Preventative Medicine Needed: Israel's Roles in Genocides, Dictatorships, and Repression Around the World

FEBRUARY 9, 2024

BY HOWARD WAITZKIN, MD

My first encounter with Israel’s role in genocide happened while caring for patients, not in Palestine but in California. Compared to traumatization of ordinary people in Israel or deaths and injuries in Gaza now, that experience may seem small. But as possible Israeli genocide causes concerns worldwide, including South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice, Israel’s actions outside Palestine, often as an enforcer of U.S. policies, deserve more attention than they have received so far.

My experience happened while doing medical work with refugees. During the 1980s and 1990s, I directed a University of California internal medicine residency program. We faced an epidemic of dramatic physical symptoms among patients arriving from the wars in Central America. Symptoms included severe chest pain, abdominal pain, pelvic pain, and neurological problems such as dizziness, loss of consciousness, weakness, headaches, and visual and hearing problems. Although some of the patients came from El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, most were Mayan refugees who journeyed from the highlands of Guatemala, through Mexico, to California.

Extensive evaluations revealed that these symptoms did not develop from physical causes. Instead, the bodily distress came from horrifying traumas, including torture, rape, watching the murders of parents and children, and being forced to dig graves for friends, family, and themselves before they escaped. In vivid detail, they described Israel’s role in Guatemala’s genocide. They mentioned Uzi submachine guns and Galil rifles made in Israel and described how Guatemalan and Israeli military personnel used the arms during massacres. Despite our efforts, we knew that most patients never would outgrow such memories. Human rights organizations named the atrocities of the Guatemalan government, but not the U.S. or Israeli governments’ supporting roles, as genocide.

. . .

Later, our work in global public health revealed impacts of Israel in multiple Latin American countries. Israel acted as a surrogate for the United States, especially when direct U.S. military intervention was politically not feasible.

For instance, Israeli personnel helped coordinate U.S.-backed interventions against Nicaragua, which colleagues and I witnessed through our medical work there. During the so-called Iran-Contra affair, Israel sold U.S. weapons to Iran, generating funds for the counter-revolutionary (“contra”) forces in Nicaragua. Israel also sent weapons confiscated from the Palestinian Liberation Organization directly to the contras based in Honduras.

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/09/preventative-medicine-needed-israels-roles-in-genocides-dictatorships-and-repression-around-the-world/