“The doctor is the natural advocate of the poor” was a slogan that Rudolf Virchow, a wealthy German pathologist, politician, and social medicine activist, helped popularize in the mid-19th century. More than 100 years later, Frantz Fanon – a Martinican-born psychiatrist who resigned his position in the French medical system to protest French colonial violence in Algeria – expressed a less idealized impression of the profession.
If the doctor presents himself as “the doctor who heals the wounds of humanity”, he is in reality “an integral part of colonization, of domination, of exploitation”, writes Fanon.
Physicians around the world are familiar with Virchow’s assertive portrait of ourselves as virtuous defenders of the oppressed. But based on the dominant responses of American, European, and Israeli medical professionals to the U.S.-backed genocide in Gaza, Fanon’s damning assessment of doctors’ complicity in state violence rings much more true.
As the world witnesses daily massacres carried out by the far-right Israeli government against Palestinian civilians, including deliberate attacks on hospitals that have killed and mutilated medical staff and patients, doctors outside Gaza are are divided into two camps: the collaborators and the resistance. .
The majority of us in the Global North seem to have grouped themselves into the first category. Collaboration with colonial violence takes many forms, from passive silence or procrastinating commentary that promotes evasion of ethical and political responsibility to active censorship by newspaper editors over conditions, history and Palestinian perspectives, to public calls by Israeli doctors to murder their Palestinians. their counterparts by bombing hospitals in Gaza.
Particularly pernicious are the intellectually and ethically flawed assertions that invoking historical and political-economic analyzes of the root causes of current violence linked to occupation and apartheid policies would amount to justifying the violence committed by Hamas, and would therefore be unacceptable.
Such assertions constitute a classic tactic to manufacture consent for the perpetuation of colonial domination. Their goal is to obscure his continued cruelty and prevent would-be resisters from using their voice and influence to stop him.
The incentives for collaboration and the barriers to dissent are clear. The US House of Representatives sanctioned the only Palestinian-American lawmaker, Rashida Tlaib, for calling for a ceasefire and reiterating her aspirations for Palestinian liberation.
Scores of billionaire donors have used the power of their checkbooks to demand McCarthyist policies on campuses across the country.
In response, most of the best-protected professors have remained silent, while university presidents at elite institutions like Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania, attuned to donors, have suspended the groups. pro-Palestinian and Jewish students protesting against continued violence in the occupied Palestinian territory. 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 allegations of anti-Semitism on campuses. academics.
This reality has not escaped the most powerful figures in American medicine, who typically depend on academic appointments and associated academic honors to advance their careers.
Not a single major medical professional organization in the United States has spoken out against the acute or chronic genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, much less mobilized its significant lobbying power to oppose the active support of American lawmakers. in favor of this genocide.
Despite this and the risks it entails, many American doctors have begun to organize among themselves, join larger movements beyond our profession, and unite with a wide range of health professionals to seek ways to end the violence.
Many of those in the American medical field who have thus far fallen into the collaborationist camp would no doubt vehemently deny the accusation if confronted and would express outrage that anyone would dare challenge their moral position.
Some might cite their abundant publications, conferences, and research grants related to diversity and inclusion, health equity, global health, or human rights as proof of their unquestionable virtue.
But when measured against their effects on people currently subject to U.S.-sponsored colonial violence and dispossession in Gaza and the West Bank, these defenses are worse than hollow. They serve to cover up the ethical failure of the American medical profession to leverage our substantial political influence to condemn colonial violence and demand that our government stop enabling it.
However, we can do otherwise. As Fanon noted in “Medicine and Colonialism” and demonstrated in his own life, despite the structurally conditioned tendencies of doctors to align themselves with colonial oppression, we are also fully capable of opposing it – to condition of having the courage to refuse the comfort of complicity and colonialism. accept personal risks.
When doctors abandon their upper-class professional value systems to “sleep on the floor” alongside dispossessed groups while “living the drama of the people,” as Fanon puts it, commitment to the trappings of polite “professionalism” gives way. the place for active solidarity. The doctor who commits to working alongside displaced and dispossessed people can move from being an “agent of colonialism” to a doctor worthy of the term caregiver.
Few American doctors have provided care in the occupied Palestinian territory or accompanied residents of Gaza or the West Bank as they face the daily deprivations of the Israeli blockade and occupation.
By what means, then, can we express our solidarity with an oppressed people thousands of miles away? We should look to Palestinian health workers and their foreign colleagues who are dedicated to caring for the sick and injured, whatever the cost, and follow their directives.
While providing medical aid under conditions that would cause most doctors in the North to give up, one Gaza doctor even found time to fill the void of ethical and political initiative left by ineffective American doctors, suing the president American Joe Biden for not having taken the necessary measures. to prevent an ongoing genocide and for his active complicity in it.
“We will not abandon our patients or our communities,” Gaza health workers repeatedly said as their workplaces were bombed.
We should, in turn, refuse to abandon them.
When we are unable or unwilling to participate in the care of those most in need, our minimum ethical responsibility as physicians who claim to value human life is to do everything we can to protect our colleagues who perform this difficult and essential work. As a professional community, we have refused to uphold even these most basic ethical standards.
Some will reject this call for doctors to reject collaborationism and join in concrete solidarity with our Palestinian colleagues who risk – and lose – their lives to care for those who need it most, calling it “divisive” and lacking “nuance”.
For anyone genuinely interested, dispassionately presented historical accounts of Zionist settler colonialism, the resulting apartheid system, the chronic destruction of Palestinian public health, and nuanced legal calls to protect Palestinian rights have been presented countless times before and are easily accessible.
But as the killings of Palestinian civilians continue to mount by the hundreds with each passing day, we should refuse to nuance or debate preventable atrocities or allow the fantasy of common ground for those who wish to refrain from ” to take part “.
There is no possible justification for what the Israeli and American governments have done in Gaza. The only ethical position for doctors – 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 system of apartheid which guarantees an incessant flow of violence, both perpetual and occasional. .
In the face of genocide, drawing boundaries and imposing decisive action is a fundamental ethical duty, regardless of who is offended and whatever personal or professional costs this may entail.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.