BY AMY HAGOPIAN
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Last week, I was informed my American Public Health Association membership has been revoked, my annual meeting registration cancelled, and I am barred from attending any APHA meetings for two years.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.
Photo, provided by the author, from the November 2024 Red Hands protest in the APHA exhibit hall in Minnesota.
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.
It’s extremely alarming when professional organizations purge their members for political reasons. Banning people from professional meetings is a form of deplatforming and censorship, and it should not be undertaken in retaliation for protected speech. The organization’s claim that merely wearing red gloves to protest the killing of innocents is inherently a form of antisemitic harassment is contrary to every principle of academic freedom, and a shameful act of repression. It is also censorship against all members of this organization who are now banned from hearing from these banned members at their conference, and must be fearful of similar censorship if they express dissent.
Has it occurred to anyone that perhaps the professional association has a reason to remove this individual? And that her self-serving narrative of events leaves out the more damning details? In this article itself, she shares antisemitic statements. She claims there were “Zionist members surveilling our activities,” using “Zionist” as an ethnic slur to refer to Jews who identify (correctly) as indigenous to Israel. She claims there was a “peaceful protest” but neglects to mention that marchers disrupted a governing session with shouting, and screaming “Resistance is Justified when people are occupied,” a statement supporting Hamas’s “resistance” which included mass murder, rape, and kidnapping. She claims Israel bombs hospitals, without holding Hamas accountable for its well-documented use of hospitals to house weapons, hold hostages, and use as terrorist headquarters. She ignores Hamas shooting children in the head, cutting off their limbs, raping them in front of their mothers, and burning them alive, while repeating debunked lies about the IDF. Why are you providing space to this in your blog?
Who taught HAMAS to do so?
Read Ilan Pappe “The ethnic cleansing of Palestine”, page 229:
The town of Beersheba was protected mainly by Egyptian volunteers
from the Muslim Brotherhood’s movement under the command of a Libyan
officer, Ramadan al-Sanusi. When the fighting was over, the captive
soldiers and all local people the Israeli troops suspected of holding arms
were rounded up and randomly fired at.
You wrote that you held a protest in the meeting room and your photo appears to be in the vendor area. Both of those acts go against the conduct code. Seems from your own account that you were booted for violating the rules. Actions have consequences.
I came here from the podcast. I was really concerned by the claims made ion the podcast and the blog. r.
After looking more closely at the materials it’s clear that while Professor Hagopian is well regarded in her field and has made many contributions to public health, there seem to be something else going on on how this story is presented.
From what I can find on google there was significant shouting during the protest. It seems like we are only getting one side of the story here. I’d wonder what the public health academy would say.
As a former faculty review chair, it also appears that the conduct policy, at least as in the google drive, process was followed, and that the concern may not be about censorship itself, but rather potential breaches of confidentiality and the sharing of internal information. I was a little confused in reading the response from what I think was an outside party. It appeared to be a straw man argument.
I strongly believe that we need to be judicious when considering claims of censorship. Especially during this time where protecting academic freedom and open dialogue is paramount. Still, I can’t shake the sense that there’s something else happening here. Especially since they put out a statement on Gaza.
Or, at least to know why the academy felt like this behavior meant removal from leadership for two years.
I’d really appreciate hearing an official response from the association and others there.
The APHA supports the US’s bipartisan foreign policy regarding the Israel-Hamas ceasefire. They put out the following statement pasted below. It should be obvious that the author was not expelled for having political opinions that favor a ceasefire.
APHA statement on Israel-Hamas ceasefire
October 13, 2025
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: mediarelations@apha.org
Statement from APHA Executive Director Georges C. Benjamin, MD
After more than two years of devastating violence between Israel and Hamas that inflicted untold pain and suffering on people throughout the region, APHA is encouraged by the ceasefire and return of hostages.
We commend all those involved, directly and indirectly, in reaching this point. As we have in the past, we urge both sides and the international community to work together to fully implement the agreement, ensuring an end to the violence, a surge in humanitarian aid and a path toward the long-term security and peaceful coexistence of the Palestinian and Israeli people and all who live in the region.
The pain and suffering inflicted through the years on people in the region will take decades to heal. Communities have been destroyed, people have been traumatized and families are returning to homes that no longer physically exist. The international community must work quickly to help rebuild the region to meet the needs identified by the residents.
Without significant, immediate and long-lasting action in the region, people will continue to die, even if no further bombs explode or gunshots are fired. The public health and medical systems have been destroyed; hunger and unsanitary conditions are rampant; and the vast majority of homes, hospitals and schools are damaged or destroyed.
We hope that the peace process will continue rapidly to allow communities to rebuild and create an opportunity for permanent safety and prosperity – for all the people in the region.
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Your stand against the genocide in Gaza/West Bank is admirable. Thank you for it.
Had you stood up against the organization’s insane support for Covid vaccine mandates, you might have credibility in denouncing authoritarianism. Of course, you would have been expelled in 2021 and not 2025.
With your