Palestine and the case for abolitionist medicine

On May 18, Palestinians called for a general strike amid what they described as the “United Intifada.” They penned the “Manifesto of Hope & Dignity” to articulate the significance of Palestinians transforming their condition of shetat (diaspora; dispersal) into a synchronous multi-sited resistance:

“[Zionism] tried to turn us into different societies, each living apart, each in its own separate prison...This is how Israel imprisoned us in the prisons of isolation; some of us caged in the “Oslo prison” in the West Bank, some in the “citizenship prison” in the part of Palestine occupied in 1948, some of us isolated by the monstrous siege and ongoing devastating assault on the “Gaza prison” some of us isolated under the systematic Judaization campaigns of the “Jerusalem prison,” and some isolated from Palestine altogether dispersed across all corners of the globe. It is now time for this tragedy to end…Long Live a United Palestine, Long Live the Intifada of Unity.”

The historic unity recalls the 1936–1939 revolt when Palestinians organized a similar strike in protest of the British Mandate and its allowance of Zionist immigration as part of their plan to colonize Palestine and transform it into a Jewish nation state. In 1933, the first Congress of Arab Doctors in Palestine was held in Haifa to address how the professionalization of medicine coincided with the British Mandate’s negligence of Palestinian healthcare infrastructure.^[i] By rising up in unison 80 years and a myriad of colonial divisions later, Palestinians recentered the way their struggle is narrated on an international stage. Their reconfiguring of collectivity burst through contemporary legally coded categories of Palestinians as subjects (in the West Bank, Gaza or East Jerusalem) or citizens (of Israel) to instead resituate themselves as a united colonized people resisting the settler colonizer. It is during this enacting of a return to un-bordered forms of being that Palestinians with Israeli (colonial) citizenship in the healthcare workforce joined the general strike.

While Palestinians with Israeli citizenship make up 21 percent of the state’s inhabitants, 50 percent of pharmacists in the Israeli state are Palestinian, similar to the make-up of construction workers by Palestinians from both sides of the green line (Palestinian citizens of Israel also constitute 50 percent of the Israeli criminal prison population)^[ii]. And 25 percent of physicians and nurses in Israel are Palestinian as well. While incorporating them into the colonial fold, Israel has always centered its myth of coexistence around Palestinian healthcare workers with Israeli citizenship in particular.

As they theorize the importance of joining the general strike, Palestinian healthcare workers not only stitch together the distinct yet intertwined faces of colonialism within medical institutions across historic Palestine and the occupied territories, they also demonstrate how colonial mechanisms aim to depoliticize healthcare as sites of neutrality both locally by disciplining a professional class of “native clerks” with Israeli citizenship as well as transnationally through rending the political horizon of resistance to occupation into a humanitarian effort. The Palestinian healthcare workers’ voices centered in this piece work to (re)carve anti-imperialist, decolonizing and abolitionist medical frameworks that create possibilities to rethink local and transnational health systems as inherently political, and to (re)imagine health as a space of possibility and freedom.

Bifurcated colonial healthcare systems and the ‘native clerk’

Saleh Dabbah, a pharmacist and cultural writer who took part in the strike, explained to us in an interview that health workers with colonial citizenship have attempted to go on strike before, but with little success. That said, the most recent mobilization of Palestinian healthcare workers with Israeli citizenship to join the general strike marks an important refusal of decades of Zionist policies designed to prevent medical professionals from resisting colonization. By maintaining high levels of economic insecurity among Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and limiting their opportunities of economic mobility to “technical” fields like healthcare, Zionist leaders have sought to “depoliticize” the indigenous population that held citizenship, argues Ghada Majadli, director of the occupied Palestinian territories department at Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

A 1965 classified document by Shmuel Toledano, who at the time served as the prime minister’s adviser on Arab affairs, reads: “The crystallization of a broad educated class should be prevented as much as possible,” to prevent Palestinians with Israeli citizenship from pursuing “positions of radical leadership.” The document proceeds to recommend “slow solutions”: limiting the professions and industries with guaranteed employment for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Adam Raz, who wrote an article on the document, summarizes its conclusion for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship’s education and employment: “Natural and medical sciences - yes, humanities and law - no.” Another classified report from 1976, known as the Koenig Memorandum, that was authored by Yisrael Koenig, who served as the Northern District commissioner in the Interior Ministry, reiterates that Palestinians with Israeli citizenship should be directed to “technical, physical, and natural sciences” since “these studies leave less time for dabbling in nationalism and the dropout rate is high.”

For Palestinians with Israeli citizenship moving into the sector, however, the healthcare field has been part of the larger struggle to “remain,” to pay the bills and to resist colonial erasure in a context where they are “precluded and uninterested in pursuing several security-related fields, but also other careers like aviation, etc.,” according to Dabbah.

But even while seeking economic mobility and security, Osama Tanous, a pediatrician based in Haifa, points out that Palestinian students with Israeli citizenship face many barriers to enter the healthcare professions including a “segregated and heavily defunded Arabic school system in Israel” and Hebrew-only entry exams to medical schools.^[iii] Thus, many Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are forced to travel abroad to study in Arabic-speaking universities, such as Jordan — another carefully designed Zionist strategy.

The 1976 Koenig Report recommended that Palestinians with Israeli citizenship be pushed to study abroad and, upon their return, for Israel to hinder job possibilities as a way of pressuring them to leave the state (a slow, invisible deportation).

For those Palestinians with Israeli citizenship who do manage to overcome all these obstacles and reach healthcare jobs in the state of Israel, they do so knowing full-well that their achievement will not protect them from persisting forms of discrimination and limitations to career development.^[iv]

Dabbah reiterates this point while pointing out that working as a pharmacist has become stigmatized as “Arab work,” as opposed to other higher-paying professions in the field such as pharmaceutical production and management that Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are systematically excluded from through racist hiring practices.

Thus, Israel attempts to absorb Palestinian healthcare workers into the colonial apparatus in what Jonathan Derrick described as “native clerks,” the exploited medical labor on which Israel’s healthcare system currently remains dependent.^[v]

However, Palestinian healthcare workers with Israeli citizenship are only one part of the larger colonial healthcare industrial complex. Unlike the Congress of Arab Doctors in Palestine from the British Mandate, Palestinian healthcare workers’ labor conditions have been structured by intertwined yet unique forms of colonial violence. This is precisely why the participation of Palestinian healthcare workers with Israeli citizenship is significant — it actualizes liberation from Zionist divisions and a return not to the past, which was rife with elitist barriers to medical education,^[vi] but toward a future that sees Palestinian pharmacists in Israel and Palestinian construction workers from both sides of the green line as bound up in the same struggle, as Dabbah argues. Toward a future that does not premise access to health, food, water and education on the model of labor exploitation.

Dabbah and others connect their participation in the strike to Sheikh Jarrah, Gaza and the West Bank while understanding that settler colonialism takes on different faces at different borders and assigns different statuses to colonized bodies accordingly. Within the borders of the open-air prison of Gaza, healthcare workers are deemed as disposable as the rest of the Palestinian population. Within the borders of the West Bank, they are dispossessed from the resources to deliver adequate care and are often directly targeted while trying to approach and treat the injured during protests. Within occupied East Jerusalem, amid similar attacks, Palestinians also face linguistic barriers^[vii] to access typically Hebrew-only services within the state of Israel in addition to the physical barriers created by the apartheid wall snaking around refugee camps like Qalandiya, Kafr Aqab and Shuafat where healthcare delivery is weakened by de-development and systematic neglect.

These forms of violence signify two related yet disparate relationships between healthcare and the strategy of settler colonization. On one hand, colonial powers require well-staffed hospitals and advanced medical care to ensure the continued presence of healthy, able-bodied settlers and the soldiers who defend them. On the other, settler-colonizers actively decimate local healthcare delivery systems that serve Palestinians, in Palestine and elsewhere, a strategy for advancing genocide.^[viii]

In Gaza, the latter strategy is most blatantly illustrated by the US-funded Israeli bombing of healthcare facilities and the murdering of doctors treating Palestinians.

Palestinians with Israeli citizenship find themselves caught within this bifurcated colonial healthcare structure. Although their indigenous status ultimately renders them disposable within the larger settler colonial matrix, in this particular prison geography, they become enlisted as second-class healthcare soldiers that are necessary to bolster the settler population. They are needed both as a source of medical labor and as eventual targets for the continued violent deprivation of the Palestinian population.

This strained status of Palestinian healthcare workers with Israeli citizenship was further exhibited during Israeli efforts to vaccinate the settler population — even as Israel refused to provide COVID-19 vaccinations to the West Bank and Gaza in a flagrant yet typical Israeli violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Osama Tanous points out how Israeli media branded Palestinian healthcare workers with Israeli citizenship as “brothers in arms,” language that underscores the militarization of Israel’s colonial healthcare system under a pretense of coexistence.^[ix] Such discourse, according to Majadli, builds on a long history of Israel lauding the participation of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship in the state’s healthcare workforce as the pinnacle of coexistence and equality — exemplifying what Fred Moten describes as extractive incorporation.

Yet, the lynching of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship by police-protected settlers yelling “Death to Arabs” in past weeks exposes what these diversity campaigns try to obscure: Palestinians with Israeli citizenship are ultimately no exception to the settler colonial rubric. Just as settler colonialism tries to maximize land at the expense of indigenous dispossession, it also tries to maximize the quality and duration of life for settlers at the expense of indigenous life.

Even during the lynchings, the Israeli healthcare industry and general public continued to insist that Palestinian healthcare workers with Israeli citizenship should “not let what’s happening on the outside reach the hospital,” Majadli added. They insisted even as Palestinian healthcare workers with Israeli citizenship feared they would be attacked on their way to work, even as we heard stories about “a Palestinian nurse who took off her hijab so that she wouldn’t be targeted, and a family physician who received cyber-threats for a social media post sympathizing with Gaza, yet received no support from her employers when she was too scared to go to work,” recounted Majadli.

Dabbah argued that by joining the general strike on May 18 Palestinian healthcare workers with Israeli citizenship “burst through Israeli citizens’ denial.”

At the same moment that Israeli society was pushing the years-long narrative of healthcare constituting a “neutral sphere” of coexistence, Israeli healthcare institutions were threatening Palestinian workers with Israeli citizenship who planned on participating in the strike. According to a Palestinian doctor based in Jerusalem, Rambam Health Care Campus, one of the largest hospitals in Haifa, warned doctors and nurses against observing the strike. Afterward, the HR director of the largest hospital in Tel Aviv sent an email requesting that everyone who didn’t come in to work on May 18 send their names along with their national ID numbers, according to Majadli who added, “This was a clear threat despite their attempts to backtrack and claim that they simply wanted to record absences for future staffing schedules.”

This gesture, Majadli continued, was emblematic of the constant policing Palestinian healthcare workers with Israeli citizenship face lest they bring their status as colonial citizens into their professional setting in any shape or form — an especially degrading and painful policing method to experience during Israel’s most recent war on Gaza, or the many wars prior in 2012, 2014 and 2008-09. In recent weeks, Israel launched its ongoing “Operation Law and Order” aggression with a declared goal of arresting 500 Palestinians with Israeli citizenship following their participation in protests in past weeks — yet another example of policing and punishing Palestinians who dare to deviate from the disciplined parameters of the “citizenship prison.”

In this context, the Palestine healthcare workforce’s mass mobilization to join the general strike represents a powerful response to their attempts to depoliticize within the Israeli settler colonial matrix. Not only does their organizing shatter the myth of coexistence premised on "equal citizenship" but the lived experience of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship demonstrates freedom can never be possible without full decolonization. Moreover, through coordinated efforts to self-organize against the Israeli occupation, Palestinian healthcare workers with Israeli citizenship demonstrated a practice at the intersection of medicine and political struggle. Specifically, Palestinian healthcare workers employed a medical practice based in an explicitly anti-colonial position — and arguably, an abolitionist medicine.

After the bombing stops: Beyond humanitarian medicine

Palestinian healthcare workers with Israeli citizenship understand that the same colonial violence that aims to discipline and depoliticize them through their professionalized labor also works to depoliticize global healthcare workers through humanitarianism. Osama Tanous, the Haifa-based pediatrician who has visited Gaza twice, has written about both forms of disciplining and demonstrates how a theorizing that links the two together is born out of an understanding that had their parents or grandparents sought refuge in Gaza, Palestinian healthcare workers with Israeli citizenship could have very well been killed like Dr. Moeen Alalool, one of the few psychiatric neurologists in the Gaza strip, and his five children or Dr. Ayman Abu al-Ouf, the head of internal medicine and coronavirus response at Shifa hospital, and his family members. These murders coincided with the US-made Israeli-piloted warplanes bombing in May “a total of 24 medical facilities in Gaza,” according to an interview with Ghada Majadli. These bombed facilities included Gaza’s Ministry of Health, the only Covid-testing center, a Doctors Without Borders clinic, and the roads leading to the largest medical center in the Gaza strip, Shifa Hospital.

Whether working locally or transnationally, healthcare workers are often at the frontlines of capitalist harm —from chronic disease, to gunshot wounds and suicide attempts. However, in the West, it is common for health to be taught, researched, and discussed primarily in terms of abstract “risks” or “determinants'' of poorer health. Medical institutions often take a superficially investigative role in these issues, producing extensive taxonomies of the “health disparities'' that exist across different populations without critiquing the harmful systems that produce them. As a result, healthcare workers see themselves as witnesses^[x] to this violence at best rather than actors whose treatments have a political dimension.

More recently, due to the efforts of Black scholars and activists in the US, conversations which connote a slightly more critical, structural analysis, such as naming systemic racism, have begun to gain popularity, even if to a limited extent. Medical and epidemiological curricula only go as far as naming racial or socioeconomic identity markers as contributors to disease burdens in the same way you might name smoking as a contributor to lung disease. In contrast, terms which require a more critical view that implicates institutions like settler colonialism, capitalism or profit-driven militarization are often left out of medical discourse, despite their role in (re)producing global health issues like poverty, famine and violence.

In this way, the case of Palestinian healthcare workers shows us that “health disparities” cannot be properly addressed without naming and challenging the structural harms that produce them.

Though Palestinian healthcare workers, researchers and activists have been rejecting the depoliticization of healthcare for decades,^[xi] a second mode of depoliticization occurs at the level of healthcare workers embedded in the transnational humanitarian edifice.

Tanous highlights the latter while recounting his two visits to Gaza with a delegation of doctors: once in December 2019 and again in January 2020. During these trips, Tanous witnessed what happens after (or in the case of Gaza, in between) bombings. Due to the 14-year Israeli siege and de-development of Gaza, medical supplies, medications and doctors themselves are scarce.^[xii] This reality undergirds the enormous prevalence of chronic diseases that are punctured and compounded by war-time injuries and traumas — all of which lead to countless avoidable disabilities and deaths. Without access to needed medical services or guaranteed permits to seek treatment beyond the siege in the Israeli state, “the constant uncertainty makes creating strategic medical plans [in Gaza] seem like an unattainable luxury,” Tanous writes.

Though Tanous expresses his respect for healthcare workers who volunteer their time to visit Gaza, he critiques the underlying workings of humanitarian institutions as “revolving doors.” Doctors shuffle in. Patients stream out. And numbers are tallied. But patients’ symptoms usually remain untreated. Even before the latest round of Israeli launched missiles onto countless Gazan medical facilities, the besieged strip had yet to recover from the extreme de-development of its healthcare services in the wake of the seven weeks of Israeli bombing in 2014.

Without “addressing the core questions of occupation, justice, and the refugees’ right of return,” Tanous argues, humanitarian institutions claiming neutrality are in fact “active participants in (and in some ways, beneficiaries of) the cruel and repetitive cycle of destruction and reconstruction.”

Similar to depoliticized reports on identity markers, such as health “risks,” the provision of humanitarian aid — particularly medical aid — often remains relatively safe from public criticism or pushback. It is thought that humanitarian aid or medical relief are necessary components of “ethical” war and are thereby treated as neutral. The Israeli occupation of Palestine and ongoing siege of Gaza is a prime example of this phenomenon. Gaza, an open-air prison whose daily horrors are still being revealed on the global stage, is simultaneously one of the greatest per-capita recipients of humanitarian aid in the world. It is through this supposed neutrality of medical aid to Gaza that physician organizations and other medical institutions tend to respond to ongoing abuses.

For example, it is common for international healthcare institutions to at least recognize the harms done by Israel on the health and survival of Palestinians in Gaza. Notably, this stands in contrast to the ways in which these harms are either minimized or ignored entirely in other forums like the international media.

However, such statements tend to focus solely on the need for humanitarian intervention, stopping short of taking a stance on the known underlying causes of those harms such as Zionism, colonialism, militarization, among many other factors. Furthermore, as others like Tanous have argued, framing issues of colonization and militarized violence as problems of inadequate humanitarian aid may even perpetuate their harmful effects by abating public concern through easily-publicized but ultimately limited medical efforts.

Palestinian pharmacist and epidemiologist, Danya Qato writes: “rather than ignoring and reproducing their violence, we need to consider the implications for health and health research of eliding ongoing settler colonialism.”^[xiii] In this way, the Palestinian workforce has shown us that describing the harms done against Palestinians is not enough. Instead, what is needed is to forego political neutrality and pursue an explicitly abolitionist medicine at local and transnational levels.

Health as freedom

There are several historical and contemporary examples of critical medical pedagogies.^[xiv] During the 1970s and throughout the First Intifada, Palestinian grassroot health committees (closely tied to women’s committees as well the structure of political factions) focused on demystifying medical authority and training volunteers and rural villagers to provide care alongside trusted doctors in mobile and fixed health clinics.^[xv]

For instance, the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UPMRC) established by the Palestine Communist party emphasized prevention and primary care as well as first-aid training and kit distribution: “Between 1979 and 1987… the UPMRC... [taught] 22,000 Palestinians ‘the basic principles of first aid’... and distributed 19,000 first-aid kits.”^[xvi] During the First Intifada, UPMRC established a national blood donor system which saved hundreds of lives.^[xvii] It’s worth noting that committees like UPMRC and others affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and ultimately Fatah, were active throughout Palestine, including in Gaza.^[xviii]

In the years that followed the uprising, wide scale poverty dried up many of these clinics’ local fundraising models. Nonetheless, their history interlink with Palestinian healthcare workers today who continue to imagine medical systems disentangled from imperialism and professionalized class labor toward liberating futures. In the same way that Palestinian healthcare workers today build on a rich history of decolonizing medicine, the possibilities for transnational abolitionist healthcare movements that reject a humanitarian edifice affixed to imperialism extend from a long legacy of resistance.^[xix]

During the British Mandate, Palestinian doctors participated in many regional and transnational conferences, including the Arab Medical Conferences. The 1945 Cairo conference issued a resolution to “boycott… Zionist pharmaceutical companies and doctors pledged to refrain from prescribing their products.”^[xx] These archived moments remind us that the Boycott Divest and Sanctions movement, premised on the South African anti-apartheid movement, had many former iterations in the past and extends to many possibilities for the future.

The tangible connections between the fight for Palestinian liberation and other global decolonial struggles like Black Lives Matter have been made increasingly apparent in the past several years. Similarly, the relevance of applying a decolonial position to medical practice as demonstrated by Palestinian healthcare workers can be interlinked with the BDS movement and its South African counterpart as well as abolitionist politics popularized during the uprisings for George Floyd. Amid the ensuing uprisings last summer, many organizers and thinkers echoed questions posed by Mariam Kaba that are reminiscent of critiques by Dr. Tamimi, a Palestinian doctor who helped found the Palestinian Arab Medical Association in October 1944: “The [British] mandate knows how to build dozens of fortresses for the police in Arab Palestine, [but] does not know how to build one clinic for tuberculosis patients.”^[xxi]

Today, many abolitionists are asking: What if we redirect the massive budget dedicated to police, militaries and prisons — which have always inflicted systemic harm upon communities beyond the descendants of European settler colonizers from the US to Palestine — to healthcare, education, and affordable housing? During the recent Israeli bombing of Gaza, a member of the indigenous Oglala Lakota tribe asked: “Why [does the US] give Israel [$3.8] billion a year for ‘infrastructure’ — when the Navajo Nation’s water supply remains undrinkable?” What if that money was redirected to indigenous people in the US as reparations? What would it look like for healthcare workers and patients around the world to not simply advocate for funneling resources toward researching decontextualized “health risks” and humanitarian relief but to advocate for defunding the imperial systems of harm that produce them? What if healthcare workers embedded in transnational humanitarian networks actualized the revolutionary potential these global connections might harbor?

These are questions Palestinian healthcare workers in conversation with internationalist movements in solidarity with them are pushing us to ask.

 

^[i] Liat Kozma and Yoni Furas, “Palestinian Doctors Under the British Mandate,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 52 (2020): 104, doi:10.1017/S0020743819000886.

^[ii] Nimar Sultany, “The Making of an Underclass: The Palestinian Citizens of Israel,” Israel Studies Review 27, no. 2 (April 2012): 190, doi: 10.3167/isr.2012.270210.

^[iii] Osama Tanous, “Palestinian Physicians in Israel’s Healthcare System: Covid-19 Fault Lines,” Journal of Palestine Studies XLIX, no. 4 (Summer 2020): 2, doi: 10.1525/jps.2020.49.4.1.

^[iv] Tanous, “Palestinian Physicians,” 4.

^[v] Jonathan Derrick uses this term to describe the dual and ambiguous role of the native clerk in colonial Africa who, even while being moderately critical of colonial role, contributed to European oppression. See: Jonathan Derrick, “The ‘Native Clerk’ in Colonial West Africa,” African Affairs 82, no. 326 (1983): 61–74.

^[vi] Glenn E. Robinson, “The Role of the Professional Middle Class in the Mobilization of Palestinian Society: The Medical and Agricultural Commitees,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 25, no. 2 (May 1993): 301-326.

^[vii] M Karjawlly, N Agbaria, M Nubani Husseini, D Zwas, “Assessment of needs and barriers to healthcare care in Arab Palestinian mothers in East Jerusalem,” European Journal of Public Health 30, no. 5 (September 2020), doi: 10.1093/eurpub/ckaa166.037.

^[viii] The Israeli army also targeted PLO healthcare infrastructure during its war on Lebanon in 1982. For more information on the PLO healthcare facilities in Lebanon at the time see: Cheryl A. Rubenberg, “The Civilian Infrastructure of the Palestine Liberation Organization: An analysis of the PLO in Lebanon Until June 1982,” Journal of Palestine Studies 12, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 54-78.

^[ix] Osama Tanous, “Palestinian Physicians in Israel,” 1–11.

^[x] Didier Fassin has argued that humanitarian witnessing and testimony to suffering, in a world where Palestinians have been so dehumanized that they are denied the status of war victims, is inherently political and transformative in the sense that it is a Foucauldian ‘moral problematization of violence.’ That said, this piece departs from Fassin’s assertion that “Yesterday we denounced imperialist domination; today we reveal its psychic traces,” and instead centers the former as central to any truly transformative healthcare practice. See: Didier Fassin, “The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification Through Trauma in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 3 (August 2008): 532.

^[xi] For example, see: Cindy A. Sousa, Susan P. Kemp, and Mona El-Zuhairi, “Place as a Social Determinant of Health: Narratives of Trauma and Homeland among Palestinian Women,” British Journal of Social Work 49, (2019): 963-982. doi: 10.1093/bjsw/bcz049; Danya M. Qato, “Introduction: Public Health and the Promise of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 49, no. 4 (Summer 2020): 8-26; Reema Hammami, “Human Agency at the Frontiers of Global Inequality: An Ethnography of Hope in Extreme Places,” (paper presented at the Prince Claus Chair, Utrecht University, 2006), available online.

^[xii] The term “de-development” was brought into use by researcher Sarah Roy. See: Sara Roy, “The Gaza Strip: A Case of Economic De-development,” Journal of Palestine Studies 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 56-88.

^[xiii] Danya M. Qato, “Introduction: Public Health and the Promise of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 49, no. 4 (Summer 2020): 8.

^[xiv] For instance: Frantz Fanon initially theorized the inextricable connections between colonialism and the mental health of the colonized. Fanon’s work went on to greatly influence the militant healthcare arm of the Black Panthers in the United States, which argued that the medical institutions were affixed to the state’s systems of violence against Black communities. They encouraged all chapters to establish Panther Free Health Clinics throughout the country. See: Alondro Nelson, “Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 75–77. Present-day continuation of abolitionist healthcare efforts, including the Ujima Medics collective, similarly trains community members to treat what they identified as two of the most preventable causes of Black deaths that imperialist capitalist harm creates: gunshot wounds and asthma attacks.

^[xv] Glenn E. Robinson, “The Role of the Professional Middle Class,” 301-326.

^[xvi] Robinson, “The Role of the Professional Middle Class,” 304.

^[xvii] Robinson, 304.

^[xviii] Robinson discusses how rivalry between factions compromised coordination between medical committees leading to duplication of services in some areas while ignoring others altogether.

^[xix] In addition to the examples discussed above, one has to at least reference the Cuban Medical Internationalists who continue to send healthcare workers to the Global South during times of crisis and invest in long-term collaborations that invest in community health. See: Robert Huish and John M. Kirk “Cuban Medical Internationalism and the Development of the Latin American Medical School,” Latin American Perspectives 34, no. 6 (November 2007): 77-92.

^[xx] Kozma and Furas, “Palestinian Doctors,” 105.

^[xxi]  Kozma and Furas, 106.