Canadian Health Care Workers Should Stand Up for Palestine
Despite Canada withdrawing funding from UNRWA, the country’s doctors have not criticized Israel’s actions strongly. As health care workers, they have a moral responsibility to defend the right to health care — they should do so now.
In Canada, a country that prides itself on its universal health care system, health care workers have faced severe repercussions for showing support for suffering Palestinians. (Jan Woitas / picture alliance via Getty Images)
A recent commentary in the Lancet makes the case that the American health care establishment, in light of its silent inaction, is complicit in the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. While their argument is compelling and uncontroversial, much of the discussion of it has revolved around the technical question of whether it is correct to claim that Israel’s actions amount to genocide. But this is confused. The right to care should not depend on whether the causes of suffering are natural or man-made. For example, it should make no difference to a population’s right to health care whether they’re starving due to ecological drought or man-made famine.
Public health consists of political dilemmas that necessitate political solutions. That is not to say that the physician’s principal clinical concern is political, but it entails that when the cause of a health crisis is bound up with a political problem (as they often are), treatments must not shy away from targeting the powerful mechanisms that allow the proliferation of ill health. We recognize this fact intuitively and intimately: in recent years, most of the world’s governing authorities followed the guidance of public health professionals in implementing policies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and protect its citizens’ lives, as well as curtailing the pandemic’s future cost on social and economic systems.
Why, then, is it so controversial for physicians and health care workers to point out the obvious in the case of Palestinians? A simple call for a “cease-fire” is viewed as a divisive statement, yet it is the most straightforward treatment for the current public health crisis in Gaza in which the scale of the ongoing war makes medical care almost impossible. In Canada, a country that prides itself on its (almost) universal health care system, as well as its role as supposed enforcer of international peace and human rights, physicians and trainees have faced severe repercussions for showing support for suffering Palestinians, including signing a petition that called for a cease-fire.
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