Weeks before first responders fought valiantly to save lives at Bondi Beach in Sydney in December last year, an international medical conference on the latest battle-tested techniques to treat gunshot wound victims in the critical minutes after injury was to be held in Perth.
Among the speakers was the former head of the Israeli military’s medical corp, Dr Elon Glassberg, who was to share how the Israeli army reduced battlefield mortality rates from gunshot and blast injuries to the lowest in history of any army in the world.
Anti-Israel doctors and nurses groups threatened to picket the conference with large-scale protests if the Glassberg session went ahead. The organisers capitulated and the conference was cancelled.
For protesting healthcare workers, it was a victory to be celebrated. “Thank you to everyone who wrote letters, made phone calls and made their concerns known. Free Palestine,” the Instagram account @hcw4palestinewa said.
For Australians, the cost of cancelling the conference may come, or already may have come, in the form of lives lost.
Local medical teams rarely get the chance to learn directly from international experts who have developed lifesaving techniques from years of experience treating gunshot wound victims and others suffering potentially fatal bleeding from severe injuries in war and terror attacks.
“We are the ones who lost out,” Adelaide trauma specialist Dr Dan Ellis says. “Without a doubt the hospital staff that would have attended that conference would have gained knowledge to deal with mass casualty events such as Bondi.”
Many of the more than 30 doctors, nurses, midwives and allied health professionals interviewed for this article cite this incident as one of many examples of how anti-Israel activism by healthcare workers since the October 7, 2023, massacre by Hamas has shaken the 2500-year-old bedrock principle of medicine, dating from Greek physician Hippocrates and his oath, which is that the best interests of patients always comes first.
Even now, with the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion under way, an orchestrated campaign by pro-Palestine healthcare workers groups, the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network and other activist groups and influencers has been launched to pressure the national medical oversight body, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, to withdraw its recently announced adoption of the internationally recognised International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism.
AHPRA adopted the IHRA definition after almost three years of failing to tackle the unprecedented explosion of antisemitism in healthcare in Australia.
More than 1400 healthcare workers, including some involved in the cancellation of the Perth trauma medicine conference, have signed an open letter demanding a voice in how AHPRA defines antisemitism. They appear to have a particular objection to the IHRA definition that says denying Israel’s right to exist or holding Israel to different standards from any other country may be antisemitic under some circumstances.
“The ‘Zunts’ have gone hard on us,” a registered nurse commented on an Instagram post urging healthcare workers to sign the letter. She then went on to accuse Australia’s special envoy to combat antisemitism, Jillian Segal, of working at the behest of Israel.
These types of campaigns are the crux of the problem, say medical professionals who have seen the toxic effects of healthcare worker activism since October 7.
Using the exalted mantle of their medical professions, activist doctors and nurses routinely are amplifying anti-Jewish blood libels propagated by Hamas as well as adopting dehumanising anti-Jewish hate speech while often expressing support for proscribed terror groups such as Hamas that advocate mass slaughter of Jews.
By doing so, they are turning hospitals and medical clinics into ideological war zones instead of safe spaces where patients can be assured of getting the best possible medical care by empathetic healthcare providers.
“Health should be a neutral space where the best interests of patients comes first,” Melbourne anaesthetist Dr Deborah Bell says.
Anti-Israel activism began almost immediately after the October 7 massacre when the protests that unfolded in Australian cities spilled into the wards and staffrooms of hospitals in Melbourne, Sydney and other capital cities.
Doctors and nurses wore “From the river to the sea” protest symbols to work and covered hospital toilet stalls and corridors with stickers that included a Star of David with a red line drawn through it.
At The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, which has received tens of millions of dollars from Jewish philanthropists, such stickers were stuck to the bedside wall of an elderly Jewish patient in the hours before he died.
Meanwhile, a war of words was waged online. Social media posts by pro-Palestine doctors and other healthcare professionals veered into hate speech, antisemitism, Holocaust inversion and support of proscribed terror groups.
“Doctors and nurses were posting Nazi symbols and little caricatures of Jewish people but using the word ‘Zionist’ instead of ‘Jews’,” Jewish pediatric neurologist Dr Carly Debinski says. “They were so virtuous and obsessive about vilifying Jewish people.”
Almost three years later, it’s still going on virtually unabated.
After the Bondi terrorist attack, an eminent doctor shared a post that described Jews at a Bondi Beach memorial vigil as “genocide supporting Zionists”. Dossiers of his posts and other doctors’ posts have been submitted to the royal commission.
Facebook groups where doctors and nurses had discussed mundane topics such as childcare became venomous in the aftermath of October 7, with Jewish members attacked or booted off if they mentioned the 200-plus Israelis held hostage in Gaza at the time, or the mutilations, rapes and slaughter of 1200 Israelis by Hamas on October 7.
At a major hospital in Melbourne, a Jewish intensive care unit nurse resigned after more than a decade in the job because management refused to tackle “online hate speech” by staff.
“If these people are willing to share these things on social media, imagine how they treat a (Jewish) patient face-to-face,” she says, requesting that her name be withheld. “Part of receiving excellent care is receiving non-biased care. It was being compromised by the way that staff were sharing propaganda online directly from movements that are linked to terror groups.”
Hospitals became hostile environments for Jewish patients and employees. A Jewish health worker at a Melbourne teaching hospital was shirtfronted by a colleague from Ireland, where antisemitic incidents are at record highs, who demanded she apologise for the Gaza war. The same hospital HR department that weeks earlier transferred a staff member in the same unit for mimicking a foreign accent refused to take action when a complaint was lodged.
That pattern was repeated across the country as hospitals and healthcare regulators tolerated conduct against Jews that would have triggered disciplinary action if the conduct had targeted any other minority group, say numerous medical professionals who experienced this double standard.
After allegations yet to be determined emerged that two Muslim nurses at Sydney’s Bankstown hospital allegedly told an Israeli influencer they’d kill Israeli patients, Jewish patients hid their religion from doctors and hospital admission forms. For Charlotte Frajman, 64, the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, having her religion listed in her medical records is a litmus test. “If I can’t have my Jewish religion on my medical records then it’s time to leave Australia because we are no longer safe here,” she says.
Frajman worries she was targeted during monthly appointments at a Melbourne hospital day clinic where she receives intravenous post-cancer treatment. During a session last year, a Muslim nurse, with whom she’d previously exchanged smiles, lost his kind demeanour when he saw Frajman’s religion on her hospital records while verifying her details.
“When it came to putting in the cannula, he took four attempts. It was incredibly painful,” Frajman recalls. “I was bruised for weeks. You would have thought he was a trainee nurse, not the senior nurse in charge.” When the same nurse again took four attempts to insert cannulas during subsequent visits, Frajman determined that it had to be deliberate.
Israeli-born Orit Brand begged a hijab-wearing radiographer to stop after the eighth failed attempt to insert a cannula into her vein at a radiology clinic at a Melbourne hospital. At her insistence another staff member was called and inserted the cannula at the first attempt “with no pain and no bruising”.
It’s nearly impossible to prove malice when it comes to painful needle insertion. However, in both cases, the hospital protocol of a maximum of two attempts by the same practitioner was breached, according to nurses who work at the hospitals in question.
“The needles, it is a story that keeps repeating,” says Nurit Hadad, a NSW-based mental health nurse counselling victims of antisemitism. “This is the easiest way to hurt people. They say: ‘I’ve done my best but I just couldn’t find a vein.’ ”
Midwife Sharon Stoliar has heard many horror stories since October 7. Among them, a Jewish woman who cried in agony for hours the night after a C-section at a Sydney hospital where she was “left to lie in a pool of blood with no pain relief” while her baby screamed in its cot alongside hers. When the nurse eventually arrived, she treated her roughly and with no compassion.
“People are at their most vulnerable in hospital,” Stoliar says. “Doctors, nurses, midwives have power over them.”
While hospitalised in the ICU ward of an Adelaide hospital, Julia, a Jewish patient who asked that her family name be withheld, sobbed after being given a bedside lecture by her nurse denying the events of the Holocaust and the October 7 massacre.
Jewish medical students and trainee doctors have been ostracised by fellow students. Some have been verbally attacked by patients and taunted by superiors. They are too afraid to go public because of concerns that it will affect their chances at getting accepted in highly competitive specialist training programs. Indeed, many of those interviewed for this article asked for their names to be fully or partially withheld because of safety or job concerns.
The terrible loss of life in Gaza where the Hamas-run health ministry has given the toll of 70,000 dead without distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants has inflamed emotions, as has horrifying footage of Gazan children killed in the war and claims that Israel targeted hospitals. Absent in the echo chambers in which pro-Palestine activists share Hamas talking points is that Hamas kept command bunkers in hospital compounds, such as Nasser Hospital where Hamas leader Mohammed Sinwar was killed, launched the October 7 massacre via pick-up trucks that left hospital compounds and held hostages at hospitals, including a hostage murdered by a medical worker at Shifa Hospital and others tortured by Gazan doctors and nurses.
Hamas has a long history of exploiting hospitals and other civilian sites. When it first took over Gaza in 2006, its operatives tortured and executed Palestinian rivals in Gazan hospitals.
Ten days after the October 7 massacre, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket targeting Israel misfired and hit the grounds of Gaza’s al-Ahli Arab Hospital. Hamas claimed the blast was caused by an Israeli airstrike and that 500 Gazans were killed. The Hamas narrative was carried by the media for hours until video and audio evidence disproved its claims.
It is a testament to the effectiveness of Hamas’s propaganda machine that two days later, hundreds of medical workers dressed in hospital scrubs protested in Sydney and Melbourne chanting “stop hospital bombings”, even though the only Gazan hospital that had been bombed was al-Ahli and it had been hit by a misfired Palestinian rocket.
The same protesters outraged by what they claimed was Israel’s targeting of healthcare workers in Gaza were silent about Hamas firing rocket-propelled grenades at Israeli ambulances on October 7, killing paramedic crews, as well as murdering many Israeli first-aid workers during the massacre including a doctor and paramedic slaughtered as they treated the injured at Kibbutz Be’eri’s clinic.
The medical specialty that seems to be most infested with antisemitism is mental health. Calling on Israelis to commit suicide, a Queensland-based psychotherapist posted on X, “You aren’t fit to live”. An academic working in the psychiatry department of a prominent Australian university put up a Holocaust inversion post on X comparing queues at food distribution centres in Gaza to concentration camp gas chambers during the Holocaust.
Mental health counsellor Hadad had a panic attack in the regional NSW Headspace office where she worked at the time when after October 7 a colleague draped her adjacent desk with a keffiyeh.
“If someone is coming with a keffiyeh to a workplace, Australian people who have nothing to do with Middle Eastern culture … it’s a statement of violence,” says Hadad. “It represents the people trying to kill me.”
Her managers refused Hadad’s request to ban protest symbols at work. After months of feeling unsafe at work, Hadad quit her job.
Lea, a Melbourne mother, called Lifeline for help with severe post-partum depression following the birth of her first child amid the devastating news that two of her young cousins had been murdered at an Israeli kibbutz attacked by Hamas on October 7. Instead of compassion, the counsellor chastised her for talking about her family’s tragedy and failing to express sympathy for Gazans.
“It’s not about comparing tragedies or competing. We are all suffering here and I needed help with my suffering,” says Lea, who asks that her last name be withheld.
One of the main battlefields has become medical boards, which have been inundated with complaints since October 7, many of them vexatious and some the result of co-ordinated campaigns.
Sri-Lankan born midwife Stoliar hopes to testify before the royal commission about the extensive antisemitism in healthcare that she has seen, experienced and documented.
Stoliar is not Jewish but her husband is, and as a result she has been attacked online, harassed and doxxed. One specialist doctor posted that Stoliar’s family was “Jewish mafia”, with “dirty, dirty money”.
Stoliar also received threats including: “You Jewish whore Hitler gonna rape in hell just like he raped ur grandmother.”
It all began after Stoliar wrote on Instagram of her shock at a post by a Sydney doctor quoting Hitler on “the Jewish question” in late 2023. The same doctor then reposted a post that described Jews as “the most loathed slime on this planet”.
Stoliar’s post prompted a flood of complaints about her to the NSW health board by pro-Palestine doctors and nurses, despite none of them having dealings with her. Stoliar was doing a PhD at the time and wasn’t a practising midwife. She stopped counting after the 15th complaint was sent to her by the NSW health board requiring a mandatory response.
Meanwhile, she says, no action was taken against those whose complaints against her were patently vexatious.
As for the doctor who posted the Hitler quote and a post describing Jews as “loathed slime”, health oversight boards closed the complaint without taking action, as they did for complaints about numerous other doctors who posted antisemitic, terror idealisation and pro-Hamas content online.
“Regulators have shown clear double standards in the handling of complaints,” says Stoliar. She says sometimes the same AHPRA staff have acted against Jewish health practitioners targeted by baseless complaints, while ignoring complaints about blatantly antisemitic and terror idealisation posts by pro-Palestine healthcare workers by claiming these posts were made in personal capacities.
Perth doctor Deborah Cohen-Jones received so many threatening messages that she installed a panic alarm to alert police. “You better watch your back,” one message said.
It all began on October 9 when she posted on her Instagram a Star of David and wrote “I stand with Israel” to mourn the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Days later she posted photos of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, the Israeli baby and his toddler brother who were taken hostage and then murdered along with their mother, Shiri Bibas.
In response to those posts, Cohen-Jones received a letter from AHPRA advising that “an anonymous notifier” had complained that she was using her professional social media pages to “promote a political view”. That was the first of three complaints that she said was part of a co-ordinated campaign against her by West Australian pro-Palestine doctors and healthcare workers groups; the same groups that rallied against the Perth trauma conference late last year.
Following the murders of two Israeli embassy staff members in Washington DC in May last year by Elias Rodriguez, a pro-Palestine protester who shouted “Free Palestine” after he gunned them down, Cohen-Jones reposted a post showing a photo of a pro-Palestinian protester in a keffiyeh with a white mask covering her face. Underneath was a photo of someone in a white Ku Klux Klan mask.
Complaints were made to AHPRA and Cohen-Jones was officially cautioned “for posting culturally inappropriate and insensitive information on social media”.
AHPRA “knowingly allowed itself to be weaponised”, she says.
Since July 2023 until the end of February this year, AHPRA says it received 124 complaints related to antisemitism and 97 relating to Islamophobia. It’s not known on what basis it made such categorisations.
Jewish doctors have lodged complaints about pro-Hamas terror posts that they did not consider antisemitic but rather inappropriate for a doctor to promote a proscribed terror group.
Some Jewish and pro-Jewish doctors and nurses received letters from AHPRA accusing them of Islamophobia for posting think-tank reports debunking genocide claims or for posts suggesting that the writing had been on the wall for the Bondi attack.
They are mystified as to how AHPRA could use labels such as “antisemitism” and “Islamophobia” in these instances, let alone consider such posts problematic. They worry that AHPRA is using a binary ledger sheet approach with “antisemitism” in one column and “Islamophobia” in the other when the problem is far more complex and requires a much more sophisticated strategy than shown so far.
The crux of the issue, they say, is really about the corrosive effect that ideologically driven activism, at times organised by pro-Hamas groups, has had on healthcare in Australia, as well as a leadership vacuum in tackling the problem.
AHPRA says “racism and discrimination including antisemitism are unacceptable and will not be tolerated” and that it’s doing its best to prevent racism in healthcare. Critics say AHPRA’s prevarications and inconsistent policies have done nothing to stem the hate unleashed after October 7.
Perhaps adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism will change all of that as AHPRA now has an internationally accepted criterion to use.
However, that assumes AHPRA doesn’t buckle to pressure from the pro-Palestine lobby campaigning furiously against the IHRA adoption decision.
For Melbourne pediatrician Debinski, Australia became so toxic for Jews after October 7 that she is happy she moved to Israel, where she works at Sheba Medical Centre, one of Israel’s largest hospitals near Tel Aviv.
She is part of a team of Jewish, Arab, Muslim, Christian and Druze doctors and nurses, treating children from all communities, including Gazan children brought to Israel for medical treatment.
Israel, she says, could teach Australia lessons about cultivating a culture of collaboration by medical teams from many walks of life whose creed is that patient care is paramount and personal baggage stays at home. For Debinski, the post-October 7 activism in Australian healthcare might have been done “under the guise of humanitarianism but it was really just a poisonous hatred of Jews”.
Megan Goldin is a Melbourne-based former Middle East correspondent and author.