A Palestinian American medical student objected to working alongside IDF soldiers. The university suspended her

The Guardian

24-03-2025

Umaymah Mohammad has wanted to be a doctor for as long as she remembers. She traces her ambition to the story of her mother, one of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by Israel to Jordan in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and who contracted polio as a toddler. Despite living with the debilitating disease, Mohammad's mother went on to raise five children and obtain a graduate degree in the US.
It's the story of a woman who 'overcame unbearable medical circumstances', Mohammad said. It also taught the Palestinian American about 'the sociological determinants of health', she said, as Mohammad believes displacement contributed to her mother catching the disease, due to the poor sanitary conditions entire communities of Palestinian refugees faced at the time.
Mohammad, now 28, was up front in her applications to medical school about her goal of becoming a 'physician who speaks up about the social structures of violence that affect health' – and received rejections from most. Emory University, in Atlanta, was an exception. She began a dual program there in 2019 to get both her medical degree and a sociology PhD.
Four years into her studies, 7 October happened. After watching Israel's deadly retaliation on Gaza in horror from afar, in January 2024, Mohammad sent an email to the entire medical school with the subject: 'Palestinian blood stains your hands, Emory University and School of Medicine.' She railed against her fellow students and the school's faculty for being 'silent about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians'.
That spring, Emory's campus erupted in protests seeking divestment from Israel, prompting Emory's president to call in the Atlanta police on 25 April. It was the fastest show of police force on a US campus at the time. Police used tasers on the students, also a first. As an organizer, Mohammad was in the thick of it.
The next day, she gave an interview on the Democracy Now! news program in which she spoke of the climate on campus for protesters. She also talked about an Emory medical school professor who had recently returned from volunteering as a medic in the Israeli military. This would lead, seven months later, to her suspension from medical school for a year, after she was found to have violated the medical school's standard of 'professional conduct'.
Mohammad's case has become a tense showdown over expression, mirroring the conflict playing out in institutions across the US over Israel's ongoing assault on Gaza. It is also emblematic of a specific concern: professors and students beginning to object to the presence of Israelis on campus who are fresh off military service.
When Mohammad went into the Democracy Now! interview in April, she was already upset about what she saw as an immoral double standard. Months earlier, an Emory medical school professor, Abeer N AbouYabis, had been fired after posting on Facebook in support of Palestinians after the events of 7 October. Her post included the phrase: 'They got walls, we got gliders / Glory to all resistance fighters,' a reference to the way members of Hamas glided over walls in Gaza to enter Israel and stage their attack. According to a report on AbouYabis's firing by Emory's committee for open expression, her post was seen as 'glorifying' the group.
At the same time, Mohammad told her Democracy Now! interviewer: 'One of the professors of medicine we have at Emory recently went to serve as a volunteer medic' in the IDF. That professor, she continued, 'participated in aiding and abetting a genocide, in aiding and abetting the destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza and the murder of over 400 healthcare workers, and is now back at Emory so-called 'teaching' medical students and residents how to take care of patients'.
Mohammad's remarks on the program drew complaints from the professor – who she did not name – and a dean, who has since left Emory. The professor told the medical school he didn't feel safe, as Mohammad's interview could expose him and his family to harassment. He asked medical school administrators to investigate her for violating the school's code of conduct.
In July, an investigator released their initial findings: Mohammad had violated the medical school's code of conduct with regards to 'professionalism' and 'mutual respect' by singling out and disparaging an individual during her Democracy Now! interview.
This caught the attention of Emory's committee for open expression, and that month, its chair, the physics professor Ilya Nemenman, asked the school of medicine to allow the committee to weigh in. But Nemenman was rebuffed: 'The School of Medicine Conduct Code does not include a role for the [committee] in a student disciplinary matter,' said the executive associate dean John William Eley in his reply.
Nemenman wrote back almost immediately, reiterating his request and insisting that this interpretation broke with at least a decade's worth of precedent. His reaction was echoed by George Shepherd, a law professor and Emory's faculty senate president, who also wrote to Eley expressing he was 'surprised' at the 'terse rejection'. (The faculty senate oversees the committee.)
'A student's right to free expression is implicated most dramatically when Emory disciplines the student for what they have expressed,' Shepherd added.
Neither Shepherd nor Nemenman received a reply, and in September, Eley asked Mohammad in a letter which of two routes she wanted to follow: accept the finding and allow a dean to decide on appropriate sanctions, or proceed with a hearing. She chose the latter.
'Accepting guilt would mean accepting not talking about Palestine and accepting not talking about genocide, and no career is worth that,' she told the Guardian.
Later that month, the open expression committee released a report of its own: according to its independent investigation, the content of Mohammad's interview was protected by Emory's policy on free expression. In fact, the committee said, the school of medicine had violated Emory's policy on open expression by conducting the investigation in the way it did.
Nemenman wrote in the report that, by ignoring the committee, the school of medicine 'violated not just the Policy, but, ironically, also the 'principles of professionalism and mutual respect', which they had aimed to enforce with this Conduct Code investigation'.
Caught between these two conflicting interpretations, Mohammad faced her hearing on 12 November. The professor and the dean who had accused her, together with a faculty adviser of the professor, 'testified for my expulsion', she said. 'They wanted me to never be able to practice medicine … [and] one was spitting across the table, his face red, yelling a lot,' she recalled. They demanded she provide evidence to support her claims about the professor. At one point, the adviser screamed: 'Who are you to decide what's a genocide?'
Mohammad said she felt outmatched and that attempts to argue her case fell on deaf ears. She described the hearing as 'one of the most dehumanizing two hours of my life'.
As Mohammad's PhD adviser, the sociology professor Karida L Brown, was allowed to accompany her in the hearing. Brown, whose research centers on race and racism, echoed Mohammad's description. It was 'like a Jim Crow court', she said. 'It never felt fair, from the beginning,' she said, citing the school of medicine's refusal to engage the open expression committee or consider its report.
Seven days after the hearing, Mohammad was informed that she had been suspended from the medical school for one academic year, and would be on probation from the time she returned until she graduated. Her appeal of the suspension was denied.
Mohammad decided to go public: in the new year she wrote about her case for Mondoweiss and held a press conference, in the hopes the school of medicine would reverse its decision and change its code of conduct to better align with Emory's policies on open expression. Her name and photo had already been posted online after her January 2024 email by pro-Israel groups such as Canary Mission, and fellow medical school students had also called her a 'terrorist' online. In this atmosphere, she decided at one point to leave her Atlanta house for a week – 'for safety', she said.
A request for comment to Eley was forwarded to an Emory spokesperson, Laura Diamond, who said: 'Emory is unable to discuss student conduct cases.' Diamond also pointed out that Emory released an updated open expression policy on 20 March. The new policy states that while a representative from the free expression committee may play an advisory role in disciplinary hearings if requested by the person facing discipline, it has no right to relevant information or records from university officials, nor does it have a right to participate in hearings.
'Administrators are still able to ignore open expression policy – [the updated language] doesn't sufficiently provide protection under open expression policy to students rights,' said a person familiar with the deliberations. The language was updated because of Mohammad's case, they said.
Mohammad has at least a year left on her sociology PhD, after which she was planning to return to her MD program. Instead, her suspension will go into effect then, delaying her MD another year.
As she returned to campus this spring, one scene in particular from her hearing played over and over in her head. 'I'll never forget what one of them said to me at the end,' she said. 'I'm sorry about your mother, but that has nothing to do with this.'
Particularly since the 1967 war that displaced Mohammad's mother and thousands of others, healthcare for Palestinians in Gaza has been fragmented and weakened. But in the last 18 months, 'Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza's healthcare system,' according to a UN report, which accused the IDF of war crimes including targeting medical personnel and bombing most of Gaza's hospitals. More than 1,000 healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. Israel has denied the allegations.
It is in this context that Mohammad and some in the medical field in the US have grown increasingly frustrated at the lack of outcry from members of their profession – especially since most of those bombs were made in the US. The frustration, in some cases, has become personal, feeding tensions between students and faculty protesting Israel and Israelis on campus who have served in the IDF since 7 October. (Military service is compulsory in Israel, and a number of Israelis in the US traveled back to volunteer in the military after the Hamas attacks.)
'What kind of care are medical students learning when these are our mentors and educators?' Mohammad wrote in her Mondoweiss article. 'What kind of care are patients receiving from doctors who believe in the legitimacy of apartheid, and that some human lives are not as important as others?'.
At least two professors at US universities have faced consequences in recent months after publicly expressing concern about former IDF soldiers on campus. The Columbia University law professor Katherine Franke said she was forced out of the school in January after bringing up the issue of Israeli students 'right out of their military service … [who have] been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus'. She had also been speaking on Democracy Now!
Dr Rupa Marya, a professor of medicine and a physician, was banned from campus at the University of California, San Francisco, for posting on X about the presence of former IDF soldiers at medical schools specifically: 'Med students at UCSF are concerned that a first year student from Israel is in their class. They're asking if he participated in the genocide of Palestinians in the IDF before matriculating.'
In an interview with the Guardian, Marya elaborated on her concern: 'How do we integrate [Israeli] reservists into the medical community – with [Palestinian] students who have lost 50 or 60 family members? What is the moral obligation of medicine?'
She is still undergoing hearings at UCSF to determine her future at the school, she said. UCSF did not reply to a request for comment.
Also in January, a scheduled talk by a surgeon and member of the IDF medical corps at the University of Maryland school of medicine, on 'advancing care, saving lives and improving outcomes', was cancelled, after the school received thousands of emails in protest.
Azka Mahmood, executive director of Cair-Georgia, or the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Mohammad's case was unusual because 'we haven't seen medical students targeted in this way,' she said. 'You have a Palestinian medical student who specifically joined the field trying to understand inequities and the role of medicine in violence. To have to work side by side with an IDF soldier is exacerbating, and makes it uniquely painful for her.'
Mohammad and Marya have connected and are now part of a small group, including the founders of Doctors Against Genocide, who are launching a Zoom course aimed at healthcare workers and medical students who want to 'speak up about the genocide in Gaza … and build a just future for our health systems'. They called the course 'Cultivating Courage'.
'It is our obligation as a medical community to do no harm and to protect life,' said Karameh Kuemmerle, a Palestinian American doctor and founder of Doctors Against Genocide, a self-described 'global health coalition committed to stopping genocide' that has recently organized healthcare workers to lobby US lawmakers on getting aid to Gaza. 'To see our hospitals and medical institutions avoid this issue because it's 'too divisive' … is something we simply do not accept,' Kuemmerle said.
Nidal Jboor, another founder, noted that medical institutions such as the Red Cross failed to speak out against the Holocaust while it was happening. If US doctors and medical students continue down the same path with regards to Gaza, he said, 'it's putting us on the wrong side of history.'
The project has been a rare bright spot for Mohammad. 'Repression often brings you new community,' she said.
Back at Emory, Brown, Mohammad's doctoral adviser, said she was proud of her student. 'She's doing what she's supposed to do – holding her field accountable to its stated ideals,' Brown said, adding: 'She will be Dr Mohammad, one way or the other.'