Antizionism in medicine attracted attention only recently, but it’s been an ongoing problem since October 2023 and appears to be a global trend.
In February this year, two Muslim nurses in Australia made headlines when they bragged, on a video, of mistreating Israeli patients. “I won’t treat them. I will kill them,” one of them said. The nurses were promptly fired.
Now, a report out of Norway highlights the anxieties of Norwegian Jews using medical services. Doctors and community leaders drew attention to patients hiding their Jewishness for fear of being mistreated. A half a dozen people out of just 1,500 Jews residing in this Northern European country stepped up to share their experiences, while community leaders warned that many more are likely going through the same ordeal.
Similar unease has been registered at the University of California San Francisco hospital where, according to their union, “hundreds” of nurses wear antizionist pins on their scrubs and Jewish employees filed so many harassment complaints, the U.S. House of Representatives is now investigating the outfit. Anti-Israel activists on the hospital campus marked territory with a prominent installation, complete with a keffiyeh-wrapped statue and giant banners carrying blood libel slogans. Inverted red triangles — the symbols of genocide used by Hamas supporters — regularly pop up at events like a resource fair or as a background for a video call.
It’s hard to say what accounts for the prevalence of antizionism in hospitals worldwide. It may be that the medical profession has an appeal to the kind of sociopath who’d praise Hamas while denying the atrocities it committed on Simchat Torah in Israel. Go through the posts of the @StopAntisemites account on Twitter/X and find never-ending examples of doctors and nurses, most of them employed in American hospitals and usually fairly new to this country, expressing sympathy for terror.
Western civilization invented the Hippocratic Oath to address the macabre tendencies of the healers. The ancient document binds medics to care for the bodies in their care regardless of what they think of a person:
Into whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman, bond or free.
Israel — which employees of UCSF would have you believe is committing genocide — cured the brain cancer of Hamas mastermind Yahya Sinwar. The Jewish state recently provided treatment to a Neo-Nazi United Nations hire wounded by terrorist friendly fire in Gaza. For decades, ordinary Israelis acted in the same spirit of good medical practice — driving disease-streaking patients from Gaza to the hospitals in the interior of the country — the debt of gratitude repaid in murder on the seventh of October.
I’m unclear why the physicians sporting red triangles do not see their licenses revoked. That so many act in defiance of the Hippocratic oath signals a major breakdown of medical ethics. In the United States, at least, this breakdown shows systemic features.
Take another look at UCSF. It’s not just that the hospital — like virtually every institution in San Francisco — is grossly politicized. The university website boasts that “[l]earner activism is a vital part of UCSF’s success” — and it’s not hard to see where activism leads today.
The teaching hospital is a site of the surging Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion ideology poised to take over American medical practices. The globalized intifada, which took off following the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, became the opportunity to make antizionism a central feature of it.
The recently suspended from teaching UCSF professor of medicine Rupa Marya used to be the braintrust of antisemitic activities. Dr. Marya co-authored the book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, in which she argued that poor health is caused by colonialism, capitalism, and racism.
When local pro-Palestinian groups blocked major highways, including the Bay Bridge, the sole road connecting San Francisco to East Bay suburbs, on her now-deleted Twitter/X account, Marya called on healthcare workers to join in. Yet the blockade delayed a UCSF organ transplant for several hours.
Given that Jews established medical facilities in both the US and Israel, Marya had ample opportunities to voice neo-Stalinist demands — think the Doctors’ Case — to rid medicine of “Zionist doctors” and philanthropists who build hospitals. She lashed out against Zionism on multiple occasions— and in hysterical tones — for instance:
the presence of Zionism in US medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity. Zionism is a supremacist, racist ideology and we see Zionist doctors justifying the genocide of Palestinians.
Although Marya was suspended from UCSF last fall after calling for expulsion of an Israeli medical student, this individual was reinstated in her clinical responsibilities and the activist groups she set up are still active on campus. Moreover, if it was up to me, I would prevent her from practicing medicine before I kept her from teaching.
With DEI insurgents among medical professionals, the trust in doctors is waning. Jews might be at the forefront of that trend. People who, like Rupa Marya, are unable to contain their hate should not be in the medical profession, but they are. If we are reluctant to let a nurse with a watermelon pin give injections to our children or feel skeptical about advice a doctor on a politicized campus gives to our parents, we need a plan.
The aggressively anti-Western DEI ethic is challenging millennia-old traditions that sustained the practice of medicine in the West. Falling short of creating empathically Zionist medical networks, knowing your doctor very well is paramount. Steering clear of the ones who put pronouns in their bio is a good rule of thumb, too. Still, given the systemic problem, a lasting solution to antizionism in medicine has to come from within the institutions.
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