The failure by the World Medical Association to act on Israeli torture despite a 12-year-long, evidence-based appeal by 725 doctors from 43 countries regarding accountability for doctors complicit with Israeli torture practices shows there is not even-handed regulation of doctors worldwide regarding complicity with torture. “Publications deemed critical of Israel often evoke vitriolic and ad hominem attacks upon writer and medical journal – and little engagement with the cited evidence.”
Israel has a long-standing policy of refusing to release the bodies of Palestinians who have been killed by its military for burial. This is yet another form of collective punishment, where Israel uses the dead as an example to anyone who dare challenges the apartheid state.
The U.S. foreign policy elite and some of the mainstream press are already trying to rewrite the history of Afghanistan War. But U.S. forces could never have defeated the resistance. Just consider the significance of IEDs, which killed and maimed more US and allied soldiers than any other weapon during the long war.
On June 23, 2021, Dr. Fidaa Wishah was fired from her job at Phoenix Children’s Hospital following a campaign calling for her dismissal in response to social media posts she made critical of the State of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. Dr. Wishah writes, “I am a Palestinian woman and I dared to speak up against Israel. Phoenix Children’s Hospital and its board terminated me because of who I am and where I come from.” Dr. Wishah has now filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and plans to bring a lawsuit against the hospital.
The U.S. embarked on the “war on terror” with Israel as a model. Occupy Muslim lands, bomb civilians to defeat political opposition. It didn’t work in Afghanistan; and the U.S. withdrawal will force the Israel lobby to come up with new messaging to maintain the false belief that Israel and the U.S. face the same “bad neighborhood.”
Israeli politicians routinely make shockingly racist comments about Palestinians that most Americans would condemn. So why does the U.S. continue to send Israel nearly $4 billion a year?
At a family gathering last May, everyone in Basma Ismail Kurd’s family was looking forward to her niece playing doctor. But after the last escalation between Israel and Hamas, and witnessing death and destruction around her, she no longer wants to become a physician. What do you tell a ten-year-old who has witnessed carnage around her, when you’re also traumatized yourself?
As Israelis were evacuated from Jewish-only communities in the Galilee due to fires this month, Hatim Kanaaneh reflects, “Are you aware that within recent memory your own residential locales had Palestinian names and were inhabited by humans, some of whom with features not really different from your own and who were before their expulsion actually part of the best educated nation in the Middle East? They lived right where you live now but without all those fire-hazardous pines.”
Pro-Israel writers have dismissed all criticism, opposition and even enmity to Israel and its actions as springing from an ancient malady, antisemitism. They thereby erase the true history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, in a so-far successful effort to discredit the critics. Israel’s actions exist very much in history, and its supporters use very sharp elbows and knees to get its way.
Any attack on the civilian population in Gaza is an attack on children, where 40% of the population are 14-years-old and younger.