Public health professionals can sign the petition “Public health professionals object to suppression of views within American Public Health Association, and punishment of Professor Hagopian in the struggle for health in Palestine” here.
Read the text of Amy Hagopian, professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Public Health, below.
Public health professionals are charged with responding to humanitarian crises. When hospitals are bombed, when children are deliberately starved, when doctors are assassinated, we’re supposed to speak up. That’s the job.
Last week, I was informed my American Public Health Association membership has been revoked, my annual meeting registration cancelled, and I am barred from attending any APHA meetings for two years. I was also stripped of my elected leadership position as chair of the International Health Section. My offense? Advocating (too much) for the health of Palestinians in Gaza.
Political authorities in the U.S. and the U.K. have made it personally and professionally dangerous for academics and professionals to publicly object when Israeli soldiers shoot children in the head as they stand in line for food in Gaza, or to protest the kidnapping and torture of doctors at Kamal Adwan Hospital, or to object to the blockade of food deliveries that could avoid deaths by starvation. Protesters risk their visas, their jobs, their housing and even their liberty if they oppose Israel’s repressive policies towards Palestinians.
While European and international public health associations have issued statements expressing grave concern over Gaza’s health system collapse, America’s 25,000-member professional association has responded feebly — by linking arms with the Trump administration to weaponize false antisemitism charges against those advocating for Palestinian health. (To be clear, antisemitism is a real threat, but here it is being twisted to silence critics of the Israeli regime.)
APHA own Code of Ethics requires practitioners to “remediat(e) structural and institutional forms of domination that arise from inequalities related to voice, power, and wealth. It is difficult for public health to promote health justice at the transactional level if it does not take steps to promote it at the structural and institutional levels as well.” No one could argue that remaining neutral on Israel’s bombing of schools and hospitals, murder of journalists and imprisonment of Palestinian doctors is consistent with our Code of Ethics. Yet the organization has failed multiple times over the last 15 years to pass statements on how the Israeli occupation undermines Palestinian health.
In November, 2023, our Palestine Health Justice Working Group persuaded the APHA governing council to adopt a one-sentence Gaza ceasefire statement, with 90% voting in favor. The following year, though, we were stymied by the 24-member executive board when it voted unanimously to block the governing council from even considering a longer, more reasoned statement on Palestinian health justice at its autumn meeting in Minneapolis.
When the governing council sustained that decision, three dozen of us staged a peaceful protest. We donned red latex gloves (signifying “blood on our hands”) at the back of the meeting room and marched through the Exhibit Hall. No big disruption, just a quiet march.
An anonymous complainant deemed this action to be antisemitic and intimidating to Jewish members. A three-person subcommittee of the executive board held a 40-minute zoom “Code of Conduct” meeting with me—with no written charges provided—then issued its ruling without investigation, witness interviews, or appeal process. A second anonymous complaint targeted the mission statement I circulated to our working group’s mailing list, which we knew included Zionist members surveilling our activities. Our younger members found this particularly alarming as they watched their fellow students be snatched from the streets, expelled from school, and even deported for their views on Palestine.
APHA is not alone in overturning democratic member votes. Other academic and professional associations have wrestled with how to respond to Israel’s pummeling of Gaza. The American Historical Association’s governing body quashed its “Resolution to Oppose Scholasticide in Gaza” in January, 2025, after a general membership meeting adopted the resolution with an 85% “yes” vote in New York City. Similar undemocratic maneuvers occurred in the Modern Language Association.
Academic and professional associations exist to provide spaces for debating controversies across institutions. Policy statements issued by credible national organizations help to shape the public’s views on current events and influence legislation on pressing issues. This work helped shift American opinion on South African apartheid.
But today, universities and professional associations are ignoring their ethical codes to fall in line with current government dictates and tweets. Compared to the firehose of MAGA authoritarian moves over recent months, what’s happening to me in APHA is relatively minor; I am only a volunteer, so I haven’t lost my livelihood. But the pattern of institutional capitulation matters. Graduate students and junior faculty watch these institutional failures and understand: speaking up carries professional consequences that tenure and seniority cannot always shield. When professional associations preemptively police dissent on Palestine—using false accusations of antisemitism as a cudgel—they’re rehearsing the very authoritarianism they should be resisting.
Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, writes that someday there will be nothing controversial about naming Gaza’s starvation, the executions, the obliteration of families, homes, schools, hospitals. “Once far enough removed,” he notes, “everyone will be properly aghast that any of this was allowed to happen,” as is now normal in discourse about South African apartheid. “But for now, it’s just so much safer to look away, to keep one’s head down, periodically checking on the balance of polite society to see if it is not too troublesome yet to state what to the conscience was never unclear.”
At the conference that I’m shut out of this year, supporters of Palestinian health justice will wear ribbons opposing my expulsion and in support of a ceasefire. We shouldn’t have to fight our own association to stand for the health of a besieged people.We have organized a sign-on letter addressed to the “brass” at APHA, which you can find HERE. A link to all the documents in the case is also available HERE.
Amy Hagopian is professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Public Health, where she taught for thiry-five years. Specializing in conflict and health, homelessness, health workforce planning, rural health, and global health policy, Hagopian’s wide-ranging interests are unified by the idea that the maldistribution of power and wealth undermines health. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and has served in numerous leadership roles within APHA over twenty-five years.