Already outspoken on genocide of indigenous peoples, doctor took deep dive into Palestine studies at Harvard

While at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health a couple years ago, Dr. Yipeng Ge faced a dilemma – and the decision he would make would profoundly influence the following years of his life.

Already outspoken on the genocide of indigenous people and racism in North America, Dr. Ge, during graduate studies at Harvard, discovered the Palestine Program. Also taking courses in the Kennedy School and Harvard Law, he then soon found out about Palestine Trek, or PalTrek. In that private program, he could travel to the West Bank and occupied Jerusalem. He wanted to go to supplement his studies, but had a moral problem: Was it ethical for him to go?

“I considered going, but wasn’t sure if it was right for me to go, knowing my Palestinian friends and colleagues do not have their right of return,” Dr. Ge told the Sampan during a recent phone interview.

Dr. Ge, 30, who is now practicing family medicine in Canada, wanted to learn more about Palestine first-hand, but he also knew of Palestinian friends and colleagues who had not even gone back themselves – “and some of them never had been there because their parents or grandparents were exiled from historic Palestine.” During the Nakba – or “Catastrophe” – of 1948, for example, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were pushed from their homes and many were forced to become refugees, often within their own state. Israeli forces have continued to push out many more Palestinians in the decades since.

After getting “the blessing” of his Palestinian friends, he went on the trip in March of 2023, where, he said, he “bore witness to overt occupation and apartheid.” Since then, he’s been a vocal advocate of Palestinian human rights, and went on to write a graduate paper called, “Settler Colonialism, Health, and Palestine.”

But knowing and seeing the human rights violations faced by so many Palestinians came with another dilemma: How much should he speak out?

Dr. Ge knew the consequences.

“I was very aware of this chilling effect of anti-Palestinian – ‘progressive except for Palestine’ – racism,” he said, referring to people who act Liberal on many issues, but stay mum on abuses carried out by the government of Israel, often with support of the U.S.

So when he did show solidarity with Palestinians, he, like so many others in academia, faced swift backlash. Another, higher-ranking medical colleague, Dr. Ge said, targeted him for his social media “likes” and reposts following Israel’s barrage on Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. The senior doctor claimed that Dr. Ge was spreading anti-Semitic and inflammatory posts.

Soon after, said Dr. Ge, the Canadian Medical Association reprimanded him and the University of Ottawa, where he was on faculty in the residency training program, suspended him. Dr. Ge said the association told him to apologize to people he was accused of offending for liking posts, including one with images of a person holding a “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” sign.

An outcry of support for Dr. Ge followed. A petition to reinstate the doctor and seek an inquiry into the university’s handling of the matter quickly got tens of thousands of signatures and is now at over 100,000. The University of Ottawa eventually offered to reinstate him, but he ultimately resigned, as he did from his position in the medical association. In his lengthy letter of resignation from the Canadian Medial Association, he wrote, in part: “Criticism of the actions of Israeli governments is not antisemitic. Criticizing Zionism as a nationalist ideology is not antisemitic. Nor is expressing support for a future in which Palestinians and Israelis can live in equality. We all benefit when we are all freer.” (The Canadian Medical Association said in its response at the time that certain posts by Dr. Ge “were received as harmful by some members of the medical profession” and that the association and Dr. Ge “both agreed to participate in a restorative process to repair relationships.” The University of Ottawa did not respond to a request for comment.)

Instead of backing away from the criticism, he pushed on with his activism. He continued to speak out against Israel’s bombardment of Palestinians. He also went to Gaza in February of 2024, providing volunteer medical services in an old school building in Rafa, where he saw starving children, burn victims and a lack of medical supplies.

But all this came at a cost to his career and reputation.

“I appreciate Dr. Ge’s resilience, and the example he sets of how to stand up to bullies and maintain moral integrity,” said Joanna Berry, an immigration and refugee lawyer in Canada, who follows the doctor’s activism. “As a University of Ottawa alum and former Ottawa resident, I have observed through news and networks that the crackdowns against pro-Palestinian activists and scholars are especially violent in Ottawa…. Bully tactics range from the overzealous, reckless deployment of the Ottawa Police Service … to forms of institutional and lawfare violence, which Dr. Ge has certainly encountered through his work.”

From Wuhan to Activism

The family doctor’s activism, however, didn’t start with Palestine. Dr. Ge was born in Wuhan, China, where his parents had attended university. As a small child, his family later lived in Japan for a few years and then when he was about four-years old they relocated to Waterloo, Canada.

“My parents wanted a … better life for me as a kid to grow up in Canada,” he said, of his childhood.

He said he’s always felt like an outsider – both in Canada where he’s a first-generation immigrant and in China, where he still has family but is seen as “Western.”

“That family experience really made me think about what is my identity growing up in Canada,” he said.

But then as he got older, he learned of Canada as a “settler-colonial state.” He also learned of the crimes against the indigenous people of North America and how the native people’s land was stolen, resulting in the current nation from which he reaps advantages, including the ability to pursue a career in medicine.

“I worked in and entered medicine and public health, for that matter, in Canada – recognizing people’s genocide here on Turtle Island,” he said. “That was, for me, one of the biggest, shocking worldview shifts.”

“I was like, How do I live in this world in a way that hopefully does less harm and hopefully helps dismantle some of these systems of oppression?”

He then focused on “settler colonialism” and how it affects public health, after he first learned in-depth about Canada’s genocide of indigenous peoples – First Nations, Inuit, and Métis – during his undergraduate studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

“I learned from community members, activists, and clinicians who studied and worked in indigenous health, many of whom were from Six Nations of the Grand River, the largest First Nations reservation that exists in Canada to this day,” he said.

“So, understanding what’s happening in Palestine makes a lot of sense. I stumbled upon Palestine because of that.”

On Speaking Up

“When we know right from wrong, we have to draw attention to those things,” said Dr Ge, who appears to view human rights activism as inseparable from public health.

He also sees the crackdowns on free speech and protest at universities and other institutions recently has highly problematic.

And he learned about the latter the hard way over the past year, as have many who’ve come under scrutiny and received reprimand from universities and other institutions. Dr. Ge said because of his recent time at Harvard, including a 2024 course about social medicine in Palestine, he’s followed some of what’s happened in the Boston area that appears similar to what happened to him in Canada. And he said the censorship and silencing has caused his colleagues – even those who’ve witnessed firsthand the atrocities in Gaza – to avoid speaking out.

“Academic institutions say they are for one thing … like academic advancement of speech, dialog and research papers and whatnot, but they are actually very much for something else,” said Dr. Ge, who argues that the financial interests of many institutions often outweigh their value of free speech.

“Academic institutions,” he said, “care about their budgets and their donors than their students. … They will always side with who has more power.”

But, he added: “This chilling effect is really dangerous for free speech – for being able to talk about genocide, which is something that any doctor should be able to talk about, especially about its impacts on health and healthcare.”

This story, which is slated to appear in the Lunar New Year Issue of Sampan, is part of a collection of stories on various types of activism. This story has some minor edits made shortly after it was posted to shorten it. The story was also updated to reflect that the University of Ottawa did not respond to a request for comment.