Petition called on school officials to cancel the talk in the name of ‘health equity and justice’
Pro-Palestinian activists failed to get a talk by an Israeli doctor canceled at the University of Michigan.
Dr. Nadav Davidovitch spoke on Feb. 6 to the university’s school of public health about the polio outbreak in Gaza as well as providing medicine in a war zone, in the face of protests during and before the event. Davidovitch (pictured) is a doctor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.
He is a lieutenant colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces and previously served as a commander, according to the petition, reportedly signed by 200 university affiliates.
The petition demanded the university cancel the talk in the name of “health equity and justice,” values promised by the school.
The letter stated that Dr. Davidovitch’s support for “Zionism” is also in opposition to the school’s commitment to “anti-racism.”
The activists criticized Davidovitch for serving as a doctor to the IDF. They said his “academic work” “cannot be separated” from his other affiliations.
They said there is “ongoing genocide” and an “illegal occupation” by Israel. Furthermore, the letter predicted he would not be critical of Israel and its alleged role in a “polio outbreak in Gaza.”
“Bringing him to campus to speak on a topic in which he is both complicit and has not denounced is further absolving Israel of their crimes and normalizing their deliberate genocidal actions as status quo,” the letter stated.
During his talk, the doctor addressed the destruction of healthcare facilities by Israel as part of its response to the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack, according to the Michigan Daily coverage.
He stated:
Nearly three months into the escalation of the war, we know that about 17,000 children in Gaza missed the routine (Polio) vaccination.
Before October 7, substantial progress had been made to improve children’s health and well-being with raising vaccination coverage, arriving up to 99%. … But of course, the socio-economic decline, the conflict, the infrastructure that was ruined, all of this, of course, makes a very fertile ground (for disease).
“I’m not trying to make a comparison, I’m not trying to say who was suffering more,” Davidovitch said about Israel’s response, which has included striking hospitals. “What Hamas did was horrible, but of course, it’s not giving Israelis a permit to destroy Gaza, and also not to destroy all the health care system in Gaza. … I don’t have an answer about what to do when a terrorist organization is taking civilians and taking hospitals and using them.”
The organizers of the petition reiterated to the student newspaper that the school was “attempting to give intellectual and institutional legitimacy to apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.”
The chair of the epidemiology department, Belinda Needham, said she supported the student’s right to speak out but that it was important to hear from Dr. Davidovitch. Needham said the Israeli doctor is critical of his own government.
The department “organized a forum the day before the seminar where students, staff and faculty could express their concerns,” according to the student newspaper.
MORE: Georgetown Law student group to host speaker linked to Israeli teen’s killing
IMAGE: Israel Academy of Sciences And Humanities/YouTube
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