Palestine Pt. 3: Settler-Colonialism and Medical Apartheid with Rupa Marya & Jess Ghannam

As the ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians continues, it’s important that we also continue to raise a magnifying glass to its perpetrators, not just looking at the state of Israel as a whole or the IDF—as blood-soaked as their hands are—but also looking at the some of the perhaps less publicly scrutinized institutions complicit in this genocide. 

In this episode in our ongoing series on Palestine, we’re going to focus on healthcare institutions and their complicity in the devastation and destruction taking place in Palestine. What are the underlying power structures that support and uplift settler colonialism, white supremacy, and health apartheid? Why is it that so few health institutions in the west have spoken out against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people? What does that tell us about the failures of our healthcare systems and much of the medical community? 

To discuss these questions and more we’ve brought on two guests today. Dr. Jess Ghannam is a Palestinian professor in psychiatry at UCSF in San Francisco working in Gaza. Dr. Rupa Marya is a professor of medicine at UCSF in San Francisco and co-author, along with Raj Patel, of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. 

Thank you to Carolyn Raider for this episode’s cover art and to Sabreen Group & Majazz Project / Palestinian Sound Archive for the intermission music. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond/Lanterns.

Further Resources

• Upstream: Decolonizing Medicine with Rupa Marya and Raj Patel
• Rupa Marya on Instagram
• Inflamed Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice
• There’s No Justification for Destroying Gaza’s Health Infrastructure, Yes Magazine
• Health Professionals and War in the Middle East, JAMA
• Upstream: Health Communism with Beatrice Adler-Bolton
• Upstream: Palestine Pt. 1: A Socialist Introduction with Sumaya Awad
• Upstream: Palestine Pt. 2: Justice for Some with Noura Erakat

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