Is Hamas Gaining a Foothold in U.S. Medicine?

As if the antisemitism that has swept through Harvard needed an accelerant, a growing group of professors and other employees inaugurated the spring semester by rolling out the university’s chapter of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP). It’s part of a new U.S. network to “support” the National Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that called the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.”

Significantly, more than 40 percent of the 112 signatories to FSJP’s founding statement were from Harvard’s medical and public health schools as of Feb. 19. Names then were removed from public view amid backlash over the group’s reposting of a flagrantly antisemitic image, for which it later apologized as it faced fierce outcry. The cartoon depicted a hand with a dollar sign at the center of a Star of David holding a noose around the necks of what appeared to be the Black boxer Muhammad Ali and former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Among the FSJP founding statement’s signers are practitioners in internal medicine, psychiatry, pediatrics, and cancer care. Count this among many worrisome signals that the antisemitism roiling U.S. undergraduate programs has bled into the healthcare field as well, particularly among younger doctors and medical students. It has implications for medicine.

Vilifying Israel

Physicians are brazenly posting comments on their personal social media that vilify Israel while calling for its “dissolution” and rail against “Zionist doctors,” with comments such as, “The presence of Zionism in US medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity.”

Some doctors are denying the brutalities inflicted by Hamas. Among them are gynecologists who called the documented rapes fabrications and doubled down while blaming Israel for the massacre when challenged by a Florida maternal fetal medicine specialist who recently had been in an OB/GYN residency program with them. (They agreed to share this information with me on condition of anonymity.)

Not only do those impugning doctors spread monstrous lies virally with the heft of a medical license, many also are taking Jew-hatred to the streets as they align with groups backing Hamas and target sacrosanct spaces in the name of medicine. Even before Israel entered Gaza, health workers protested at Harvard Medical School in Boston’s medical district. Several wore white coats embellished with “Doctors Against Genocide, Free Palestine” and “Medical Students against Genocide, Free Palestine,” an oft-heard rallying cry that blends a modern-day blood libel with a call for Israel’s destruction.

A recent protest outside Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center was part of a “Flood Manhattan for Gaza MLK Day March for Healthcare,” sponsored by Healthcare Workers for Palestine and Within Our Lifetime—the latter group listed by the Anti-Defamation League as “expressing complete support for Hamas’s deadly attacks” and viewing violence as “a warranted response.”

Among those captured in a video accusing the cancer center of supporting genocide were protesters holding a logo-bearing banner for the group Doctors Against Genocide. That’s the same organization that had planned, but then canceled, an “Urgent Call to Action” at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., billed as “Stop the Genocide in Gaza” and encouraging “healthcare workers to wear white coats/uniforms.”

It was an egregious attempt at Holocaust inversion, a frequently used ploy to portray Israelis as modern-day Nazis.

Antisemitic Doctors

More worrisome is the Jew-hatred making inroads in the workplace and academic settings, which are largely intertwined in medicine. Dr. Yael Halaas, a facial plastic surgeon in New York, recently launched the American Jewish Medical Association with other doctors throughout the U.S. to address a deluge of concerns about antisemitism from clinicians who hungered for a unifying voice.

Many don’t report incidents, fearing retaliation. One was fired after coming forward as a whistleblower regarding antisemitism, she says. Several in the field have observed a troubling drop in enrollment of Jews in medical schools over the last few years.

For young Jews already pursuing medicine, the challenges are enormous. Antisemitism proliferated after Oct. 7, with classmates primed from their untamed college activism.

Eliana Jolkovsky, in her third year at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, is no stranger to this hate fest. She issued a statement on behalf of the school’s Jewish Medical Student Association that condemned the Hamas massacre, while lamenting that the attack “will ultimately result in significant loss of Israeli and Palestinian life.”

In return, an anonymous coalition of medical students issued a list of demands. Among them: that her organization publicly retract “your false statements, particularly” those referencing the kidnappings, beheadings and rapes. It further denounced “casting retaliation against an apartheid state as unprovoked terrorist violence.”

“It made me feel extremely unsafe at my medical school, knowing that the people I’m training alongside to become one day healers think that a massacre of my people is warranted,” she told me.

Jolkovsky’s class chat became a “cesspool of anti-Israel messages.” While not an “official” UCLA group, the platform is used to discuss assignments, study tips, and residency applications, so her presence is a de facto requirement, she said.

Open Hostility on Campus

For Valery Rozen, a fourth-year medical student at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, it’s been a similar narrative of open hostility. Panel discussions on the conflict are stacked against Israel, with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) brought in for a bogus balance. “In several instances” following the Oct. 7 massacre, according to the ADL, “JVP or attendees/speakers at its rallies have expressed explicit support for terror against Israel or even overt antisemitism.”

Minorities are always celebrated at the medical school, including Rozen's Hispanic heritage. “But when it comes to the Jewish side of me,” she says, “at least in this school, it’s always associated with Israel and always very negatively.”

Interns Against Israel

It is no less difficult for Jewish doctors as they continue their training. The Committee of Interns and Residents (CIR), a union that negotiates salary, benefits and working conditions for 30,000 doctors across the U.S., issued a statement that, among other things, failed to denounce the Hamas massacre.

The union also signed onto a rally sponsored by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America at which a doctor in CIR leadership was filmed as a speaker. On Oct. 7, DSA hardly sugarcoated its sentiments as it posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, “Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime…”

Dr. Tal Shachi, a pulmonary and critical care fellow in New York, raised objections to the CIR statement in its chat and with a change.org petition garnering almost 1,400 signatures. The union’s chat turned blistering on Israel, with accusations of settler colonialism and genocide. Shachi dropped her membership in CIR, which had been withdrawing 1.6 percent of her base salary for dues, but she remains tethered to it because the union still takes a slightly smaller cut in New York State as an “agency fee” to cover expenses for collective bargaining.

While not overt in the hospital, the animus “inevitably trickles into the workplace,” she tells me. “They’re writing something in a chat, and then I see them the next day at work. It makes things really uncomfortable.”

Medicine Should be Free from Politics

What are the implications for patient care? It would be naïve not to be concerned.

There already is evidence patients’ trust in their doctors is being undermined. Dr. Katie Hulbert, a California-based psychiatrist, told me she was in touch with a family that stopped seeing their child’s pediatrician after the doctor, unprompted, used the visit to spew about Israel being genocidal.

“Now patients who have established care with doctors might go somewhere else and it’s maybe not as good, or drop their care and not go somewhere else,” says Hulbert, who found herself denigrated publicly, then removed, from an online physician/moms group after posting about her tour of Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in Jerusalem and its inclusive care.

Others with decades behind them in the profession are worried about whether newly minted doctors can commit to their patients’ needs regardless of differing views. For many of these warrior medical trainees, social justice—not medicine itself—is the calling, several have observed.

“The politics must be left at home,” says Dr. Gary Schiller, director of leukemia and stem cell transplant at UCLA Health, “but this new generation of trainees takes them everywhere. I fear that rather than equalizing the distribution of healthcare across the population, it may mean that patients will need to choose wisely.”

That could prove difficult in rural areas or narrow specialties. What’s more, there is no choosing doctors in emergency hospitalizations. And even if a surgeon is selected for a planned procedure, the hospital staff caring for you can’t be handpicked.

Healthcare leaders must act decisively now to eliminate this ideological cancer metastasizing throughout medicine, or risk imperiling the profession as this new cohort begins overseeing departments, running hospitals and influencing health policy. How—and whether—they meet this challenge will cement their legacy in the field and determine if American medicine remains a trusted and top-notch brand.

A version of this piece previously appeared in the printed pages of The Jerusalem Post.