In October 2023, self-avowed Zionists at UCSF were emailing me and cold calling me to ask me to explain my tweets, feigning academic interest in my knowledge of colonialism as a subject matter. The tone soon shifted into accusing me of Jew hatred when I wouldn't stop tweeting. 🧵 As I decried the bombing of Al-Ahli hospital on October 17th, having knowledge that the IDF bombed it because I was speaking to the surgeons INSIDE the hospital who reported that the IDF called two days prior and said "We are going to bomb the hospital," these people

We are taking our cases to the UN. The repression of healthcare workers here is part of Israel’s Genocide Enablement Apparatus. Our silence is how the genocide continues. It must be broken. Speak up. Reclaim your humanity from those who dehumanize you. #FreeDrHussamAbuSafiya If healthcare workers remain silent, this will become the future of all wars. Our hospitals and clinics are sacred places that must be protected to care for the sick. We must all stand up and recognize how a harm to any physician is a harm to all of us.

The most profound moment of my 22 years of doctoring was when a man with white supremacist tatooes around his face collapsed into my arms sobbing because I spent an hour asking him and his cancer-ridden mother what their lives were like in Muscle Shoals Alabama.

https://twitter.com/ProudSocialist/status/1867570511733031135

What struck me is that what fascists attempt to use to drive us apart is what compassion can work to bring us together in common cause. His mother was sick because of how the toxic effluent 3M and other corporations poisoned their groundwater.

Question: When our US medical school professors leave work to go to the IDF to participate in a genocide and then return to work to teach Palestinian students, how do we handle that as a profession?
blogs.timesofisrael.com/an-ongoing-que… How does it violate the civil rights of Arab, Palestinian, Indigenous, Black and other survivors of genocides to be forced into the presence of a genocide abettor or perpetrator?

How do we as a pluralistic nation that strives to protect the basic civil right of all handle this?

There’s 1 word to explain why liberal DEI was doomed to failure, exploited by the right to do the dirty work of ushering in the fascist agenda. A decolonial analysis can take us further but is often rejected by the careerist libs. That 4 letter word: GAZA. Decolonial scholars saw through the ruse of DEI and all the acolytes of incrementalism who consigned their people to worse health while they published papers and made careers out of talking about closing the gaps while doing nothing of the sort.

In Oct 2023, I was asked by the @bmj_latest to write a piece on decolonization. I said I'd focus on Gaza. They agreed. I was in daily touch with @GhassanAbuSitta as he relayed a genocide unfolding from the OR in Gaza. I wrote up his words & contextualized. BMJ refused to publish. As we sort through all the war crimes that have happened at the @CIJ_ICJ, we have to examine what impact the silencing of discourse around the unfolding genocide had and the silencing of healthcare workers around the world continues to have.

À UCSF nurse was suspended for wearing a 🍉 pin at work. Because some patients felt uncomfortable.

What makes the nurse uncomfortable is the genocide in Gaza.

Instead of working to stop the killing, they are working to stop us from talking about it.

We will not be silent. A UCSF chief resident had his Grand Rounds talk taken down from its usual online site after it had been put up. He spoke about Medical Apartheid experienced by Palestinians. He is a Palestinian American and his academic contributions were deleted by UCSF leadership. Why?

Yesterday UCSF had an ideologue who isn’t a scholar of colonialism tell our community that Israel isn’t a settler colonial project because Jews are indigenous to the region. As the in-house expert on the health impacts of colonialism, they could’ve tapped me to clarify. Being of a place does not somehow make you immune to settler colonial rule. Israel is a settler colonial project as defined by founding Zionists who looked to the US (as did Hitler) to how to clear land of undesirable people who happened to be living there for thousands of years.

Does a nation have the right to exist, when created through land theft, forced expulsion, apartheid and genocide?

This is the history of the US.

People fleeing religious persecution said their god gave them this land “from sea to shining sea.” Guns made the argument. And social structures cemented the death and poor health of Native Americans for centuries. These persist today, as people have been pushed off their lands, internally displaced and subjugated by racism. Others who came by their will or not were fit into a brutal caste system.

Liberals used movement language to feel better about themselves without understanding words like “solidarity” and “liberation.”

Movement workers were left with no support when the genocide unfolded. We now see the foot soldiers of empire clearly. In medicine, the consequences of liberals co-opting movement language has been catastrophic. While an entire healthcare system was targeted and destroyed, while doctors, nurses, pharmacists, students and patients were murdered—liberal strongholds in medicine stood silent.

Our colleagues who were too afraid to speak up against genocide, as physicians, nurses, medics, pharmacists, students and patients are murdered—how did you amputate your care? Did you silo a part of your heart to say Black Lives Matter but Palestinian lives don’t? The ones who were raised indoctrinated who position themselves as supporters of health justice but privately emailed me to say how dare I assume Israel was bombing hospitals and didn’t I know it antisemitic to say such a thing—how are you feeling now, some 30,000+ deaths later?

While universities start sacrificing their own professors as their donors and MAGA GOP run them through gauntlets around statements that calls for genocide are not ok, the March for Israel was a call for genocide while a genocide was underway and is ongoing.

https://twitter.com/BenLorber8/status/1724507088230011241

With signs like "Finish the Job Israel" and "Many Gaza Civilians are Hamas-In-Training" and chants of "No Ceasefire" as hospitals were being bombed and NICU babies were dying, this sea of white people was akin to a modern day lynch mob.

https://x.com/BenLorber8/status/1724501073396629735?s=20

Say it louder for those who can't seem to get it: A Two State Solution is just ongoing apartheid, "separate and not equal." It will only breed more violence.

A One State Solution requires the dissolution of Israel as a political entity and the creation of a new single state with equal rights for all. Historically, the peoples of Palestine--Muslims, Christians Jews; Arabs, Turks, Armenians, Circassians, Europeans and many more have always been ethnically and religiously diverse.

In the fall of colonial empires post WW2, Zionism claimed

I've never been in a point in my career where my phone is blowing up nonstop with SOS signals from residents and medical students going out of their minds at the UTTER MORAL FAILURE of leadership. This just happened at the
@AmerMedicalAssn From @DoNoHarmUCSF Today 135 medical student members with resident and fellow members and the Minorities Affairs group at the @amermedicalassn attempted to introduced a resolution for ceasefire in Gaza. The young Middle Eastern trainee who moved to introduce the resolution

As someone who studies colonialism and health I want to share why I and others use the phrase "settler colonialism" to describe the state of Israel. The term describes historical dynamics of power that are on display today. Many people are Indigenous to the region, including 1/ Jews, Arabs and others. Claims to Indigeneity do not absolve a group of colonization. Palestine has been a historic homeland to many different kinds of people.

I name--as others name--the state of Israel as a settler colonial project because this is how it was described by 2/

I dreamed last night that I was standing on the Camino del Diablo. The treacherous path so many migrants perish on walking to this side of the border. These trails have been walked by humans for millennia, but now with the border they have become deadly. I stood and watched a man walk by. He wasn’t holding bottles of water in his hands to survive the desert heat. He had bare feet. His shoes had given out a whole back. He was holding a child’s hands, helping her stay upbeat as she walked. She was little, maybe 2 years old.

I've been told since the first day I started working at the Division of Hospital Medicine at @UCSF that my work doesn't bring in $ to cover my salary. It's a narrative of manufactured scarcity, a common tactic in capitalism. The CEO is making $1.85 million plus bonuses. I have a feeling all the patients I care for, the chemo I oversee for oncology, the ortho patients I make sure don't die, the families I accompany, they see the value I bring.

I went to an outdoor performance with my family last night--Mary Poppins--and in the midst of Act One heard the whisper traveling up my way from a few rows ahead--"Is there a doctor here?"

No rest for the weary, I jumped up and headed down to find the person who needed help. 🧵 I found frantic family around an ashen looking grandmother. “I’m a physician in Internal Medicine.” She was sitting upright but not responding to verbal cues. What’s your name? No answer.

She had a leftward gaze deviation. I said, call 911. The son was already on the phone. 2/

The reason the Bay Area is now a hotspot for Covid is because the things that made us ride through well at first (an abundance of caution/masking) now have been thrown to the wind by people who think vaccines and paxlovid will get us through this. These tools will help but not 1/ on their own. Masking is a simple intervention that works to prevent the indoor spread of Covid. Shutting down indoor dining also helps. But the Bay Area has been taken over by libertarians in medicine/public health. The worst possible political orientation for getting through 2/

Yesterday I met the guy who developed EPIC. He told me that this was never meant to be a clinician note-taking tool. It was created by accountants to do billing and to capture billable moments. No wonder we hate it so much. Can we please stop now? If you want to capture billable moments, HIRE SOMEONE to follow me around and capture them. But let me write notes that don't take hours of my work day and then hours at home completing then hours more responding to billing people telling me to rewrite my notes to capture more $$

I had shivering chills under 6 blankets, sore throat, myalgias, fatigue, racing heart rate, diarrhea for 16 days in March 2020 after the first Covid patient was transferred to our floor. Occ health refused to test me b/c I didn’t go to China or have “fever & cough.” 1/ They insisted there *no* in-hospital transmission and it wasn’t airborne. Front-facing (lower wage) staff were told not to wear any masks and several got sick. Our response at @UCSF has been a challenge for me from the start. ☹️