I’m not trying to be mean here. But as British journalist  Jonathan Cook asks, “At what point are we permitted to prize Palestinian life over the “sensitivities” of Zionist supremacists?” 

How can it be that more than 555 Jewish medical doctors in the Toronto area, all affiliated to the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine,  can support statements that are little more than pro-war, racist, claptrap and total support for Israel?

Dr Philip Berger, a Toronto area physician for 40 years, wrote a letter on Nov. 22, 2023 as a spokesman for the group, Doctors Against Racism and Antisemitism (DARA).  This is not a secret group; it has website, a sizeable membership and many pro-Israel lobbying efforts. For example, DARA is supporting efforts to fund a legal case in support of charitable tax status for the Jewish National Fund (JNF). In August, after decades of pressure by groups such as Independent Jewish Voices and CJPME, Revenue Canada (CRA) finally revoked the JNF’s charitable status because of it’s support for illegal settlements, and unlawful Israeli land grabs by Jewish settlers in the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. In the letter on behalf of DARA, Dr Berger stated that the 555 Jewish physician faculty members “proclaimed their Zionism” and declared  their right to “work openly as Zionists free of censure”. Berger’s letter reads in part:

 “Israel is accused of genocide when it is Hamas that declares its goal of genocide for the Jews and acts on it. For millennia Jews have been accused of doing the very thing that the antisemites do to the Jews — classic antisemitism. Now is no different.”

“… the Zionist impulse [is] to defend themselves, their people, their state, their highest ideal, and Western civilization.”

Dr Philip Berger, see this

He further states “these 555 physicians had the Zionist impulse to defend themselves, their people, their state, their highest ideals, and Western civilization.”  Western civilization is code for what exactly? Berger goes on,  “The left has failed to see that there’s only one Jewish state, under threat by millions of citizens around it. The left does not have a scintilla of empathy for Jewish victims of terror.” 

Wait – wait — wait – hello?  After the horrendous October 7 attack on Israelis, who have been the main victims of terror?  It’s millions of Palestinians locked in Gaza and (also in the West Bank) whose lives are at tremendous risk because of Israel’s illegal bombing, artillery file, snipers, missiles – blasting  the hell out of Gaza.  By late November, at the time of Berger’s letter, Israel had killed more than 11,200 Palestinians — two-thirds of them women and children since Israel’s war on Gaza began on October 7. In the six weeks after Oct. 7, About 2,700 Gazans had already been reported missing. 

If Israel doesn’t stop, it seems as though no one can or will stop them, there will be up to 440,000 dead in the last months of 2024.  New research from the University of Edinburgh estimates more than 335,000 Palestinians in Gaza may be dead by the end of September.  Statisticians are now saying that Palestinians who are missing, the murdered, the corpses lying dead under buildings and those who have died of their injuries, disease or starvation are already in the hundreds of thousands. 

This is no fantasy.  Israeli officials, such as Finance minister Belzalel Smotrich, have said that they would be happy to kill all 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza but that international powers wouldn’t let Israel wipe out Gaza’s population.

“Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned,” Smotrich said.

Neither Dr Philip Berger nor his  555 medical doctor followers in DARA seem to have the slightest idea there is a genocide going on in Gaza. And if they know, do they care? 41,000 Palestinians officially dead, 100,000 seriously injured, up to 5,000 children surviving with one or more limbs amputated – that is what is happening now in Gaza.  How exactly does that put Jewish doctors in Toronto at risk? Risk of what?

Question: Has one Toronto area doctor lost his or her job because they are Jews? Has one doctor lost admitting privileges or benefits because they are Jews? Has one medical student been kicked out of med school because of being Jewish?  The answer is no to all of the above. 

Yet dozens and dozens of doctors have been disciplined. In the case of Dr Yipeng Ge he was kicked out of his medical graduate training program for pro-Palestinian comments on social media. After a a petition demanding his reinstatement received over 65,000 signatures, he was reinstated. In January 2024, despite being reinstated by the University of Ottawa, Dr. Ge declared that he had no plans to return. He said, “I feel incredibly harmed by this process, and I don’t know how to continue within this institution because of what’s happened.” Due to his anti-genocide views, Dr Ge felt pressure a lot of pressure and resigned from the board of the Canadian Medical Association. And there is the case of Winnipeg nursing student Arij Al Khafagi who was suspended from her final year program because her social media was sympathetic to Palestine.

Since DARA is a group of 555 medical doctors you would think they would be sympathetic or at least interested in saving human beings – even “enemy” human beings –especially the fact that  tens of thousands of the victims are women and children.   Medical doctors are supposed to be devoted to protecting human life, and they are supposed to live up to  the message of the Hippocratic oath. So how does that play out with Israel’s war on the Palestinians?

The state of Israel with its huge financial backers including the US, UK and Canada has been oppressing and killing Palestinians since before the Nakba in 1948 in order to rid Israel of Palestinians – to “judaise”the region.  It proceeds by way of  ethnic cleansing, driving Palestinians out of their homes, and bombing and killing them. Not just them but destroying everything, about Palestinian civil society, universities, art,  libraries, hospitals  schools, mosques. 

So how do the  555 Canadian medical doctors measure up as humanitarians? Has even one of the 555 defended anyone’s rights except to protect their own prejudices and racism?  Maybe they just follow their leader? Well Dr Berger (plus the other 555) now have to “wear” the second stage of the Israeli occupation of Gaza which will include

• expelling Palestinians from the north of Gaza (to start with) the land and using it for Jewish settlements
• condemning the ones who won’t  go to mass starvation and continuous military attacks
• The “firing” of UNRWA because Netanyahu hates its parent organization, the UN, because of its pro-Palestine resolutions of late. Israel has done everything to undermine UNRWA, accusing them of harbouring Hamas and other terrorists (without concrete evidence). And if UNRWA is forced to leave, who will replace it? Surely not Israel, that is responsible for the destruction and the withholding of aid.

As Jonathan Cook writes “At what point are we allowed to say that Israel cannot continue to exist in its current form, as a racist, settler-colonial state masquerading as the “state of the Jews”, and that it must be remade, as apartheid South Africa once was?”

Nota bene:

Two Israeli settler rabbis, Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, who make the argument for killing babies:

“There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.” (read this)

Photograph at the top: A group of girls, dresssed up for Eid al-Adha, pray in the rubble of a mosque in Khan Younis on 16 June, 2024. (credit: Omar Ashtawy/APA images)