Rupa Marya demonstrates the courage required to contest the neocolonial erasure of Palestine

Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician and activist. She's been a major part of revolutionary health initiatives like the Justice Study, which looks at the links between police violence and health in Black, brown and Indigenous communities, and Seeding Sovereignty, a group that promotes Indigenous autonomy in climate action. She's also the co-author, with Raj Patel, of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. Inflamed is a book that can help us locate the roots of disease in a system of overproduction that pumps so much toxicity into our communities.

In September 2024, Marya was put on leave by the University of California San Francisco in response to her criticism of Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, and just weeks ago was fired for her comments. She has now filed multiple free speech complaints against UCSF. Exposing the obvious danger that fascism poses to providing care should not come at the cost of someone's career. Trying to convey the sheer magnitude of this horrific bombardment on the healthcare system in Palestine shouldn't mean this level of risk.

The message from many Western institutions is that basically any expression of pro-Palestinian dissent is now going to be either crushed or completely ignored. These institutions, including many universities, are complicit in the political cowardice and settler colonial racism that lets the genocide to continue. The crackdown on dissent is ramping up everywhere. And because the Israeli propaganda machine has struggled to obscure the reality of this genocide with its lies, accusations and brinksmanship, the only strategy left is just to go after people like Rupa, either by attacking their ability to do their job or by detaining and disappearing them.

Our conversation is really about the emergence of a world order that doesn't care about health. Gaza has endured 638 days of hell. Unimaginably, Israel has delighted in raining down hell on Gaza for over 15,000 straight hours. Two years of witnessing the humiliation and annihilation of the people of Gaza. What has it done to us? This event? Has it changed time the way the pandemic did? Does it make us relate differently to the things and people around us? The water? The air? The peace we get to experience? Has seeing these things and thinking about the poisonous roots of what we're seeing done anything to our sense of how we should be governed?

I wonder because, in this discussion, Marya lays out exactly the kinds of sacrifices that need to be made so that health can serve as a rallying cry for ending the obscene domination of Palestine.