The doctor’s role in liberation
Published
by
Richard Kuper
JVL Introduction
A haunting, moving, thought-provoking, life-affirming long interview with a British-Palestinian doctor on his life in trauma medicine and particularly in the current conflict.
A key surgeon and spokeperson at Al-Shifa Hospital, he has committed himself to opposing the “killing machine masquerading as a state” set on extinguishing life in Gaza.
RK (h/t LMT)
This article was originally published by Mondoweiss on Tue 5 Mar 2024. Read the original here.
The doctor’s role in liberation: an interview with Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah
In a wide-ranging interview, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah discusses the liberatory potential of medicine, the genocidal nature of Zionism, and the obligation, when confronted with the logic of elimination, to remain unwavering in our commitment to life.
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“They tried to bury us: they did not know we were seeds” said a young Greek poet. Palestinian ‘sumud’ will allow the seeds of the watermelon to bloom into the finest fruit in the land. We all need to nurture and water those seeds with every ounce of our campaigning. Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah embodies the very best of a people who will bloom and rise again.
Teaching genocide today in relation to a little known genocide of the Banda people in the 17th C, in Amitov Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse, our talk immediately switched to both the Holocaust and then to Gaza–one knows if one wants to know. This is an incredibly important article which I will send to my students at John Jay College, where, of course, I have also taught James Baldwin with love and admiration. Thank you.
What a moving article. The description of what has happened to the medical director of Al shifa hospital is heart wrenching. I remember his reports on Al jazeera before the storming of the hospital, how can the West ignore this.