A Palestinian American medical student objected to working alongside IDF soldiers. The university suspended her
Emory
University put Umaymah Mohammad through ‘one of the most dehumanizing’
experiences of her life as a new front opens in the silencing of
pro-Palestinian voices
Umaymah
Mohammad has wanted to be a doctor for as long as she remembers. She
traces her ambition to the story of her mother, one of hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians displaced by Israel to Jordan in the 1967
Arab-Israeli war, and who contracted polio as a toddler. Despite living
with the debilitating disease, Mohammad’s mother went on to raise five
children and obtain a graduate degree in the US.
It’s
the story of a woman who “overcame unbearable medical circumstances”,
Mohammad said. It also taught the Palestinian American about “the
sociological determinants of health”, she said, as Mohammad believes
displacement contributed to her mother catching the disease, due to the poor sanitary conditions entire communities of Palestinian refugees faced at the time.
Mohammad,
now 28, was up front in her applications to medical school about her
goal of becoming a “physician who speaks up about the social structures
of violence that affect health” – and received rejections from most.
Emory University, in Atlanta, was an exception. She began a dual program there in 2019 to get both her medical degree and a sociology PhD.
Four years into her studies, 7 October happened. After watching Israel’s deadly retaliation on Gaza
in horror from afar, in January 2024, Mohammad sent an email to the
entire medical school with the subject: “Palestinian blood stains your
hands, Emory University and School of Medicine.” She railed against her
fellow students and the school’s faculty for being “silent about the
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”.
A pro-Palestinian protest against the war in Gaza at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in April 2024. Photograph: Elijah Nouvelage/AFP/Getty Images
That spring, Emory’s campus erupted in protests seeking divestment from Israel, prompting Emory’s president to call in the Atlanta police on
25 April. It was the fastest show of police force on a US campus at the
time. Police used tasers on the students, also a first. As an
organizer, Mohammad was in the thick of it.
The next day, she gave an interview
on the Democracy Now! news program in which she spoke of the climate on
campus for protesters. She also talked about an Emory medical school
professor who had recently returned from volunteering as a medic in the
Israeli military. This would lead, seven months later, to her suspension
from medical school for a year, after she was found to have violated
the medical school’s standard of “professional conduct”.
Mohammad’s case has become a tense showdown over _expression_, mirroring the conflict playing out in institutions
across the US over Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. It is also
emblematic of a specific concern: professors and students beginning to
object to the presence of Israelis on campus who are fresh off military
service.
When
Mohammad went into the Democracy Now! interview in April, she was
already upset about what she saw as an immoral double standard. Months
earlier, an Emory medical school professor, Abeer N AbouYabis, had been
fired after posting on Facebook in support of Palestinians after the
events of 7 October. Her post included the phrase: “They got walls, we
got gliders / Glory to all resistance fighters,” a reference to the way
members of Hamas glided over walls in Gaza to enter Israel and stage
their attack. According to a report on AbouYabis’s firing by Emory’s committee for open _expression_, her post was seen as “glorifying” the group.
At
the same time, Mohammad told her Democracy Now! interviewer: “One of
the professors of medicine we have at Emory recently went to serve as a
volunteer medic” in the IDF. That professor, she continued,
“participated in aiding and abetting a genocide, in aiding and abetting
the destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza and the murder of over
400 healthcare workers, and is now back at Emory so-called ‘teaching’
medical students and residents how to take care of patients”.
Umaymah Mohamamad’s interview with Democracy Now!
Mohammad’s
remarks on the program drew complaints from the professor – who she did
not name – and a dean, who has since left Emory. The professor told the
medical school he didn’t feel safe, as Mohammad’s interview could
expose him and his family to harassment. He asked medical school
administrators to investigate her for violating the school’s code of
conduct.
In July, an investigator released
their initial findings: Mohammad had violated the medical school’s code
of conduct with regards to “professionalism” and “mutual respect” by
singling out and disparaging an individual during her Democracy Now!
interview.
This caught the attention of Emory’s
committee for open _expression_, and that month, its chair, the physics
professor Ilya Nemenman, asked the school of medicine to allow the
committee to weigh in. But Nemenman was rebuffed: “The School of
Medicine Conduct Code does not include a role for the [committee] in a
student disciplinary matter,” said the executive associate dean John
William Eley in his reply.
Nemenman wrote back
almost immediately, reiterating his request and insisting that this
interpretation broke with at least a decade’s worth of precedent. His
reaction was echoed by George Shepherd, a law professor and Emory’s
faculty senate president, who also wrote to Eley expressing he was
“surprised” at the “terse rejection”. (The faculty senate oversees the
committee.)
“A student’s right to free
_expression_ is implicated most dramatically when Emory disciplines the
student for what they have expressed,” Shepherd added.
Neither
Shepherd nor Nemenman received a reply, and in September, Eley asked
Mohammad in a letter which of two routes she wanted to follow: accept
the finding and allow a dean to decide on appropriate sanctions, or
proceed with a hearing. She chose the latter.
“Accepting
guilt would mean accepting not talking about Palestine and accepting
not talking about genocide, and no career is worth that,” she told the
Guardian.
A view of damage after Israeli army hit the pediatric department of Nasser hospital in Gaza’s Khan Younis on 17 December 2023. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Later that month, the open _expression_ committee released a report
of its own: according to its independent investigation, the content of
Mohammad’s interview was protected by Emory’s policy on free _expression_.
In fact, the committee said, the school of medicine had violated
Emory’s policy on open _expression_ by conducting the investigation in the
way it did.
Nemenman wrote in the report that,
by ignoring the committee, the school of medicine “violated not just
the Policy, but, ironically, also the ‘principles of professionalism and mutual respect’, which they had aimed to enforce with this Conduct Code investigation”.
Caught
between these two conflicting interpretations, Mohammad faced her
hearing on 12 November. The professor and the dean who had accused her,
together with a faculty adviser of the professor, “testified for my
expulsion”, she said. “They wanted me to never be able to practice
medicine … [and] one was spitting across the table, his face red,
yelling a lot,” she recalled. They demanded she provide evidence to
support her claims about the professor. At one point, the adviser
screamed: “Who are you to decide what’s a genocide?”
Mohammad
said she felt outmatched and that attempts to argue her case fell on
deaf ears. She described the hearing as “one of the most dehumanizing
two hours of my life”.
As Mohammad’s PhD adviser, the sociology professor Karida L Brown,
was allowed to accompany her in the hearing. Brown, whose research
centers on race and racism, echoed Mohammad’s description. It was “like a
Jim Crow court”, she said. “It never felt fair, from the beginning,”
she said, citing the school of medicine’s refusal to engage the open
_expression_ committee or consider its report.
Seven
days after the hearing, Mohammad was informed that she had been
suspended from the medical school for one academic year, and would be on
probation from the time she returned until she graduated. Her appeal of
the suspension was denied.
Mohammad decided to go public: in the new year she wrote about her case for Mondoweiss
and held a press conference, in the hopes the school of medicine would
reverse its decision and change its code of conduct to better align with
Emory’s policies on open _expression_. Her name and photo had already
been posted online after her January 2024 email by pro-Israel groups
such as Canary Mission, and fellow medical school students had also
called her a “terrorist” online. In this atmosphere, she decided at one
point to leave her Atlanta house for a week – “for safety”, she said.
A
request for comment to Eley was forwarded to an Emory spokesperson,
Laura Diamond, who said: “Emory is unable to discuss student conduct
cases.” Diamond also pointed out that Emory released an updated open _expression_ policy
on 20 March. The new policy states that while a representative from the
free _expression_ committee may play an advisory role in disciplinary
hearings if requested by the person facing discipline, it has no right
to relevant information or records from university officials, nor does
it have a right to participate in hearings.
“Administrators
are still able to ignore open _expression_ policy – [the updated
language] doesn’t sufficiently provide protection under open _expression_
policy to students rights,” said a person familiar with the
deliberations. The language was updated because of Mohammad’s case, they
said.
Mohammad has at least a year left on her
sociology PhD, after which she was planning to return to her MD
program. Instead, her suspension will go into effect then, delaying her
MD another year.
As she returned to campus this
spring, one scene in particular from her hearing played over and over
in her head. “I’ll never forget what one of them said to me at the end,”
she said. “I’m sorry about your mother, but that has nothing to do with
this.”
Particularly
since the 1967 war that displaced Mohammad’s mother and thousands of
others, healthcare for Palestinians in Gaza has been fragmented and weakened. But in the last 18 months, “Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system,” according to a UN report, which accused the IDF of war crimes including targeting medical personnel and bombing most of Gaza’s hospitals. More than 1,000 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. Israel has denied the allegations.
UCSF students and healthcare workers commemorate one year of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. Photograph: Youtube via laborvideo
It is in this context that Mohammad and some in the medical field in the US have grown increasingly frustrated
at the lack of outcry from members of their profession – especially
since most of those bombs were made in the US. The frustration, in some
cases, has become personal, feeding tensions between students and
faculty protesting Israel and Israelis on campus who have served in the
IDF since 7 October. (Military service is compulsory in Israel, and a
number of Israelis in the US traveled back to volunteer in the military
after the Hamas attacks.)
“What kind of care
are medical students learning when these are our mentors and educators?”
Mohammad wrote in her Mondoweiss article. “What kind of care are
patients receiving from doctors who believe in the legitimacy of apartheid, and that some human lives are not as important as others?”.
At
least two professors at US universities have faced consequences in
recent months after publicly expressing concern about former IDF
soldiers on campus. The Columbia University law professor Katherine
Franke said she was forced out
of the school in January after bringing up the issue of Israeli
students “right out of their military service … [who have] been known to
harass Palestinian and other students on our campus”. She had also been
speaking on Democracy Now!
Dr Rupa Marya, a professor of medicine and a physician, was banned from campus
at the University of California, San Francisco, for posting on X about
the presence of former IDF soldiers at medical schools specifically:
“Med students at UCSF are concerned that a first year student from
Israel is in their class. They’re asking if he participated in the
genocide of Palestinians in the IDF before matriculating.”
In
an interview with the Guardian, Marya elaborated on her concern: “How
do we integrate [Israeli] reservists into the medical community – with
[Palestinian] students who have lost 50 or 60 family members? What is
the moral obligation of medicine?”
Umaymah Mohammad in Tucker, Georgia, earlier this month. Photograph: Alyssa Pointer/The Guardian
She
is still undergoing hearings at UCSF to determine her future at the
school, she said. UCSF did not reply to a request for comment.
Also
in January, a scheduled talk by a surgeon and member of the IDF medical
corps at the University of Maryland school of medicine, on “advancing
care, saving lives and improving outcomes”, was cancelled, after the school received thousands of emails in protest.
Azka Mahmood, executive director of Cair-Georgia,
or the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Mohammad’s case was
unusual because “we haven’t seen medical students targeted in this way,”
she said. “You have a Palestinian medical student who specifically
joined the field trying to understand inequities and the role of
medicine in violence. To have to work side by side with an IDF soldier
is exacerbating, and makes it uniquely painful for her.”
Mohammad and Marya have connected and are now part of a small group, including the founders of Doctors Against Genocide,
who are launching a Zoom course aimed at healthcare workers and medical
students who want to “speak up about the genocide in Gaza … and build a
just future for our health systems”. They called the course “Cultivating Courage”.
“It
is our obligation as a medical community to do no harm and to protect
life,” said Karameh Kuemmerle, a Palestinian American doctor and founder
of Doctors Against Genocide, a self-described “global health coalition
committed to stopping genocide” that has recently organized healthcare
workers to lobby US lawmakers on getting aid to Gaza. “To see our
hospitals and medical institutions avoid this issue because it’s ‘too
divisive’ … is something we simply do not accept,” Kuemmerle said.
Nidal Jboor, another founder, noted that medical institutions such as the Red Cross
failed to speak out against the Holocaust while it was happening. If US
doctors and medical students continue down the same path with regards
to Gaza, he said, “it’s putting us on the wrong side of history.”
The project has been a rare bright spot for Mohammad. “Repression often brings you new community,” she said.
Back
at Emory, Brown, Mohammad’s doctoral adviser, said she was proud of her
student. “She’s doing what she’s supposed to do – holding her field
accountable to its stated ideals,” Brown said, adding: “She will be Dr
Mohammad, one way or the other.”