The Scramble for Narrative Control
Power--Not Race or Religion--is the Heart of the Matter. Justice is the Medicine.
Last week, San Francisco-based journalist Heather Knight from the New York Times reached out and said “Jewish and Israeli doctors at UCSF” asked them to write about antisemitism at UCSF. She contacted Drs Jess Ghannam, Leigh Kimberg and myself. We are the physicians who founded UCSF’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter, to provide support for faculty and staff who wanted to speak up to support Palestinian life. About half the people we work with to support Palestinians in the face of Israel’s genocide are Jewish—this is not about antisemitism.
This week, I was informed that UCSF launched a new investigation on faculty conduct into my writing and speaking in support of Palestinian people and my critique of the racism that undergirds Israel’s genocide and the behavior of pro-Israel people here.
Yesterday I received a leaked email that shows a white female physician at UCSF who has uplifted my work in health justice multiple times over the past several years railing to UCSF leadership that in fact, I’m a vile racist. She was also complaining about Denise Caramagno, a counselor at UCSF who works in the Office of Diversity and Outreach.
Back in January, Caramagno was surprised when UCSF launched an attack on my questioning about Zionism as a form of supremacism and its impact on health outcomes for patients. In its subtle form, it could impact the allocation of resources. In its obscene form, it could take the shape of physicians from the US going to Israel, serving in the IDF, participating in the genocide of Palestinians, then returning home to the US. What impact does that have on the care of brown, Arab, Muslim people here? When a Palestinian medical student at Emory asked this question about an Emory professor who went to serve the IDF during this genocide, she was also put under investigation by her university for her conduct.
The physician who framed me as a racist was upset that Caramagno pushed back on UCSF’s attack on my line of questioning and asserted that perhaps Caramagno was unfit to serve Jewish people. Caramagno has since been removed from the team offering psychological support to UCSF community members during Israel’s ongoing violence in Gaza, an affront to her professionalism and career-long commitment to antiracist work. What this doctor framed as “Denise’s public support for Rupa’s antisemitism” was Caramagno’s support for academic freedom and supporting the voices of faculty of color asking hard questions about health equity.
This same white physician who asserts I’m “poisoning the UCSF DEI/social justice infrastructure” sent me emails when Al-Ahli was bombed in November 2023. This was the first hospital Israel bombed. She was upset that I decried the bombing and asserted that because I blamed Israel, I was making the world unsafe for Jews, which is antisemitic. That framing was a fascinating move of words, after Israel just murdered a bunch of people sheltering in a hospital. I told her I was in daily communication with doctors inside that hospital who had been called by the IDF days prior and informed that the hospital would be bombed. Then Israel proceeded to bomb that hospital and all the hospitals in Gaza. The physician has been silent on hospitals since.
When white people lash out at brown and Black people articulating opposition to the killing of people of color—we must see this for what it is. This is racist repression to allow the killing to continue uncontested.
The brown and Black people who are lining up to do the white folks bidding are a part of maintaining white supremacy at these institutions. The work of DEI is already poisoned if it’s used to silence people of color, while uplifting racist agendas. What’s exposed here are dynamics of power—beyond identity. Any tool can be used to maintain power, when its certitude is challenged by a more compelling narrative. And justice is by far one of the most compelling human narratives. Palestinean liberation—as did South African liberation—brings together every movement for justice.
The physician who misrepresented my words to assert a racist narrative does narrative work and knows how language works. She manipulated my words to drive a political agenda, which is to use the DEI machinery at UCSF to isolate and silence me and those who agree with me. There are hundreds of at UCSF who do agree with me, by the way, and who are shocked by the mechanisms of power being used to silence healthcare workers who are speaking up against Israel’s violence against healthcare workers in Gaza.
Historically white women have been the biggest upholders of white supremacy—no surprise here. What we see now is how South Asian and Black people are enlisted to do the same—from the White House spokespeople to the UN representatives blocking multiple ceasefire resolutions to the countless Health Equity scholars in the US who have been eerily silent in the face of the largest acts of racist violence that we have collectively witnessed in our lifetimes, targeting our own colleagues.
White women have also been great allies—as Denise Caramagno demonstrates—to dismantling the systems of power that keep brown and Black people mired with worse health outcomes across the globe. The issue deeply at play in is not simply race nor religion—it’s power. Racism is one way of entrenching power. So is ethnonationalism, where one cultural religious group is given structural power over all others.
We cannot be silent in face of genocide. It is the most egregious form of racist violence. In Gaza, this is also ethnonationalist violence.
Since October 7th, Israel has lost narrative control. Now they come after those of us who eroded it by sharing the experience of Palestinians subject to 76 years of Israel’s violence and exposing the tentacles of financial relationships in the US that support the continuation of this violence. In medicine, this is particularly important because Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure was targeted in this genocide to accelerate the degree of human suffering.
At UCSF this is especially relevant because our largest donor—the Diller Foundation—supports Israel, racist organizations that attack Muslims and Arabs and organizations that try to destroy the careers of US academics who are critical of Israel—like me. The Dillers make their money from the Prometheus Real Estate Group, a developer who works to fight rent control and drives homelessness in San Francisco. All of these relationships are inextricably linked, and they contribute to how power crushes the powerless around the world. The work of health justice is to identify, understand and redraw dynamics of power from ones that cause harm to ones that promote health for all.
Whatever challenges we face here in using our voices to confront this genocide is nothing compared to what our colleagues in Gaza are facing. We each must do our part. Keep speaking. Keep marching. Keep walking to Freedom.