The medical profession tends to consider itself “neutral”. This claim to neutrality ignores the dehumanizing and despicable role that doctors played in slavery in the United States, the Nazi regime in Germany, and medical colonialism here in Canada. It also does not take into account the variable benevolence of pediatric centers in Canada, volunteering to welcome Ukrainian children last year, but not children from Yemen nor those from Gaza currently. It also obscures the hypocrisy of the Canadian Pediatric Society, which asked its members in 2022 not to “remain silent” and to “act” following the invasion of Ukraine, but which refused to called for a ceasefire in Palestine last month.
When we become aware of this false neutrality and deviate from the dominant values of the medical establishment, we are disturbing. In reaction to my involvement in the face of injustices here and elsewhere, an influential doctor at the university hospital where I was doing my internships warned me that “people [de pouvoir en médecine] wait until you make a mistake”, and advised me to prioritize my studies instead of getting involved socially… as if one excluded the other!
Twenty years later, I am troubled by the obstacles to freedom of expression suffered by a new generation of health students who denounce the incredible violence inflicted on the Palestinians. For weeks, dozens of students (the vast majority of them women) from different universities have told me they feel isolated and powerless in the face of censorship. They are even more distraught by the fact that the teachers who once encouraged them to speak out against injustices remain silent for fear of reprisals.
Students are punished for expressing support for the Palestinian people. Arij Al Khafagi, president of the Nursing Students’ Association at the University of Manitoba, and Yipeng Ge, a public health and preventive medicine resident at the University of Ottawa, were questionably suspended after sharing critical messages of Israel’s policies on social media.
The case of Dr Ge raises the cruel hypocrisy that Fabrice Vil underlines well in his column in The Press : while the highly publicized case of Professor Verushka Lieutenant-Duval at the University of Ottawa caused a lot of ink to flow in Quebec in 2020, the columnists who went to the barricades in defense of academic freedom are inaudible in the aftermath of the suspension of the Dr Ge. Is freedom of expression more important when it involves using “the n-word” than when it aims to protect the lives, dignity and freedom of Palestinians?
Shree Paradkar recently addressed this toxic institutional climate in her column in Toronto Star. She discusses the professional reprisals suffered by some of the 3,000 signatories of an Urgent Declaration against the destruction of the health system in Gaza by Israel, launched by the Alliance of Health Workers for Palestine on November 10: an Arab doctor -Québécois explained to Paradkar, on condition of anonymity, that it “was not only a case of muzzling and intense harassment, but also, quite frankly, of defamation”.
These high-profile cases are just the tip of the iceberg. So much so that the Native Physicians Association of Canada issued a statement this week against the intimidation of medical students “who are sanctioned for echoing the pain and suffering of civilians in Gaza” and having denounced the violence which caused it. Shree Paradkar asks the fundamental question: “In what world are doctors who say ‘stop killing’ or ‘don’t bomb hospitals’ going against their professional, moral or ethical obligations?” »
A report published in 2022 by Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV), Lifting the veil on a deleterious climateexplains that we “can establish a link between these attacks [représailles, harcèlement, intimidation] and efforts by pro-Israel lobby groups to promote the working definition of anti-Semitism put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA),” which “represents an unprecedented attempt to qualify as “anti-Semitism” any criticism of the State of Israel or the political ideology of Zionism.”
In her column, Shree Paradkar hits the nail on the head when she says it should be possible to criticize Israeli policies while bluntly denouncing anti-Semitism and hate crimes perpetrated against Jewish communities, themselves reeling from deplorable losses of Israeli lives during the Hamas offensive on October 7.
For its part, VJI advocates the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism (DJA), initially developed by a group of 210 specialists in Holocaust history, Jewish studies and Middle East studies, “in order to […] to identify and combat anti-Semitism, while protecting freedom of expression.” The DJA confirms that “supporting the Palestinian people’s demand for justice in accordance with international law” is not an example, “a priori, of anti-Semitism”. In other words, humanizing Palestinians is not an anti-Semitic act.
I have already mentioned in these pages the war waged against Palestinian children for too long. The fact that it took this level of suffering, death and carnage — and the display of dead and mutilated bodies of Palestinian children — for Western civil societies to begin to act speaks to an insane level of dehumanization of Palestinians. This dehumanization — some media lately describe children as “people under 18”! — has long been prevalent precisely to silence Palestinian voices and perspectives.
In a recent interview on “Israel’s war on Gaza,” Gabor Maté, renowned Canadian physician, Holocaust survivor and ex-Zionist, asked Tarek Loubani, Palestinian refugee, emergency physician and associate professor at Western University, how he dealt with the “communication machine that invalidates and denies the experience” of the Palestinians. Tarek Loubani explained that Palestinians do not have permission to tell: “We are fighting not only for our existence as such, but also for our right to tell our own stories. »
In an interview with CTV, Tarek Loubani — recently charged with mischief after an incident in which, according to police, ketchup was sprayed on the office of the MP for London North Center in the wake of a demonstration calling for a cease-fire the fire — underlined how vital international solidarity is for oppressed peoples by recounting a lesson learned from his humanitarian work: “Victims from Ukraine, Palestine or elsewhere always tell us: ‘We don’t want you remained silent”. »
If “the first victim of a war is always the truth” and freedom of expression becomes a “collateral victim”, these imposed silences allow, for their part, the avoidable deaths of hundreds of Palestinians every day, with complete impunity. Our collective humanity is damaged by these silences that kill.