Hunger Strike for Gaza Spreads to Stanford

As Campuses Close, the Hunger Strike for Gaza Grows

Today on May 12th, 15 students, faculty and staff launched a hunger strike at Stanford to join the growing numbers around the country who are taking a stand against Israel’s genocide and US complicity in genocide. The strikers at Stanford demand that their administration divest from genocide, drop all charges against the Stanford 12 and take a stand against the current administration’s assault on academic freedom and freedom of speech. Here are the words I offered to these incredible youth at Stanford SJP who are demonstrating what moral courage and commitment look like in practice.

From @stanfordsjp on Instagram. Follow them!

I am a professor of medicine at UCSF where I have served and walked alongside many oppressed people here in their struggles for dignity and health. I have accompanied several hunger strikes now, as Bay Area community members like the Frisco 5 reached the limit of their words and used their bodies to achieve their goals for humanity, for equity and for health justice. Today we stand together with these hunger strikers to end the genocide in Gaza and our institutions’ complicity in this genocide and to end the apartheid in Palestine.

After 23 years of serving as a physician at UCSF, I received notice from the Chancellor of their intention to fire me. They cite violations in the Faculty Code of Conduct, the same sham that is being used across the US to silence faculty, staff and students as we take a principled stance against Israel’s genocide in Palestine. If standing in opposition to genocide and the racist ideology and practices that lead to genocide is a violation of our Faculty Code of Conduct, then that Code of Conduct must be rewritten, for it is inadequate to protect the things that are most sacred about our duties as educators and physicians, which is to protect all of humanity and to uphold the value of all life.

They intend to fire me for my scholarship, because I am an expert on the health impacts of colonialism, the same dynamics that continue today through policies that deny California Native people their full rights and responsibilities to steward their ancestral home, this beautiful place where we live as settlers on stolen land. My scholarship is purposefully unsettling, because it is only through unsettling, that we can recover our shared humanity and reawaken our sacred duties to care for one another and to care for the entire web of life.

They intend to fire me because I exposed their racism, how white people at UCSF are using Title VI protections to silence people of color who are standing up as people of color are once again annihilated by people of European ancestry. Title VI is an achievement of our ancestors, a victory of the Civil Right struggle. It was put in place to protect people precisely like me in times precisely like these.

This racism that I have exposed through my principled engagement shows everything we need to know about why Black people do not get the same healthcare as white people in the US. If our schools and hospitals can silence us as we stand against the most egregious expression of racism–genocide–you can now clearly see the attitudes and practices that operate every day as we are silenced when we advocate for our Black patients and patients of other marginalized identities. But we will continue to stand for our Civil Rights, because we understand, as our ancestors did before us, that a harm to one of us is a harm to all. And none of us are free until we are all free.

They intend to fire me because I was in touch with British Palestinian surgeon Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah almost daily during the first 6 weeks of the genocide. I shared his testimony and co-authored pieces that medical journals refused to publish–testimony that showed the brutality and violations of International Humanitarian Law that Israel was committing, as they bombed every hospital in Gaza and as they targeted and killed healthcare workers, practices that continue today.

Silencing healthcare workers here as they kill our colleagues and destory healthcare infrastructure there are two prongs of enabling genocide. Our words are a challenge to a system that would annihilate children. We stand for the health and wellbeing of all children. And today 2 million people in Gaza are being starved by Israel, the US and most of the West–about half of those people in Gaza are children.

Western Colonialism always uses food as a weapon. In Ireland, while the potato blight struck in the fields in the 1840s, several thousands of tons of food were shipped to England by the colonists, leaving over a 1 million people to starve to death. Images of relatives with grass-stained mouths still haunt today’s Irish people, who are just now coming to terms with the fact that they are survivors of that British genocide.

Between 1880-1920, Winston Churchill’s colonial food policies caused 165 million excess deaths throughout the Indian subcontinent. It is a holocaust that no one speaks of because the people who died were brown skinned, portrayed as subhuman or “savage.” By that point in history, Western colonial genocides were widely accepted. Western colonial genocides are still widely accepted, and we stand here today to insist upon Another Way. We insist that humanity evolves to reject this racist logic of harm and domination.

Food can be a medicine, as my work with many community groups shows, as our farms grow and feed thousands of people every week with free organic food. Food can be a weapon, as we see through the history of Western colonialism. And food can be a tool of our collective liberation, as these courageous hunger strikes who are sacrificing their health, their comfort and their wellbeing show us what we all must be prepared to do to stop this genocide.

What are you willing to sacrifice to stop this genocide? Do you see the racist muzzle clamp down, as we are defamed, degraded and fired? Do you recognize it? This is the continuation of our Civil Rights struggle. This is the next chapter. What are you prepared to sacrifice for the liberation of all beings from the tyranny of billionaires who will deny us food, water, shelter, medicine, education and a liveable climate, just to send their money to other countries to deny children there the same?

We are in the struggle of our lifetimes and I am grateful to these principled youth for demonstrating the sacrifice necessary for liberation. They can fire us. They can degrade us. They can arrest us. They can deport us. They can misrepresent us. They can call us “unprofessional.” They might as well call us “savage.”

But our cause is righteous and our path is clear. And with every attempt to silence us, our collective roar grows.

There is no career, no degree, no status, nothing–there is nothing that is worth abandoning our stance.

And we understand that the liberation of all of humanity and of the very web of life requires the liberation of Palestine. Thank you to these hunger strikers who are showing us with their practice what this stance requires. I stand with you and will serve as called. And together we will walk to a Free Palestine. Thank you.