Above photo: Dr. Jess Ghannam speaks out on behalf of the Palestinian people and healthcare workers at a December 2, 2023 Palestinian liberation demonstration in San Francisco.
University of California, San Francisco medical professionals, workers, and students throughout the UC system are convening the UC People’s Tribunal for Palestine.
They are charging UC leadership with complicity in genocide and the ongoing Nakba.
Almost a year ago, on October 31, 2023, faculty held a press conference in front of the Helen Diller Medical Center at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), in order to amplify the warnings of Palestinian colleagues at al-Ahli Hospital who predicted that Israel’s bombing of the hospital would be the first in a campaign that would decimate Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure. At the time, British-Palestinian surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, addressing the world while standing among the dead, stated that Israel’s targeting of al-Ahli Hospital signaled a decisive shift, marking the moment when its assault on Gaza “stopped being a war, and became a genocide.”
Since then, the world has borne witness as Israel has demonstrated itself to be unrestrained by any red line in its merciless assault against the Palestinian people. It has waged a systematic campaign of destruction against Gaza’s healthcare system, putting a majority of Gaza’s 36 hospitals out of commission and transforming sites of life-giving care into zones of premature mass death. Israel has murdered over 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza, destroyed access to clean water and humanitarian food relief, and placed all Gazans under the threat of imminent starvation and infectious disease. It has captured, imprisoned, tortured, and raped healthcare workers. Over 900 Palestinian healthcare workers have been murdered—some found, alongside their patients, with their arms and legs bound in mass graves at destroyed hospitals.
‘Stunning Silence‘
In contrast to its outspoken advocacy and commitment of resources to Ukraine, UCSF, whose stated mission is to “advanc[e] health worldwide,” has erected a formidable wall of silence around Israel’s genocide. It has ruthlessly policed and punished its own employees, including those who spoke out at the press conference nearly a year ago, who have dared to criticize Israel and to assert the right of Palestinians to exist. “At UCSF we have demanded that our leadership take a principled moral stand and condemn the atrocities in Gaza,” stated Dr. Jess Ghannam, a Palestinian American professor of psychology and global health sciences. “They have refused and instead created an oppressive environment that has targeted Palestinian solidarity communities. We have tried everything to engage the leadership at UCSF but have been met with a stunning silence.”
This past spring, UCSF leadership sent armed UC police officers to surveil, harass, and forcibly disperse students, staff, and faculty who were engaged in nonviolent protest against Israel’s genocide in a designated campus “free speech zone.” By falsely equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, the UCSF administration has endangered Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and anti-Zionist Jews while declining to investigate complaints of anti-Palestinian racism, doxxing, harassment, and death threats. These actions have hurt the entire UCSF community while placing marginalized community members in particular jeopardy.
UCSF healthcare professionals who have spoken out against Israel’s genocide have been fired, placed on involuntary leave, censured, smeared by their own institution, and abandoned in the face of racist and misogynistic campaigns waged by Zionist politicians and organizations. In August, the UCSF administration notified Denise Caramagno, hired to do violence prevention, of its intent to terminate her employment after she defended the free speech rights of Rupa Marya, a faculty member of color who posed questions about the impacts of Zionism in the practice of medicine. UCSF administrators have further construed the wearing of a watermelon pin as a symbol of antisemitic hate that purportedly fosters an unsafe climate, instead of understanding it to be an urgent expression of support for the Palestinian right to life during a time of unrelenting genocide. Bridget Rochios, a midwife and nurse practitioner who works in UCSF’s reproductive endocrinology and fertility department and who was in Gaza this past May, described “women sobbing during their labor because they were afraid to bring their babies into the world, because they had lost everything, most importantly, their families and loved ones,” adding, “The people who are not safe were my patients in Gaza who were giving birth among the dead while bombs were dropping.”
Critics point to the weaponization of the charge of antisemitism in UC’s campaign of repression against workers and students who have advocated for the Palestinian right to life. “Throughout the [UC] system, and particularly at UCSF, campus administrators have sanctioned punitive actions against faculty and staff who criticize the State of Israel and the Netanyahu government. The constant refrain…is that criticisms of Israel are the equivalent of bias and discrimination against Jews and antisemitism. This dishonest trope is repeated endlessly,” stated Dan Seigel, a longtime movement lawyer representing UCSF faculty and staff. “It is time for UC President Michael Drake, UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood, and Berkeley Law Dean Edwin Cherminisky to demand an end to UC’s unjustified attacks on people who support the rights of the Palestinian people.”
Creating A Culture Of Accountability
Targeted by their own institution, UCSF medical professionals, alongside workers and students throughout the UC system and concerned community members, are fighting back against the UC’s normalization of Palestinian death. On Monday, November 11, one day prior to the UC Regents meeting at UCSF, they will convene to hold the first session of the UC People’s Tribunal for Palestine and to charge UC leadership, including UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood, Executive Vice-Chancellor Catherine R. Lucey, and President and Chief Executive Officer Suresh Gunasekaran, with complicity in genocide and the ongoing Nakba (catastrophe).
The first tribunal session will focus on health and healthcare, and it will challenge not just the UC’s culture of silence around Israel’s genocide but also its active complicity in lethal systems of violence. While calling attention to UC investments in weapons industries, the tribunal will also focus on the UCSF leadership’s failure to uphold the Hippocratic oath that forms the cornerstone of the health professions.
As a case in point, the tribunal will expose how the UCSF administration has accepted $1.15 billion dollars from the Diller Family Foundation. Framed as humanitarian because of its gift to the UC, the Diller Family Foundation, as a number of student organizations, including Law Students for Justice in Palestine at Berkeley and Jews Against White Supremacy at UC Santa Cruz, have shown, is an explicitly Zionist granter that funds right-wing extremist hate groups, organizations that dox UC workers and students like the Canary Mission and AMCHA, and programs designed to deepen collaborations with complicit Israeli institutions. The Diller Family Foundation also funds the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), formerly the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, an Israeli-U.S. counterinsurgency cross-training organization, which fosters exchanges between the Israeli National Police and U.S. police with an eye to targeting toward domestic populations as “terrorists.”
Dr. Leigh Kimberg, Professor of Medicine at UCSF, stated, “As UCSF adorns its new hospital with the Diller name, while Israel bombs hospitals in Gaza and Lebanon, we cannot help but ask what role UCSF’s relationship with the Diller Family Foundation is playing in their unethical silence and vigorous repression of our constitutionally protected free speech on behalf of the health and safety of the Palestinian people.”
Dr. Ghannam described the upcoming tribunal as “our attempt to hold UCSF and the entire University of California accountable to the people of California and the world who are saying no to genocide, not in our name. We cannot, as healthcare workers, stand by silently while millions of innocent Palestinian civilians are slaughtered and starved to death. Until Palestine is free, no one is free.” According to Rosita, a UCSF nurse, the tribunal is an enactment of solidarity: “Our Palestinian colleagues are resilient. This tribunal is their opportunity to weave their story of both genocide but also steadfastness–Sumud–hope, resistance, and humanity.”