Docs at Boston Rally Call for Solidarity With Palestinian Healthcare Workers

Wearing his white lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck, Dr. Yipeng Ge told a crowd at Copley Square last weekend, “When you have privilege, you do everything in your power to get in the way … to make good trouble.”

Ge was one of several healthcare professionals who spoke in solidarity with Palestinian medical workers at a rally on Sept. 14 called “The People’s Prescription: Healthcare Workers & Allies Rally for Gaza.” Ge has served in Gaza to provide care and has been outspoken on Palestine for years – despite threats to his career.

The family doctor from Ottawa was joined by Dr. Brett Lewis of Boston Medical Center and a doctor at Beth Israel, who had his four-month old in tow, as well as several others, including demonstrators on a hunger strike and from the group Doctors Against Genocide. Just before the medical workers spoke, volunteers taped to the Boston Public Library Plaza a long row of white sheets of paper with photos and descriptions of medical workers killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

Dr. Yipeng Ge in Boston on Sept. 14; Photo by Adam Smith

The protest comes nearly two years after the bombardment of Gaza began following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel. Since then, amid the genocidal attack, some 1,800 Gazan healthcare workers are estimated to have been killed as others languish in Israeli detention centers, according to the demonstrators. In addition, some 50,000 Palestinian children have been maimed or killed, according to UNICEF US. At least 64,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered so far, and some believe that number to be an extremely low undercount of the total death toll.

Dr. Lewis told how she had no religious or regional connection to Palestine but that she was there in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide and who have lived under a system of double-standards. She also drew parallels with the under-served patients she helps in Boston and those in need elsewhere in the world.

“All oppression is interconnected,” said Lewis. “This is not a foreign humanitarian crisis,” she said. “The true sickness is not something that can be found in Palestine ... but in Israel and in the United States and in the entire western world,” where she said, imperialism, capitalism, settler colonialism and white supremacy are “endemic” plagues. 

At one point during his speech, Dr. Ge pulled from his pocket his Canadian passport and said it was because of his citizenship in a wealthy Western nation that he could travel to Palestine though many with origins to the region could not, and he spoke at length about serving on medical missions in the region.

While Dr. Ge was enrolled in his graduate studies at Harvard, he was involved in the university’s Palestine Program, he had told Sampan in an earlier interview. The effective inability for Palestinian refugees to return has long upset Ge, he said in the interview with Sampan in January.

Ge said he now is deeply worried about the colleagues and patients he’d met in Gaza and their fate — especially amid mass starvation.

“I don’t know,” he said at the rally, “if my Palestinian healthcare colleagues that I worked with, if they are still alive to this day, because thousands have been either murdered, detained (or) thrown illegally in Israeli torture camps....”

Then, he said, “the Palestinian healthcare workers that I am in touch with, they send me messages to check in to see how I’m doing” — even though, he sad, “they don’t have the food to feed themselves or feed themselves in this moment.”