Sunday, August 31, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
They claim that in Israel and elsewhere, the "colonized" have poorer health because of the supposed "settler colonialism" they suffer under.
This is not the only study that blames poorer Arab health compared to Jews in the region on nebulous factors like racism or colonialism. A series of recent papers (many of whom share some of the same authors) have been pushing this narrative:
Smith J, Kwong EJL, Hanbali L, Hafez S, Neilson A, Khoury R. Violence in Palestine demands immediate resolution of its settler colonial root causes. BMJ Glob Health 2023;8:e014269. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2023-014269.Tanous O. On settler colonialism, environment, and health. Jerusalem Quarterly 2023;95:112–15.Asi YM, Hammoudeh W, Mills D, Tanous O, Wispelwey B. Reassembling the pieces: settler colonialism and the reconception of Palestinian health. Health Hum Rights 2022;24:229–35. PMID: PMC9790940.Asi YM, Sharif MZ, Wispelwey B, Abuelezam NN, Ahmed AK, Samari G. Racism as a threat to Palestinian health equity. Health Equity 2024;8:371–5. https://doi.org/10.1089/heq.2024.0027.
It does not take long to not only debunk this theory, but to advance an alternative theory that is much stronger to explain why Arab Israelis and Palestinian Arabs have a lower life expectancy than Israeli Jews.
Let's ignore the fact that Israel is not a settler-colonialist state, since Jews are indigenous to the region.
If settler colonial determinants of health (SCDH) were real, then one would expect that Arabs under Israeli rule or "occupation" have worse health than their neighbors in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria, who do not live under such circumstances.
Yet the life expectancy of Palestinian and Israeli Arabs is 76, while their neighbors average about 74.5.
That is a negative correlation.
Yet Israeli Arabs do have lower life expectancy than Israeli Jews, which is 83 years. That is certainly a significant difference. If "settler colonialism" is not the major reason, what is?
Modern medicine loves to look at social factors as underlying health determinants - things like poverty or marginalization. Of course, "poverty" does not cause health problems any more than "settler colonialism" does - the use of the word "determinants" in SCDH is knowingly deceptive. There may be correlations, but nothing about poverty causes poor health - it is at best a second-order factor, because perhaps poverty indicates less access to health facilities, or more stress. But social factors, by themselves, are never determinants.
Let's look at poverty. There is no doubt that Arab Israelis have lower incomes and higher poverty rates than Israeli Jews do, so a superficial glance at only those two factors would seem to indicate some correlation.
However, there is another well-defined group in Israeli society that has high poverty rates: religious Haredi Jews. And if you look at their life expectancy you can see that it is higher than that of non-Haredi Jews in Israel! The Haredi population has a life expectancy of 84.5 years, a full year and a half over other Israeli Jews.
So what accounts for these seemingly contradictory results? If it isn't settler colonialism, and it isn't poverty, then what is it that is the major factor for determining life expectancy?
If you had to choose one dominant health factor, the answer is simple: smoking.
If you compare life expectancy with smoking rates, among Haredi, non-Haredi Jewish Israeli , Israeli Arab and Palestinian men and women, the negative correlation between smoking and life expectancy is a very high -0.934.
This is a much stronger correlation than other first-order health factors like obesity or diabetes.
When academic health papers are biased like these, and ignore easily obtained statistics and methodologies that undermine their theories, that is no longer just bias or antisemitism. It is a threat to the entire health industry. Public health must be guided by evidence, not activism. When empirically measurable factors like smoking rates show a near-perfect inverse correlation with life expectancy, ignoring them in favor of untestable theories is not only unscientific - it's unethical.
This is not the only problem with the SCDH theory. But it is enough to show that within some health circles, activism is trumping science. That should concern everyone, no matter what your position is on Israel.
One shudders to think that these health professionals are spending more effort to slander Israel in the name of Arab health than to promote anti-smoking initiatives among Palestinians and Arab Israelis - an idea that Israeli health officials would gladly embrace.
(h/t Andrew P)
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