Talking About Palestine is an Exercise in Public Health

For the past 17 months, we have witnessed in real-time how a genocide unfolds and what the essential components of it are. 

From watching livestream footage of splayed children’s bodies hanging on the walls to patients burning in tents with IV still in their arms; from our own institutions suppressing student voices to our politicians perpetrating atrocity propaganda to manufacture and maintain consent for bombing hospitals, ambulances, journalists, and universities  —  rarely are the circumstances so hauntingly ripe for a medical student to receive their degree whilst undergoing a worldwide pandemic and simultaneously bearing witness to a genocide. 

As medical professionals, most of us are not well-versed in or feel comfortable speaking on international geopolitics. But we are trained to recognize health crises, whether brewing inside an individual’s body or wrought on a magnanimous scale by ordnance provided by your own country. What has been happening in Gaza is a public health crisis raised to a power of infinity. So, what can we do about it? We should talk, discuss, and educate. 

Even if you don’t feel a moral obligation, you can be a true capitalist: educate the American public selfishly — to enhance your own ‘fund of knowledge’ in the field of public health. Dr. Rupa Marya recently quipped that she is currently completing an “anti-genocide” fellowship, a non-ACGME accredited fellowship, which ironically, cost earned her suspension of clinical duties at UCSF. So, I invite my colleagues to become the scholars you have always dreamed of. 

Earn your anti-genocide fellowship decades before it will be inscribed into curriculums like “justice and advocacy in medicine.” The only difference is that now it is consequential; then, it will be an academic exercise.