Israeli Press
Israeli health leaders warn incitement against Arab medics invites violence
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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The head of Israel's association of public health physicians, Hagai Levine, warned on Tuesday that the slander campaign against Arab staff at Haifa's Rambam hospital is bloodletting that will end in violence — and that the politicians running it will bear the responsibility. He wrote in Haaretz together with Tsala Hoffman, a nurse and pain researcher.
The hospital investigated the complaint that set the campaign off, the authors note, and ruled out entirely any intent by its Arab workers to harm soldiers. Politicians incited anyway, before the facts were in.
Arab citizens make up a quarter of Israel's doctors and nurses, they write, and the health system cannot function without them, in routine or in war. What holds it together through years of understaffing is exactly the trust the inciters are burning.
Racism, in their argument, is not only a moral failure but a danger to public health itself: it keeps people from seeking care, corrodes patients' confidence and cripples the teamwork emergency medicine runs on.
Every complaint deserves a professional inquiry, they write — the line is crossed when an unproven case is wielded to blacken an entire public.
The piece calls the coming election fateful for public health too, and asks the current and next health ministers to act against racism in the system. At Rambam, the authors close, Jews and Arabs have saved lives together under fire, and will go on saving them.
