Open Letter on Antizionism and the Weaponization of Medicine: A Call from Jewish & Allied Health Professionals

To sign this letter, click here.

To medical school deans; deans of public health, nursing, dentistry, social work, biomedical and laboratory sciences, and all allied health professions schools; hospital CEOs; licensing boards and professional colleges; public‐health agencies; professional associations (medical, nursing, psychological); editors of medical journals; and elected officials:

We write as Jewish and allied professionals in healthcare. We have had enough. The global stalking of Jews, carried out through libels, stigma, erasure, intimidation, and professional coercion, must end. This letter sets a boundary after two years of near-constant abuse and a far longer erosion of professional norms. Our purpose is to document and expose the pattern by which antizionism has instrumentalized medicine and health, abroad and at home, endangering patients and corroding the ethics of medicine itself.

i — Introducing Antizionism

Jew-hatred follows a paroxysmal pattern, rooted in supersessionist frameworks that sought to displace and delegitimize Jewish existence. In antiquity and the medieval era, Christian polemicists branded Jews as Christ-killers, sorcerers, and plague-spreaders. In the modern era, pseudoscientists cast Jews as a biological threat, fueling eugenics and racial antisemitism. In the twentieth century, antizionists reconfigured these libels around Israel, the “Jew among nations.”

Today, antizionism deploys contemporary libels—“colonizer,” “apartheid agent,” “genocidaire,” “Zionazi”—while reproducing the same libel-cycle of earlier eras. It does so obsessively, not only in the libels themselves but through a relentless structuring of attention: a racist gaze that distorts, omits, and fixates in order to cast Jews as a collective threat, rationalizing their exclusion and, ultimately, their eradication.

Three ideological strains shape contemporary antizionism:

• Soviet antizionism (post-1903, especially 1948–1970s): Lenin dismissed Zionism as a “bourgeois nationalist diversion,” and Soviet authorities later rebranded it as “racism” and “imperialism” to advance their Cold War strategy. This ideology crystallized into the pseudo-discipline of “Zionology,” which provided a veneer of scholarship to anti-Jewish propaganda. Moscow deliberately exported this framing through the United Nations and other international institutions, weaponizing rhetoric to isolate Israel and erode Western influence in the developing world.

• Islamist theology (post-1920): Drawing on centuries of Islamic polemics and reinforced by modern political Islam, Islamist demagogues and regimes branded Jewish sovereignty as a violation of divine order. They fused theological absolutism with political agitation, inciting violence against Jewish communities and transforming hostility toward Israel into a sacred duty.

• Nazi ideology (post-1939): Rooted in centuries of European antisemitism, Nazi propagandists systematized the portrayal of Jews as a global menace, orchestrating campaigns that depicted them as conspirators controlling world politics and finance. These tropes, barely altered, resurfaced after 1945 in antizionist rhetoric that casts Israel as the embodiment of the same imagined threat.

Antizionism predates Israel; Israel is merely the pretext. At its core, it is a reaction to Jewish equality; it denies the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty, spreads paranoia and suspicion about Jews as “Zionist provocateurs,” and perpetuates the same cycle of libel, stigma, and violence that has attacked Jews for centuries. 

Far from being limited to one region, it has operated as a global campaign, adapting to local contexts while producing the same outcomes of persecution. In the Soviet Bloc, antizionism served as justification for state repression and purges that devastated Jewish life. Across the Middle East and North Africa, it drove the dispossession of 850,000 Jews between 1948 and the 1970s through confiscated property, erased communities, and pogroms. Today, that same pattern has spread to Europe, North America, and Australia, where antizionism is now engulfing Western academia.

Mainstream Jewish institutions, such as the AJC, WJC, B’nai Brith, and ADL, recognize antizionism as the contemporary strain of anti-Jewish hate. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) codifies this consensus. Yet in medicine, institutions both tolerate antizionist rhetoric and permit its operationalization in clinical settings, professional training, and organizational policy.

II — The Dangerous Legacy of Medicine as an Instrument of Anti-Jewish Hate

Antizionists target medicine because professional authority can legitimize hate and violence. History demonstrates medicine’s vulnerability to ideological capture.

• Nazi Germany: Physicians joined the Nazi Party in disproportionate numbers. They designed sterilization campaigns, ran euthanasia programs, and organized genocide. Doctors provided pseudoscientific justification for extermination.

• Soviet Union (1952–53): Stalin orchestrated the “Soviet Doctor’s Plot,” fabricating a conspiracy that Jewish physicians were “Zionist agents” poisoning Soviet leaders. This campaign mobilized medicine to justify anti-Jewish purges.

• Islamist and authoritarian regimes. Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, a trained surgeon, invoked his medical authority to frame jihad as a “cure” for society. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, an ophthalmologist by training, oversaw chemical attacks, torture, and hospital bombings, an egregious betrayal of medical ethics.

These examples underscore a consistent danger: whenever anti-Jewish hatred mutates, medicine is among the first professions to be infiltrated and instrumentalized. We must therefore recognize the growing presence of antizionist ideology in contemporary healthcare as an urgent threat, not only to Jewish professionals and patients, but to the integrity of medicine itself.

III. Manipulative Tactics of Antizionism

For centuries, libel has driven anti-Jewish hatred. Unlike legal libel, which is a falsifiable statement against an individual, anti-Jewish libel is an obsessively repeated accusation that functions to mark Jews with stigma, triggering an ancient civilizational reflex to target and expel Jews from society.

Antizionism advances the libel cycle through interlocking tactics:

• Libel fabrication: spreading sensational accusations—the famine libel, the child killer libel, the journalist killer libel, the genocide libel—designed to provoke outrage and moral panic.

• Exploitation of authority: laundering these libels through physicians, nurses, psychologists, and public health officials, thereby granting propaganda a veneer of professional legitimacy.

• Suppression of dissent: silencing Jewish professionals through blacklists, intimidation, and harassment, ensuring the libel circulates uncontested.

• Denial and inversion: minimizing or erasing atrocities against Jews while amplifying false accusations against Israel with relentless intensity.

• Tokenization: elevating a small cohort of antizionist Jews to legitimize libels while silencing mainstream Jewry, echoing earlier regimes’ use of compliant Jewish fronts like the Soviet Jewish Yevsektsiya, Iraq’s Antizionist League, and Germany’s National Association of German Jews. Once exploited, these token Jews were discarded or destroyed by the very regimes they served.

It is essential to distinguish the narrative machinery of antizionism from legitimate criticism of Israeli policy. All governments, including Israel’s, are rightly subject to scrutiny and debate. But the relentless structuring of negative attention—manifest in the relentless repetition of anti-Israel libels and the erasure of Jewish history, identity, and victimhood—is not good-faith critique; it is the core tactic of an eliminationist hate movement.

IV. Antizionist Abuse of Healthcare in the Middle East

In war zones, antizionism weaponizes medicine, turning hospitals and clinicians into tools that sanctify libels and enable war crimes.

• Hospitals as battle positions. In Gaza, Hamas converted hospitals into military strongholds—command centers under Al-Shifa, hospitals used as weapons manufacturing sites, weapons in pediatric wards, fighters hiding among the sick. This flagrant war crime desecrates medicine, endangers patients, and exploits civilians to generate propaganda.

• Sexual violence as a weapon of war. On October 7, Hamas carried out systematic rape, gang rape, and sexual torture. Israeli experts and the Dinah Project (2024) documented these crimes, with credible reports of continued assaults on hostages. Some antizionists continue to engage in rape denial.

• Direct attacks on Israeli health and science. Iran and its proxies targeted hospitals and research centers: a June 2025 barrage on Soroka Medical Center wounded dozens, and days later a strike on the Weizmann Institute obliterated years of biomedical research.

• Doctors as instruments of atrocity. Reports implicate physicians in hostage abuse: Dr. Ahmed al-Jamal held Israeli hostages in his home, and a doctor at al-Shifa executed 19-year-old Israeli Hostage Noa Marciano instead of treating her. At Shifa Hospital, a Hamas-aligned doctor introduced himself to British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari as “Dr. Hamas,” stitched her shattered hand and leg with expired supplies, and left her untreated for months, causing lasting disability. Such actions constitute a profound violation of medical ethics, yet they receive little acknowledgment within the medical community, which instead directs its racist gaze incessantly toward Israel.

• Exploitation of medical authority to launder libels. Anti-Israel clinicians and organizations advance libels under the guise of medical credibility. Doctors in Gaza falsely blamed Israel for the Al-Ahli Hospital blast, later shown to be a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket misfire. In the U.S., doctors alleged that Israel deliberately “snipes toddlers,” an unfounded claim echoing medieval blood libels. The Western mainstream media regularly presents Hamas-aligned antizionist propagandist Dr. Khalil al-Daqran as a neutral hospital spokesman. NGOs and UN agencies adopt and circulate the famine and genocide libels, including the 14,000 babies libel, repeating the same pattern the UN entrenched in 1975 when it declared Zionism ‘racism’ while ignoring mass persecution and expulsion of Jews across the Middle East and North Africa. Doctors Without Borders is facing calls for investigation over spreading Hamas-aligned fabrications. 

• Erasure and denial of antizionist war crimes. HonestReporting documented how Western media outlets cropped Hamas militants out of hospital footage to preserve the appearance of innocence. NGOs and UN agencies routinely downplay or omit ongoing hostage abuse and the torture and oppression of Palestinian civilians, including journalists, by their own rulers and ignore the massive evidence that Hamas uses its own people as human shields. Palestinian protests against Hamas in Gaza vanish from the record to protect Western activists’ savior fantasies. And when Syrian regime forces massacred Druze civilians inside a hospital, the anti-Israel complex was silent—an omission that lays bare the selective nature of its outrage.

V. Antizionist Abuse of Healthcare in the West

Across Western healthcare, antizionism transforms hospitals into arenas of harassment, launders libels through professional authority, and embeds hostility into training, hiring, and scholarship.

• Masked incursions into healthcare spaces. Across North America, anti-Israel agitators turned hospitals into stages of intimidation. At NYU Langone/Tisch, a masked mob in militant headbands chanted “intifada” and “no Zionists here.” At Toronto’s Mount Sinai, protesters scaled the hospital with a PLO flag, stormed hospital grounds, and pounded on a Jewish doctor’s car—an assault condemned by Canada’s prime minister. At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, agitators harassed cancer doctors as “accomplices to genocide.” At Columbia University Irving Medical Center, masked protestors held repeated “Glory to our Martyrs” vigils for months. At UCSF, antizionists formed an encampment across from a hospital, chanted “intifada,” and distributed antizionist pamphlets calling to purge “Zionists” from medicine. These invasions desecrate medical sanctuaries and turn spaces of healing into arenas of menace.

• Clinical endangerment. In Sydney, two nurses at Bankstown–Lidcombe Hospital were recorded stating they had killed Israeli patients and would do so again. In Belgium, a physician entered “Jewish/Israeli” as an “allergy” in the medical chart of a six-year-old girl.

• Antizionist slurs, libels, conspiracies, and abuse. Clinicians have flooded social media with virulent anti-Israel rhetoric. A Portland nurse sneered, “I don’t take care of animals. Dogs. Rats. Vermin,” and mocked the murdered Bibas family as “lucky” not to return in “blue zip-up body bags.” Others hurl slurs such as “zios,” “zio-Nazis,” “genocide lovers,” “white colonizers”—to stigmatize Jews who care about Israel. Some go further, reviving Soviet-style conspiracy theories like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, now recast as claims that Israel causes climate change. When held accountable, these actors often claim they are being persecuted for “pro-Palestine advocacy,” a cynical inversion that gaslights Jews and disrespects Palestinians, who deserve better than the antizionist hate movement.

• Hostile clinical and academic environments. Across hospitals and universities, antizionist colleagues harass, abuse, and drive out Jewish and Israeli professionals. Staff display anti-Israel paraphernalia—pins, keffiyehs, phone cases, lanyards—in clinical settings, intimidating Jewish and Israeli patients and staff into hiding their identity. Mentors tell Jewish and Israeli trainees to conceal their background on applications. Antizionist and unprofessional regalia is worn at medical school graduation ceremonies. A StandWithUs survey found 39% of Jewish healthcare professionals in the U.S. reported direct acts of antisemitism, much of it perpetrated by colleagues.

• Purge rhetoric and blacklists. Antizionists claim that “Zionist doctors” are a threat to patients and should be purged from the workplace, in a chilling Soviet-style tactic. Jewish therapists report a toxic environment of antizionist harassment. Anti-Israel ideologues in U.S. psychology circles circulate blacklists of “Zionist” therapists. Medical schools deny recognition to Jewish clubs while accrediting others. Israeli students are excluded from medical students’ associations. Hospitals block Jewish Employee Resource Groups, dismantling the few spaces meant to provide safety and solidarity. 

• Institutional boycotts. Antizionism now manifests in organized boycotts that weaponize professional authority. In October 2025, the South African Medical Association announced it was cutting all ties with the Israeli Medical Association and called for its expulsion from the World Medical Association. In academia, antizionists refuse to publish and collaborate with Israeli scientists on the basis of their nationality. These are not ethical stands but acts of discrimination—reviving Soviet-era tactics that targeted Jews, stripping them of professional legitimacy, and amounting to an attack on science and medicine themselves.

• Ideological capture of psychology, public health, professional societies and other settings. Antizionists smuggle anti-Israel dogma into professional life, pathologizing “Zionism” as a mental disorder and adopting “decolonization” frameworks that erase Jewish history and collapse Jewish diversity into racist caricatures of “whiteness” and “colonialism.” In the APA scandal, internal forums openly praised “intifada” and anti-Israel war crimes, prompting over 3,500 psychologists to sign an open letter denouncing anti-Jewish hate in their field. In public health, extremists push theories without scientific evidence like “Settler Colonial Determinants of Health” in order to indoctrinate students against Israel, America, and the West. At one meeting, they staged disruptions and marched through sessions with red hands—a spectacle invoking the 2000 Ramallah lynching—and delivered libelous presentations.

• Capture of journals and academic platforms. Prestigious medical outlets have at times rejected scholarship on anti-Jewish hate while legitimizing antizionist pseudoscience, presenting conjecture as fact and giving propaganda a scholarly veneer. In 2024, The Lancet published a letter citing “186,000 Gaza deaths,” but later acknowledged it as a speculative projection; once stamped with a leading journal’s authority, the figure circulated globally as supposed evidence of “genocide.” By permitting incitement to masquerade as scholarship, journals erode medicine’s credibility and public trust, and normalize rhetoric tied to anti-Jewish violence, including three lethal attacks in the United States since October 7th in which perpetrators invoked anti-Israel slogans. 

VI. Demands and Expectations

• Name the problem. Recognize antizionism and its libels as a form of anti-Jewish hate under the IHRA definition, and embed this standard into medical and health professions education, DEI programs, and professional ethics.

• Educate and train. Provide vetted resources—guidelines, CME modules, and faculty workshops—on how antizionism operates through libels, denial, and abuse of medical or public health authority.

• Protect patients and staff. Enforce clinical neutrality by banning political insignia in care spaces, establish confidential reporting lines, and condemn any rhetoric suggesting refusal of care based on Jewish or Israeli identity.

• Ensure accountability. Require clinicians and other health professionals to disclose conflicts of interest when discussing geopolitical events, and review, correct, and publicly apologize for cases where professionals, NGOs, or journals amplify libels under the guise of medicine or health.

• Defend medical integrity. Publicly reject the use of hospitals as military infrastructure and the laundering of atrocity narratives through medical, scientific, or health platforms.

VII. Closing

Antizionism is not “criticism of Israel” but a libel-driven eliminationist hate movement—the modern strain of anti-Jewish hostility. Left unchecked, it will corrode ethics and evidence, endanger patients, and erode public trust in healthcare. History shows where this path leads: from Europe to the Middle East and North Africa, entire Jewish communities were dispossessed or destroyed under the same rhetoric. Our homes must not become the next chapter in that pattern. We call on you to act now. Name this hatred, educate your institutions, and prevent medicine, public health, and healthcare from once again becoming a conduit for bigotry, purges, and violence.

Signed,

Signatures represent the views of individuals and do not reflect the views of signatories’ employers

[signatures listed here]