Our struggles are interconnected. NCM4A stands in solidarity with all oppressed and marginalized people who are denied health care, and is a co-signer of the letter detailed below.
By: Frances S. Hasso
The Invest in Justice Coalition has asked organizations to sign a letter to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, at the National Institutes of Health, to take a stand against Medical Apartheid. Read the full letter at www.freedomfuture.org/Fauci.
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The Movement Tells Dr. Fauci: Speak Out on Medical Apartheid:
1. ***Demand the right to healthcare for the Palestinian people:*** Publicly affirm the human rights community’s consensus that Israel is obligated to vaccinate Palestinians as an occupied population under international law.
2. ***Refuse complicity with Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people:*** Reject the prize! Accepting the Dan David Prize serves to legitimize Israel’s refusal to vaccinate Palestinians despite its international obligation to do so as the occupying power.
3. ***Advocate for racially just health policies in the U.S. and everywhere:*** Make vaccine apartheid policies unacceptable anywhere by supporting racially just U.S. health policies in the M4BL COVID-19 Policy Platform [Movement for Black Lives] and specifically: single-payer healthcare, the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act, and the vaccine TRIPS waiver.
One hundred countries are currently fighting the United States, which dominates the World Trade Organization, for a TRIPs (Trade Related Aspects of International Property Rights) Waiver that would allow them to produce anti-CoVid-19 vaccines using patented formulas currently controlled by Western corporations. Similar years-long battles occurred for access to HIV/AIDS and other treatments. Such a waiver will not address the situation of Palestinians colonized by Israel.
Too often we Americans (USians) have little idea how much damage we do in the world as an empire (with over 800 military bases in 80 countries) and how our fates (including lack of universal health care) are connected to investing in such damage.
Israel is an apartheid state that controls Palestinian land, air, and water borders. It is the largest cumulative recipient of US aid since World War II and often provides a testing ground for US military equipment. It runs the largest open air prison in the world, holding 2.048 million Gazans. Palestinians in many parts of historic Palestine are under the carceral control of Israel using a variety of walls, permits, economic controls, prisons, and surveillance techniques. Many of the same security companies provide the carceral technologies used at the US Southern Border.
Israel used its power to acquire vaccines early. In addition to not providing vaccines to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Israel controls their access to vaccines.
Israel is a country (with no sovereign borders by design but rather armistice lines) where any Jew anywhere is allowed to become a citizen by law but Palestinian refugees may not return to their villages and homes (hundreds of which have been erased). This erasure and ethnic cleansing continues every day as groves and homes are appropriated from Palestinians for the Jewish state. Israel’s most prestigious human rights organization released a report in January 2021 terming it an apartheid state.
Science, medicine and knowledge and their funding and ideological structures are not innocent or immune from devastating people's lives. We live in the country that passed the first eugenic forced sterilization laws under the guise of health and hygiene, using them against people held in mental hospitals and quickly working our way to prisoners and Black and brown peoples. Zionist organizations (many of which were established in the United States) working in historic Palestine and later Israeli institutions used and use science and medicine to maintain hegemony over the colonized population. The Dan Prize at Tel Aviv University is not innocent of these power dynamics and neither are we as US citizens.
Frances S. Hasso
NC Medicare for All Coalition
Image descriptions: (Middle image) High-fencing surrounds a small checkpoint building between Israel and Palestine. (Bottom image) A high concrete "apartheid wall" curves along a roadway. Barbed wire coils cover the top of the wall.