Why are global health organisations not speaking up on genocide in Gaza?
Al JazeeraGiven Israel’s systematic attacks on the medical sector and workers in Gaza, what is happening there is very much a global health issue. Doctors, when economically or otherwise professionally incentivised, are an “integral part of colonization, of domination, of exploitation”, he wrote, and “we must not be surprised to find that doctors and professors of medicine are leaders of colonialist movements.” This is also true of global health today – a field previously known as colonial medicine, tropical medicine and then international health – which has always been mired in complicity with colonial domination and white supremacist ideologies. Today, Palestinian health workers and organisations like Doctors Without Borders, which was founded in France nine years after Algeria won its independence, most poignantly illustrate the truth of Fanon’s observations. But the well-established facts of Israel’s deliberate targeting of health workers and infrastructure, killing of civilians in hospitals and refugee camps, and use of famine as a weapon of war alongside open declaration of genocidal intent do not present an ethically ambiguous choice for any organisation truly concerned about either global health or the medical humanitarian act. But the decision by global health organisations today to remain “neutral” – or worse – in the face of a genocide is sacrificing something far more valuable and difficult to recover: any plausible claim to ethical credibility.