The woke activist group White Coats for Black Lives (WC4BL) is spearheading the effort to embroil medical students in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Protests on college campuses began following Israel’s response to the unprovoked attack on Israeli civilians in Gaza by the Palestinian political and military faction Hamas. WC4BL published a letter titled, “Regarding the Increasing Harassment and Punishment of Pro-Palestine Healthcare Workers” on November 19.
The letter demands American medical institutions “reinstate all healthcare providers who have been fired or placed on leave for demanding a ceasefire, the end of the siege on occupied Gaza, and the end of Israeli occupation, or have affirmed Palestinians’ right to resist in the face of 75 years of relentless oppression.”
The letter makes no mention of the October 7 attack, which involved a range of atrocities including rapes, hostage taking, and beheadings of men, women, and children. Hamas has been classified as a terrorist organization by the United States government since 1995 and by the European Union since 2003.
Activist Physicians
The medical profession’s guiding principles, embodied in the Hippocratic Oath and the 1864 Geneva Conventions, direct practitioners to ply their trade impartially and outside the bounds of politics, race, and other biases.
Today, radicalized medical students are abandoning those principles as they actively engage in advocacy for one side of the Israel-Palestine conflict, denouncing what they characterize as “mass murder” and “genocide” allegedly directed by Israelis against the Palestinian Arabs.
While an internet search shows no notable anti-Israel protests on medical school campuses after the Gaza attack, “medical training and practice is fertile ground for antisemitism to flourish,” wrote Ian Kingsbury and Jay P. Greene on November 21 in Tablet. The writers noted that medical schools and associations have treated the Israeli-Hamas conflict differently than the Russia-Ukraine war.
“The most striking thing about the response of medical schools to the wars in Ukraine and Israel is how nearly half have something to say about Ukraine while almost none say anything about Israel,” wrote Kingsbury and Greene. “If we combined the 42 medical associations and 152 medical schools, we find that 100 out of 194 of them posted responses to the conflict in Ukraine, while 15 of those 194 issued statements regarding the war in Israel.”
No Room for Politics
In a commentary, Sally Satel, M.D., a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, detailed her receipt of an October 17 email from WC4BL imploring “physicians and physicians-in-training to use our power to amplify Palestinian people’s demands for freedom, safety, and dignity,” and asking recipients to “participate in in-person protests and sit-ins,” with the University Minnesota chapter reposting messages on X calling for “Palestinian resistance to free themselves from their oppressors by any means necessary.”
Satel criticized the inappropriateness of the email and how medical students should not engage in anything but the study of medicine.
“There should be no place in any medical school for interest groups that engage so aggressively in political campaigns bearing no relationship to medicine or that impose limits on scholarly endeavors for the good of patients everywhere,” wrote Satel. “The WC4BL episode is representative of the growing trend among medical trainees to claim social justice as part of their mission that calls for immigration reform, ending the electoral college, changing housing policy, confronting capitalism, and “dismantling racism.”
Marxism and Medicine
While groups like WC4BL claim to focus on racial injustice, their rhetoric reveals destructive neo-Marxist roots, says Marilyn Singleton, M.D, J.D., a senior fellow at Do No Harm.
“White Coats for Black Lives, a purportedly grassroots medical student-led organization, had the opportunity to gather support from all corners of the political spectrum,” said Singleton. “Who could argue with the concept of improving health for people of color?
“Unfortunately, based on its ‘Vision and Values’ statement, WC4BL turned out to be another group of Marxist marionettes,” said Singleton. “Its vision is to dismantle ‘exploitative systems in the United States which are largely reliant on anti-Black racism, colonialism, CIS heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.’”
On the role of physicians, Singleton said, “Our calling is not to take sides, but to take care of patients.”
Expectation of Impartiality
The ‘Balkanization’ of health care is a real concern, says Merrill Matthews, Ph.D., a resident scholar at the Institute for Policy Innovation.
“Just as black patients would be justified in not trusting a doctor who marched with the Ku Klux Klan, Jews are justified in not trusting a doctor, other medical professional, or a medical center that implies or publicly supports Hamas or any other antisemitic group,” said Matthews. “As various medical groups and health care providers rally for Hamas, or just in opposition to Israel, they are alienating a large segment of the population and undermining public trust.”
Not all medical students embrace the politics of medicine. A medical school student in Oklahoma who asked to speak anonymously said she is concerned over such blatant activism from students in a field that requires impartiality.
“As physicians, we should be taught to care for people regardless of their nationality, ethnicity, religion, or political views,” said the student. “The Hippocratic oath demands that we treat our patients equally ‘whether they are free men or slaves.’ Any time I hear medical students standing so firmly in hate against a country, be it Russia or Israel, I question their ability to uphold this oath to treat every patient with dignity.”
Kevin Stone (kevin.s.stone@gmail.com) writes from Arlington, Texas.
