Weeks before first responders fought valiantly to save lives at Bondi Beach in Sydney in December last year, an international medical conference on the latest battle-tested techniques to treat gunshot wound victims in the critical minutes after injury was to be held in Perth.
Among the speakers was the former head of the Israeli military’s medical corp, Dr Elon Glassberg, who was to share how the Israeli army reduced battlefield mortality rates from gunshot and blast injuries to the lowest in history of any army in the world.
Anti-Israel doctors and nurses groups threatened to picket the conference with large-scale protests if the Glassberg session went ahead. The organisers capitulated and the conference was cancelled.
For protesting healthcare workers, it was a victory to be celebrated. “Thank you to everyone who wrote letters, made phone calls and made their concerns known. Free Palestine,” the Instagram account @hcw4palestinewa said.
For Australians, the cost of cancelling the conference may come, or already may have come, in the form of lives lost.
Local medical teams rarely get the chance to learn directly from international experts who have developed lifesaving techniques from years of experience treating gunshot wound victims and others suffering potentially fatal bleeding from severe injuries in war and terror attacks.
“We are the ones who lost out,” Adelaide trauma specialist Dr Dan Ellis says. “Without a doubt the hospital staff that would have attended that conference would have gained knowledge to deal with mass casualty events such as Bondi.”
Many of the more than 30 doctors, nurses, midwives and allied health professionals interviewed for this article cite this incident as one of many examples of how anti-Israel activism by healthcare workers since the October 7, 2023, massacre by Hamas has shaken the 2500-year-old bedrock principle of medicine, dating from Greek physician Hippocrates and his oath, which is that the best interests of patients always comes first.
Even now, with the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion under way, an orchestrated campaign by pro-Palestine healthcare workers groups, the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network and other activist groups and influencers has been launched to pressure the national medical oversight body, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, to withdraw its recently announced adoption of the internationally recognised International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.
AHPRA adopted the IHRA definition after almost three years of failing to tackle the unprecedented explosion of antisemitism in healthcare in Australia.
More than 1400 healthcare workers, including some involved in the cancellation of the Perth trauma medicine conference, have signed an open letter demanding a voice in how AHPRA defines antisemitism. They appear to have a particular objection to the IHRA definition that says denying Israel’s right to exist or holding Israel to different standards from any other country may be antisemitic under some circumstances.
“The ‘Zunts’ have gone hard on us,” a registered nurse commented on an Instagram post urging healthcare workers to sign the letter. She then went on to accuse Australia’s special envoy to combat antisemitism, Jillian Segal, of working at the behest of Israel.
These types of campaigns are the crux of the problem, say medical professionals who have seen the toxic effects of healthcare worker activism since October 7.
Using the exalted mantle of their medical professions, activist doctors and nurses routinely are amplifying anti-Jewish blood libels propagated by Hamas as well as adopting dehumanising anti-Jewish hate speech while often expressing support for proscribed terror groups such as Hamas that advocate mass slaughter of Jews.
By doing so, they are turning hospitals and medical clinics into ideological war zones instead of safe spaces where patients can be assured of getting the best possible medical care by empathetic healthcare providers.
“Health should be a neutral space where the best interests of patients comes first,” Melbourne anaesthetist Dr Deborah Bell says.
Anti-Israel activism began almost immediately after the October 7 massacre when the protests that unfolded in Australian cities spilled into the wards and staffrooms of hospitals in Melbourne, Sydney and other capital cities.
Doctors and nurses wore “From the river to the sea” protest symbols to work and covered hospital toilet stalls and corridors with stickers that included a Star of David with a red line drawn through it.
At The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, which has received tens of millions of dollars from Jewish philanthropists, such stickers were stuck to the bedside wall of an elderly Jewish patient in the hours before he died.https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/how-did-hospitals-become-the-front-line-in-the-antisemitic-onslaught/news-story/8ca3ca29d2ad532776c0af3bad700038How many of those doctors and nurses are imported from Islamist countries? Most, I'd say.
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