Press Release: UCSF Professor of Medicine Files Civil Rights Complaint

Alleging Discrimination/Retaliation for Palestine Advocacy

PRESS RELEASE–For Immediate Release

UCSF Professor of Medicine Files Civil Rights Complaint Alleging Discrimination/Retaliation for Palestine Advocacy

Media Contact: Rochelle McLaughlin at (650) 383-8814 or rochellem.2021@gmail.com

After 17 months of repression and harassment for advocacy around Palestine, Dr. Rupa Marya, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is filing a complaint with the Civil Rights Department against her employer following multiple disciplinary and investigative processes due to her condemnation of the genocide in Gaza. These processes demonstrate a concerning pattern where Title VI protections are being used against people of color advocating for the rights of Palestinians, as Trump openly calls for ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Marya’s current enforced leave focuses on her asking questions around admitting medical students from a region engaged in genocide without a process to protect the university community, questions that many physicians, scholars and medical ethicists agree require consideration.

Since October 2023, UCSF has been systematically repressing its faculty, students and staff who speak up about the genocide in Palestine. They recently fired a staff member–Denise Caramagno–who stood up for Dr. Marya when the university publicly attacked her in January 2024. UCSF’s largest donor, the Diller Foundation, is entwined with Israeli settlement projects and funds rightwing organizations in the US and abroad. The Israeli military in Gaza has targeted and destroyed the Palestinian healthcare infrastructure. It has detained, attacked, tortured and assassinated healthcare workers. Healthcare workers around the world have mobilized to decry these violations of International Law and to demand an end the genocide. They have been met with repression of their speech, suspension, defamation of their character, job loss, detention and arrest.

In October 2023, Dr Marya was in daily touch with Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British Palestinian surgeon whose testimony of the first 43 days of the genocide at the International Court of Justice led to their assesment of war crimes and genocide. The doctors’ communication formed the basis of the first attempts to get out the medical story in Western media about the genocide unfolding from within the hospitals in Gaza, and were submitted in a detailed report to the UN Human Rights Council on how Israel’s targeted destruction of healthcare in Gaza and the repression of healthcare workers across the West both work to enable and accelerate the genocide in Palestine.

This attempt to silence free speech continues on university campuses across the US. It is part of the broader rightwing agenda to move back the gains of the Civil Rights Era for marginalized people. Mark Kleinman, one of Marya’s legal representatives says, “It is shameful and shocking to see this perversion of Civil Rights laws to attack women of color standing up for Civil Rights.”

Institutions like UCSF with their billionaire donors are aligning with rightwing Republicans and pro-Israel Democrats, such as California state senator Scott Wiener, who has been trying to shape how Palestinian history is taught in California’s classrooms and who has been publicly attacking Dr. Marya, framing her as antisemitic, something Jewish doctors denounce. Together politicians and institutions are falling in lockstep with Trump’s agenda of erasure–silencing people in the US while calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, violating International Law in Palestine and Constitutional and Civil Rights in the US.

“It is a dangerous time for Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech, especially in the field of medicine where the consequences of silencing doctors means that people die who do not need to” says Dr. Marya, who writes about colonialism and health in her book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. “All medical norms are being violated by Israel and the US support for the genocide, including support from within our medical institutions. As faculty who care about future generations of medical students learning how to serve the health of all people, we must speak up.”

When doctors who are speaking up for the rule of law and the wellbeing of the public are silenced, people’s health is at risk, and marginalized people are most impacted. For a doctor who has served the most marginalized people in the Bay Area for over 20 years, those people and their allies stand to lose a fierce advocate for their health.