November 11, 2024

We charge the aforementioned UC leaders, in addition to University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) leaders, including Chancellor Sam Hawgood, Executive Vice-Chancellor Catherine R. Lucey, President and Chief Executive Officer Suresh Gunasekaran, and the UCSF Foundation Board of Directors, with complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people and the ongoing Nakba. As the only UC campus wholly focused on health, healthcare, and health professions education, UCSF has a particular ethical responsibility to uphold the sacred healthcare worker oath to “Do No Harm” and to protect humanity. In this time of genocide and ongoing Nakba, UCSF administrative leaders have failed to carry out UCSF’s stated mission to “advanc[e] health worldwide” and to honor the Hippocratic mandate that forms the cornerstone of the health professions. Far from abstaining from harm, they have colluded in imperialist violence.

Research and lived experience substantiate the direct connection between past and current settler colonialism, racism, and imperialism, on the one hand, and the health of communities most impacted by these structures, on the other. The reciprocity between Indigenous land and peoples is foundational to the health of humanity and our planet. While encouraging the UCSF community to perform land acknowledgments, UCSF, as a land grant institution that profited from genocide on this land, denies landback to the Ramaytush Ohlone people and is complicit with the murder of Indigenous people and ecocide in Palestine. 

The UCSF administration upholds Zionism, a white supremacist ideology, and perpetrates anti-Palestinian racism, locally and globally. Attacks on healthcare workers, the healthcare system, and health professions students and faculty in Palestine are a key tactic that Israel, funded by the United States and supported by the UC, uses to commit genocide and ongoing Nakba. In a moment when Israel has murdered over a thousand of our Palestinian healthcare colleagues, imprisoned and tortured hundreds more, and decimated all hospitals and the healthcare system and health professions schools in Gaza, UCSF leaders have attacked and endangered those who decry this violence. 

We charge UCSF and its leadership, including Chancellor Hawgood, with direct and indirect complicity in the crimes of ongoing Nakba and genocide. UCSF administration complicity includes, but is not limited to, the following crimes: 

1. Violation of Sacred Healthcare Oath: UCSF leadership has violated our healthcare worker oath to serve humanity and its own UCSF Physician Declaration by failing to decry genocide, the murder and torture of healthcare workers, and the destruction of the healthcare and health professions educations systems in Palestine. 

2. Persecution and Repression: UCSF leaders have collaborated with Zionist politicians and institutions to attack the free speech and academic freedom of UCSF students, staff, and faculty who have sought to fulfill their oath, including through defamatory campaigns and the suspension and firing of those who have spoken up for freedom for Palestine. 

3. Withholding of Medical Assistance: The UCSF administration, which provides material and technical assistance to countries and regions with public health and healthcare crises, has withheld such aid to Palestinians who are suffering the impacts of climate catastrophe, mass starvation, the spread of infectious diseases, severe trauma, and other health calamities consequent to the genocide..

4. Investments: By investing in the Israeli state and complicit Israeli corporations, and procuring medications, equipment, and services from Israeli and other companies complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights, UCSF aids and abets the Israeli occupation and genocide. 

5. Academic Ties. UCSF sustains Israeli occupation and ongoing Nakba through its institutional collaborations with complicit Israeli universities while refusing parallel investment in Palestinian institutions. 

6. Institutional Zionism and Anti-Palestinian Racism: UCSF has consistently falsely equated criticism of Israel and/or Zionism with antisemitism, a practice that endangers Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, anti-Zionist Jews, and ultimately, all marginalized and oppressed communities while declining to investigate complaints of anti-Palestinian racism, doxxing, harassment, and death threats.

7. Donor Influence: UCSF administration has accepted $1.15 billion dollars from the Diller Family Foundation, an explicitly Zionist foundation that funds right-wing extremist hate groups, including Canary Mission-–which has doxxed UCSF faculty and students–-and programs designed to deepen collaborations with complicit Israeli institutions.