram Wispelwey" height="60" width="60"></a><div class="gmail-article-author__info"><div class="gmail-article-author__name"><a class="gmail-author-link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/bram-wispelwey">Bram Wispelwey</a></div><div class="gmail-article-author__title">Co-founder of Health for Palestine</div><div class="gmail-article-author__desc gmail-css-1wt8oh6">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.</div></div></li></ul>
</div>