The Institute of Community and Public Health (ICPH) at Birzeit University, the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights, and the World Health Organization in the occupied Palestinian territory have launched the Palestine Social Medicine course. This intensive course is part of the activities of the Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights, a partnership between ICPH at Birzeit University and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, United States. The course is supported through Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation funding to WHO occupied Palestinian territory Right to Health programme.Birzeit University is a center of antisemitic, pro-Jihadist terror.
Last December, it hosted a PFLP march where they exhorted students to "blow up the settler's head!"
Also last year, Birzeit's Hamas group hosted a reception for new students where they celebrated a famous Hamas bombmaker, Yahya Ayyash, who was a graduate of Birzeit U:
This display of Nazi-style salutes, a model of a rocket and of a suicide belt was not in Gaza, but in Birzeit University:
Does it sound like Birzeit is a center of "health and human rights?" Is it appropriate for Harvard to partner with a university that is a center for incitement of violence against Jews?
Actually, maybe it is. Because Harvard's own recent record is one of sacrificing academic integrity for "social justice" causes such as hating Israel.
The entire Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights appears to be far more concerned with bashing Israel than in actually helping promote Palestinian health.
The FXB Center's Health and Human Rights Journal recently dedicated an issue to Palestinian health. The entire thrust of the journal was to call Israel "racist" and "apartheid" and "settler colonialist":
Its studies pre-suppose that Israeli policies are fatally hurting Palestinian health and work. And when biased people look for evidence of their thesis, they can invariably find it - as long as they ignore any counter-evidence.
Similarly, Harvard's School of Public Health offers a course that looks at Palestinian health through the lens of Israeli "settler colonialism" making the initial assumption that health services are drastically impacted by Israeli policies.
Yes, a Harvard University course actually highlights "The Map that Lies" that has been thoroughly debunked and retracted by numerous organizations.
Yet in real life, Palestinian healthcare - and indeed, Palestinians' general quality of life - is better than that of neighboring Jordan which does not suffer from "settler colonialism" or "Israeli apartheid:"
In fact, it is difficult to find studies that look at and evaluate Palestinian healthcare on its own merits, or that compares it with the rest of the Arab Middle East - something that is basic in studying the healthcare of every nation on the planet. One rare example that does is this obscure paper, "Experiences of Palestinian patients with hospital services: a mixed-methods study" which employs a standardized survey used throughout the world to evaluate patient experiences in Palestinian hospitals. They aren't great, they aren't terrible, and the study makes recommendations on how to improve them.
Palestinians themselves blame their governments, not Israel, for healthcare shortfalls. A recent survey says that one third of Palestinians say they do not have enough hospitals, 24% complained of scarcity of supplies, 20% said the lack of skilled medical professionals was the biggest problem, and 10% said it
was the high costs of care or the lack of medical insurance.
But looking at the real issues is not how Palestinian health is studied in the West. Instead of caring about how to improve Palestinian healthcare, these seminars and courses and studies are all designed to sacrifice Palestinian healthcare on the much more important altar of using every possible social means to demonize Israel. By viewing everything Palestinian through a "settler colonialist apartheid structural racist" lens, actual daily Palestinian healthcare is neglected and ignored.
Demonizing Israel is a higher "human rights" imperative than improving the lives of Palestinians.
So perhaps it is appropriate that Harvard, which has already hijacked Palestinian healthcare as ammunition to be used against Israel, partners with Birzeit University, which glorifies those who use actual ammunition against Israel.
