After an Ex-IDF Soldier’s Threats, Anti-Palestinian Racism Left Me Unprotected

“I’m going to report you. I can get you fired for that,” an ex-IDF soldier threatens in the hospital hallway. The former IDF soldier now working in my hospital does not realize I am a student and cannot be fired, only expelled. The interaction began when the former soldier asked me to step outside to talk about my keffiyeh-print scrub cap.

I spent the first months of the genocide unaware of the massive campaign to silence and discipline any med student who talked about it. I was living in Amman, where I had lived for five consecutive years while completing my PhD work. In August 2024, I returned to the US to finish my rotations as an MD/PhD student.

Thankfully, living in Amman, I missed out on that crucial period of socialization in which I might have learned to be quiet about a genocide for the sake of my residency match. Instead, I spent those months sitting with my friends in Amman as their family members were killed by the dozens with bombs sent by the US.

I first became aware of the repression taking place in the US when someone sent me a link to a livestream of the December 2023 anti-semitism hearings while I was on my way to dinner with a friend. In her car, we watched top US government officials debate about whether or not the use of the word “intifada” counted as violence. I don’t remember how many of her relatives in Gaza had already been killed at that point. But Israel eventually killed them all and they did it with bombs sent by the same politicians we watched debating the meaning of a word from a language that none of them spoke.

Two thousand pound airstrikes that wipe out entire families. A debate on Arabic linguistics in the US Congress. To watch both at the same time is disorienting, like looking through a camera that hums and clacks as it struggles to find an aperture that can bring two disparate realities into focus.

The frame through which these impossibly discordant scenes can somehow be reconciled is that of the Genocide Enablement Apparatus described by Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah. He identifies repression not as a byproduct but a central component of a singular apparatus operating across distant continents and disparate scales — from the microscopic to the genocidal — as it seeks to erase symbols of Palestinian life — like a keffiyeh print scrub cap — from the workplace and the earth.

It feels absurd to dissect the mechanisms of students’ repression after witnessing 18 months of violence carried out on a genocidal scale. Yet understanding the logic through which this microscopic form of violence operates allows us to resist it more effectively and, after all, Palestinians will free Palestine. The most effective form of solidarity we can offer from the imperial core is to clean up our own dirty backyard: to trace the winding pathways through which our institutions operate to enable the US-backed genocide, articulate these causal links with precision, and demand accountability in the places where we have maximum leverage.

Institutional violence operates almost invisibly through structures of protocol and policy that displace and distribute responsibility widely across a hierarchy of individuals just doing their jobs. Violence without a clear perpetrator often disappears against the background of the everyday — the way things work.

The ex-IDF soldier demands to see my name-tag which has slipped under my sweatshirt. A nurse I’ve always worked with amicably volunteers, helpfully: “if you want to report her, call upstairs and ask the charge nurse to contact her supervisor.”

The ex-IDF soldier follows this advice. An hour later as I attempt to suture a finger laceration for the first time, hands shaking, I can hear the conversation held publicly. There is some debate about who is the appropriate supervisor to report me to.

Structures of violence that differentially distribute vulnerability to disease and early death among our patients are not upheld by bad people intending to cause harm. Violent systems are sustained by individuals just doing their job, abiding by policies that widen the distance between actions and their outcomes. Our participation in the causal chains that reproduce inequality is rarely felt as such. How many of our actions as physicians — ordering a drug test or filing a CPS report — trigger a chain of events that subjects our most vulnerable patients to additional forms of policing and criminalization? Why do we ask our undocumented patients about substance use without first asking the CBP officers holding them in custody to leave the room?

The norms of white supremacy are upheld by individuals just doing their jobs.

Later, the appropriate supervisor barges into the resident workroom where I have been waiting until I can stop crying to respond to her demand in the group chat that I come to her office (and subsequently that a resident find Morgen and relay the request).

She asks for “my side” of the story in an office shared with one of the physicians who, like the supervisor, is tasked with evaluating and grading my performance. This physician remains silent throughout the interaction.

The supervisor advises me to be more conscious of how symbols are perceived, adding that there are always “two sides” to every story. I express that I am uninterested in perceptions rooted in racism and do not care to hear the side of the story a racist has told while following through on their threat to get me punished for my scrub cap.

She confirms that a formal report is being filed, mentioning professionalism, which seems to imply that the official report will be a professionalism violation given her adamant reassurance that my scrub cap doesn’t violate policy. Her adamance suggests she is not personally opposed to my scrub cap but is just doing her job — fulfilling her duty to help the ex-IDF soldier’s concerns move towards the “higher-ups” who can determine the appropriate consequences.

I reflect on the duty of a supervisor to protect students from mistreatment and harassment and, presumably, to stand up for them when they are threatened by a racist staff member. I notice how quickly this duty disappears when a disciplinary matter demands urgent escalation. How urgently would that escalation take place if a Palestinian staff member threatened a medical student wearing an Israeli (or American) flag-print scrub cap? Would the student be encouraged to reflect on how symbols are perceived? Or, would such a threat be stopped in its tracks and escalate in reverse, materializing into a disciplinary report against the Palestinian staff member?

A kind resident tells me I don’t have to come in for my final day, correctly assuming that it will be painful to continue working with everyone who participated in and watched the slow, highly public transformation of the ex-IDF soldier’s threat into a formal disciplinary report. I use the day to write this article and send it to my lawyer at 5 AM, four hours before my shelf exam. I wonder if it will affect my “wellness grade” to admit that, against the advice of supportive attendings, I didn’t “stop thinking about it and study.” I write for hours, compelled by an urgent need to understand this microscopic encounter with institutionalized anti-Palestinian racism from the vantage point of its central target.

Driving home, a song by Amman-based Palestinian rapper Abo Ali comes on and one phrase stands out: “عطيني ميكروفون ومش رح ألجأ لانتحار (Just give me a microphone and I won’t find myself facing suicide)”. I think immediately of a student organizer who died by suicide at a university infamous for silencing those speaking about Palestine. I think of the case manager assigned to provide mental health support to medical students during the early months of “the escalating violence” while her husband cheered for genocide: “Gazans democratically elected Hamas. They fucked around. They’re about to find out.”

When it rains in Gaza, it rains in Amman. When I listen over and over and over again to the 911 call from Hind Rajab begging for help until the IDF kills her, I hear a five-year-old girl speaking in nearly the same accent as my best friend’s five-year-old daughter.

How could I expect support and understanding from a counselor married to a man eagerly anticipating the slaughter of my friends’ families? The nephew of a former Congresswoman who donates directly to the IDF and serves as a trustee at the hospital where I hope to match someday. I never made an appointment.

I have received two Fulbrights and four Critical Language grants to study in the Middle East. I have learned to speak Arabic with only a trace of an accent. And now, I am expected to silently — apologetically — take off my scrub cap and pretend I can no longer hear, in a language I have spent sixteen years learning to understand.

The pain evoked by my microscopic encounter with anti-Palestinian racism is tied to the bottomless horror, rage, and heartbreak of mourning a genocide that has not ended. I do not know the circumstances leading up to the student organizer’s suicide.

But I know that silence is death. And silence about death enables the genocide to continue. And silence about the deaths of the beautiful people we loved who were killed by Israel is not a price we should have to pay in order to ensure we match to residency.

Abo Ali continues, “ما تحملت اشوف عيونك (I couldn’t bear to meet your eyes)”. I remember my beloved colleague Dr. Yipeng Ge’s reflection that one does not need to be fearless to speak out. I imagine meeting the eyes of the people who made my life in Amman beautiful for five years, nearly every one of whom is Palestinian. Of course I am afraid. I am afraid all the time. I am afraid speaking publicly against the genocide will mean I do not match to my top — or any — residency program. But there are things that I fear more.

Every few months I encounter some new incarnation of the baseless accusations directed at students talking too loudly about Palestine. None of these has ever come to fruition as an official disciplinary charge, partly because I am not doing anything wrong, but mostly because I am white and the structures of white supremacy continue to protect those who benefit from white privilege even as we work to dismantle them at their very core. Who has the privilege to publicly narrate an encounter with institutionalized anti-Palestinian racism and expect to face an exponentially lower risk of disciplinary action and direct physical violence against her in retaliation? Women of color who publicly name forms of racialized violence often receive death threats. White women are socialized from birth to speak loudly, often obnoxiously, when we think we are right.

An encounter with the thoroughly unsurprising — the racism of an IDF soldier upheld by the faceless norms of an institution — still stings like an open wound. When the violence of repression disappears against the background of institutional norms — the way things work — what stands out is the individual. Students who have been doxxed and threatened appear not as targets of a repressive, racist campaign but as the source of the problem themselves. Shame that belongs to the institutions inventing new policies to silence, discipline, and intimidate is displaced onto the students they target. Institutional racism remains invisible while individual students appear as (and feel the shame that comes from being) the source of the problem.

To be someone who is seen as creating problems by talking too loudly about Palestine, is incredibly lonely. It’s devastating to witness the genocide taking place in Gaza and doubly devastating to witness it alone.

My dear friend Umaymah and I have talked about our sense of having something contagious, the palpable fear that having your name associated too closely with one of ours might affect your residency match. Umaymah has been suspended from Emory for a year for a brilliant interview with Democracy Now! in which she asked why an Emory physician who volunteered with an IDF combat unit in Gaza and participated in a military campaign that the ICC has deemed an attempt to exterminate an entire people — her people — was allowed to return to Emory School of Medicine and remain in a position of power and authority over Palestinian students like herself as her teacher.

Umaymah is, not coincidentally, also an MD/PhD student in the social sciences. Together we have fifteen years of training in a field that traces the pathways through which institutional violence becomes embodied as health disparities. We have harnessed its tools to do exactly what they are designed for: to identify forms of violence that continue largely because they remain invisible and, by articulating how they operate, expose them in a way that disrupts their ability to persist unchallenged because they are unseen.

There’s a kind of relief that feels like freedom in knowing that — whatever blacklists are circulating to prevent students who talk too loudly about Palestine from matching to residency — our names are already on them.

When Umaymah began to speak publicly about the genocide, there was a sense that people did not want their names appearing too close to hers because of the fear that if she goes down, they will be pulled down with her. And my response to this instinct is to publicly say as often as I can that you can glue my name to hers and try to pull us down together.