Keynote for Irish Healthcare Workers for Palestine Conference

Go raibh maith agat. Is mór an onóir dom a bheith anseo.

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you. So many of you have been a deep inspiration as you continue to organize and support a liberated Palestine, as you pursue strategies and approaches to stop the assaults on our healthcare colleagues and seek accountability and justice and an end to the US/Israeli genocide in Gaza and an end to the apartheid in Palestine.

I am here to share the story of how I lit my career in medicine on fire like a Molotov cocktail and threw it at the edifice of Western medicine in order to expose the rot at its core. After decades of working as a professor of medicine, as a practicing hospitalist, watching Black, Indigenous, Poor and other marginalized people receive unsound care in a health system designed to uphold a certain kind of power, after decades of touring around the world with my band and entering spaces in the margins where people eek out their existence in the face of structural harm, after spending years as a physician supporting communities in frontline spaces of struggle, as the bombs started falling on Gaza’s hospitals burying my colleagues and their patients under the rubble, as the genocide unfolded, I understood that the quickest way to addressing the dynamics at play in medicine was to strike at the structure, to lance the abscess and expose the rot.

At the core of western medicine, this profession we all participate in, we are all accomplices to, we enjoy the benefits from, and we see and wield the power of–at the core is a history of a supremacist logic borne out of colonialism. Medicine is a part of the colonial trifecta–missionaries, medics and militaries, which were brought to our homelands in order to subjugate our ancestors, to extract the wealth of the land and to turn us into obedient subjects.

Ireland was ground zero of this violent settler colonial ideology, with its technologies of erasure, land theft, language burial and food systems redesign to maximize dependency and minimize cultural continuance. This ideology brought ecocide and genocide, which were tested here before they were exported worldwide. Missionaries, militaries and medics, came with bad intentions, masked as good intentions, masked as commandments by some God, who promised them land and dominion, land from Sea to shining sea, stories that were told, narratives that were spun to give domination of one group over all others, not just over all people but over the water, over the soil, the Nobles of the forest, over the air–over life itself. “The Chosen Ones.”

And what we are living with now, in the polycrisis with the collapse of biodiversity across the globe, with the degradation of our soil upon which our very lives depend, with the genocides in Gaza, Congo and Sudan, the ongoing erasures of Indigenous people right now in Amazonia and across Turtle Island as fossil fuel industries and their technofascist partners grind us down for the last bits of wealth they can extract as the planet is screaming for our help, what we are living with now is the long trace of that colonial history. This must be understood in order to move forward in the correct direction and with the correct intention, if our goal is to build a world of health for all.

The critical eye turned on our own profession is not hatred or a lack of appreciation. It is actually a deep form of love to keep pushing us to be better and do better in our scientific understanding and our service. It is a necessary iterative process, of taking things apart to understand why people are hurting and why people are getting sick and what role medicine plays in recreating structures of harm that leads to health disparities. It is a necessary part of composting what does not work so that what does work can grow even better, stronger and more capable of fulfilling our shared wish of bringing healing and health for all. We have been critical of medicine’s approaches in the past and refined our understandings of pathogenesis on a molecular level. Now we must expand our understanding to encompass learning how pathology starts on a societal and environmental level. And Palestine has exposed for all of us to see colonialism’s ongoing legacy of harm.

I am here today as a physician, as your colleague, as a mother, as an activist, as an artist engaged in social practice for several decades, examining the health impacts of colonialism on our bodies, on societies and on the planet. I have always been a radical transdisciplinarian, moving and working across fields, bringing about understandings that cannot come forward without that a diversity of viewpoints. I understand now that we are living with the long traces of a system set up several hundred years ago–colonial capitalism. This system creates damage and that damage sets off the signals in our immune system that leads to chronic inflammatory disease.

And who is hit hardest by these diseases? Colonized people. And remarkably what our biology also shows is that all people are harmed by colonialism’s damage cycle. All people are ultimately harmed by systems of supremacism because they require that we shut off our biologically wired inclination to care, our empathy, what technofascist Elon Musk called “the West’s weakness.”

While there have been forms of colonialism before this last one, none has had such a catastrophic impact on the health of the planet and the health of people. Through capitalism and the reach of its imperialism, the violence and damage accelerates to a point where humanity’s very existence is now at stake. My scholarship is what the Genocide lobby ultimately attempts to deplatform and to silence.

When I lit my career on fire and lobbed it like a Molotov cocktail, I knew what would be exposed would be more effective than me writing 30 more journal articles, speaking on panels or writing 5 more books on health disparities, racism and social exclusion, climate health and other areas of academic inquiry. When I did this, I did not do it alone. I did it in constant conversation and discourse with movement elders and comrades in frontline struggles for the rights of Black, Indigenous, Poor and other marginalized people. These are elders and friends who have been informing my work for decades and with whom lengthy discussions and debates have led to an understanding and an approach. With regards to Gaza, this approach was guided by several key questions:

Why, when Israel bombed Gaza’s hospitals, why were doctors in California being silenced?

Why were medical students not allowed to speak their care for Gaza’s children, but instead were assaulted by the Los Angeles Police Department, called to assault them by the University of California?
Why were we being framed as racists for sharing our anguish watching children shot in the head or our colleagues raped to death by Israeli military?

Who was behind the motivation to silence us and this gross mischaracterization?
What will they lose by uplifting the humanity of the Palestinian people? What will we gain?

My action was not an academic one. It was a practical one. If anything it can be characterized as performance art which is different than performance. Performance is something people do to make themselves feel better. Performance is medical students doing a bakesale against genocide instead of tactically organizing to expose the racist intentions of the university administration. A petition instead of organizing for a General Strike that will halt the genocide economy.

Performance keeps power intact because it does not challenge power and rarely exposes it in a meaningful way. Performance art exposes and challenges power. Art has the capacity to create new worlds, to help us see them collectively and to invite us to yearn for that different reality. That yearning is the engine that fuels social change and has the power to topple oppressive regimes. This is why the writers, artists and radical dreamers are silenced first in fascist realities. In Gaza and now across the US, they have rounded us up, incarcerated us, fired us, silenced us, and killed us. Performance art leads us to consider practical and tactical action.

And practical tactical action is critical. Because the children of Gaza cannot wait. Because all children of the earth cannot wait. Because the earth cannot wait. Because no medical institution in the West has denounced the US/Israeli genocide, and that belies a deep complicity. Because while Trinity cut ties with Israeli academic institutions, it left ties intact with those institutions who fire doctors and nurses and silence their students for speaking out against the genocide.

It is not a time for petitioning power. It is a time to expose and challenge it. And we must recognize through our actions what we stand to lose and what we stand to gain. We must also recognize with diagnostic clarity, what we are acting for and what we are acting against. We must understand the histories, the dynamics of power and where the pressure points lie, which can lead to an opening of resources, flow, borders and imaginings.

As I recount my story today, I offer it for our shared learning. It is through our learning together that we can develop a collective understanding of the immensity of the challenge we face and the power we have to face it together.

On May 20th, 2025, after 23 years of service, I was fired from my position as a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). This was after 18 months of relentless harassment, investigations and suspension from the university administration. It appears my university coordinated this with a Zionist politician CA State Senator Scott Wiener and the university’s largest donors, the Diller Foundation. The Dillers send money to Israel to support settlers in the West Bank. They have also donated to the Canary Mission, which has become the Trump Administration hit list for ICE abductions. The billionaires funding the genocide in Gaza are profiting from the corporations making money from the genocide. Confronting the genocide in Gaza is a class issue.

I was fired for allegedly seriously violating UCSF’s faculty code of conduct, through my advocacy for Palestinian life and my criticism of the fascist logic driving the gencoide. The university compiled a 462 page report with dozens of pages fully redacted. I have not seen the evidence they use against me. They tried unsuccessfully to damage my medical license by stating I was an imminent danger to patient safety. A colleague said she was cajoled into writing a false report on my patient care to demonstrate that danger. She refused. Now they are trying again and have found anonymous doctors who have said I have harmed patients. When we ask them to send the medical records so we can review their claims, they stall. For months.

The impact of the bottle on the edifice of medicine has hit. I am suing the University of California for their violation of my free speech and civil rights. Doctors must always be able to speak up for the health and rights of all, and this lawsuit is a critical case to cement that into law. The repression I experienced started under President Biden and is ramping up across the US right now under Trump. It is a symptom of a sick system, not an attribute of one ugly politician. If we are successful in surviving their motions to dismiss, we will get to discovery. There we will see the tentacles of power and how they operate in medicine to silence healthcare workers as we speak up for humanity. Palestine has lit the way to a world of health justice. We must have the courage to follow.

And following will require courage because we stand to lose everything. And we will lose everything, but not really everything, just everything that modernity has taught us is important. We will lose our jobs, the shine on our careers as they drag us through the mud with lies and toxic media spin. We will lose our friends who are not prepared to take a stand to challenge the power that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and will kill many more. We will lose colleagues who insist on “both sides” because they lack courage--but there is no “both sides” in genocide.

What are you prepared to lose to gain a Liberated Palestine?

What are you prepared to give up to gain a world of humanity?

• We must examine the health impacts of Zionism as a political ideology in medicine throughout.

  • Former Israeli military members are silencing and attacking medical students across the US. A former Israeli security agent who is a Dean at Columbia is involved in the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil by ICE.

  • Current Israeli military are practicing battleground medicine on cadavers sold by University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. The hospital made over $800K in the sales. In the US this is important because poor people cost a hospital to keep them alive. Selling their corpses makes the hospital money. This is a financial incentive that may be impacting clinical decisions in the care of poor people. The cadavers being experimented on by the IDF are pumped with artificial blood, put on respirators and then battle wounds are created so they can practice surgical exercises. No consent was documented for these exercises.

  • US physician Josh Winer who is a professor of surgery at Emory University participated in Gaza’s genocide in a combat unit and returned to Emory to continue to practice and teach. Students who objected to being instructed by a potential war criminal were suspended.

  • The latest BMJ report details howIsraeli doctors are torturing Palestinians: We must put a moratorium on training doctors from Israel until these practices stop.

  • Palestinian hostage’s bodies have been returned with vital organs surgically removed. We must put a moratorium on training doctors from Israel until these practices stop. We must keep pressuring international medical organizations to denounce, sanction and isolate Israel because of these egregious violations of medical ethics.

• We must take on the far-right here in Ireland. Healthcare workers I spoke to here minimized my concerns about Indians being attacked by the far right as I arrived here this summer. They tried to assure me that the right could never really get a foothold in Ireland. That is a dangerous approach and demonstrates not really understanding the scope of what we are facing right now–the world order of colonial capitalism is under threat and it will strike back wherever it needs to. Ireland is key to building their empire, because Ireland is where the water is, and that water is necessary for AI. And AI is a key operational tool for the next wave of imperialism. We are seeing it used in Gaza’s genocide. And we are seeing it now across the US to identify “precriminals” which the Trump administration has started persecuting. The repression and incarceration of marginalized people is increasing.

• We must take on the data centers and the EU plan to turn Ireland into Europe’s battery and data bank. We must understand that this genocide is being driven and provided material support by the tech companies that are putting up new data centers all over Ireland. Locally, these data centers are impacting water supply and the power grid. They are providing the data operations for the genocide–this is a violation of the UN Geneva Conventions as well as a violation of Ireland’s neutrality. The engine for the genocide is right here in Ireland, as one of as Israel’s top trading partners. Irish resources, people and land are being used to provide material and tactical support for Gaza’s genocide. As healthcare workers, we must push the government to represent the will of the people and not the interests of the billionaire class or the technofascists driving not only the genocide in Gaza but the kidnappings, disappearances and incarcerations in the US. The data centers are providing material support for ICE and the expansion of the surveillance state here in the EU. We must get engaged with the fight around data centers and data privacy. We must push for a slow approach to AI in medicine. It is not a necessary tool and ultimately the data will be used to violate our patients rights to privacy and to persecute our own clinical decisions if we happen to take a stand for people the elite is trying to erase..

• We must hold every medical institution that participated in silencing of healthcare workers advocating to stop the genocide accountable for the enablement of genocide. If US institutions are firing doctors and nurses for standing against genocide, we must push our institutions here and elsewhere to end all academic relationships with those institutions until those institutions commit to academic honesty and an oath to uphold humanity. As the discovery unfolds in many of our cases, we must push further to see the dynamics of power and we must demand that these dynamics are changed.

• We must work together to ensure the Gaza Health Ministry is fully empowered to continue its work in protecting the people in Palestine. Their work has been exemplary in horrific circumstances. We must work to overturn the UN’s handing of Gaza to its killers.

• We must evolve the current medical curriculum to teach medical students how to understand systems and how to act to address systemic harm. We must teach them to become practitioners of Deep Medicine, so that their care is always for the maximum benefit of all. In times of climate catastrophe and social unrest, the most pressing health challenges young doctors face are coming from systems collapse, not genetic underpinnings of disease. We must prepare them properly for the future that is already here.

• We must support medical students from Gaza completing their education here and support those students who have been repressed in the US too.

• We must open bigger conduits to get patients and their families here and other places for urgent treatment with assurance that they can return to Palestine after their treatment.

• We must support and build power for a General Strike to shut down the war economy to stop the Genocide in Gaza and to bring an end to imperialism. Ireland is the global HQ for many corporations profiting from and driving the genocide. The only thing that will stop the war machine that we are facing is to grind the engine to a halt, as workers in Italy have demonstrated.

I conclude by saying thank you for your generous listening. The struggle for the rights and health of Palestinian people is our struggle all over the world. When you travel to the US for conferences, please remember the US is also a settler colony and the people across Turtle Island yearn for it to be liberated. Do not erase the Indigenous struggles there by normalizing US society on stolen Native land.

I believe Ireland holds the moral center of gravity of the modern world. This is where this settler colonial reality started and this is the place from where the end must be catalyzed.I am honored to join your ranks, Irish Healthcare Workers for Palestine, and will work with you tirelessly for a free and liberated Palestine.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.