Australian medical workers continue to speak out in solidarity with their colleagues in Gaza where 84 percent of health facilities have been damaged or destroyed and over 500 health workers killed.

Israel’s recent targeted assassination of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers and destruction of Al Shifa Hospital, where 400 bodies, including medical staff and patients, have been found in the ruins, are only the latest horrors in the six-month genocide.

Australian medical workers who have spoken against these and previous Israeli war crimes are viciously attacked by local Zionists in a campaign of threats and intimidation, particularly targeting members of the Australian and New Zealand Doctors for Palestine and similar social media groups.

Zionist thugs have used the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) complaints process to lodge bogus allegations of antisemitism. They have doxxed medical professionals opposing Israel’s ethnic-cleansing attacks on Palestinians in Gaza.

The Health Workers Rank-and-File Committee (HWRFC) has been conducting a defence campaign against this anti-democratic intimidation since January and has turned to health workers across Australian and internationally for support. The World Socialist Web Site has published numerous statements in support of this campaign from individual health workers, as well as other rank-and-file committees, including NHS Fightback in Britain, the Sri Lankan Health Workers Action Committee and the Committee for Public Education in Australia.

The HWRFC urges medical professionals and other sections of the working class in Australia and internationally to oppose these unprecedented attacks on freedom of speech and democratic rights.

Statements and letters of support can be sent to these addresses:
Email: sephw.aus@gmail.com
Twitter: @HealthRandF_Aus
Facebook: facebook.com/groups/hwrfcaus

This week the Health Workers Rank-and-File Committee received the following comment from a New South Wales GP:

I was saddened, if not surprised, when I saw reports about the October 7th attacks but the horrific scenes from that day were soon to be eclipsed by the genocide inflicted on the entire population of Gaza by the Israeli regime.

I joined online conversations on a GP social media group to defend human rights for the people of Palestine, but those exchanges were deliberately targeted for shutdown by pro-Zionist doctors.

I was disturbed by this successful silencing of human rights advocates on this doctors’ group and joined another Facebook group called Australia and New Zealand Doctors for Palestine (ANZDFP). This group provided a place where healthcare workers could discuss the harrowing events of Gaza in the context of being silenced or shunned in our workplaces if we expressed any sympathy for the victims of targeted mass slaughter in Gaza.

But ANZDFP was infiltrated by Zionists who would take screenshots of posts and then re-post on their Instagram doxxing pages. The method used is to post a screenshot of a social media statement of the healthcare worker and edit it with a Zionist narrative scrawled at the top with the aim of intimidating and harming the reputation of the doctors. There were repeated threats to target these healthcare workers for supposedly being pro-Hamas or pro-terrorist.

The Zionists have also posted personal photographs of these doctors, including their children, as a way of doubling-down on the intimidation and fear. They also send links of their handiwork to the employers of doctors and make malicious AHPRA notifications and boast that they will get us fired.

They routinely conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism so that they can silence any doctor who opposes genocide as an antisemite. If any doctors reply to these posts to defend their reputations, their comments are deleted so there is no right of reply.

The people who organise and contribute to these Zionist pages feign outrage about the targeting of the 600 Zionists on WhatsApp but they dox and smear Australian doctors every day for opposing genocide.

We have responded to the doxxing by following the series of actions recommended on the e-safety commission’s website for victims of doxxing. All to no avail.

This intimidation has been going on since November 2023. When the Zionist group of 600 was doxxed (an action that neither I or my colleagues knew about or supported) we were bemused to see the government spring to the defense of Zionists. Yet pro-Palestinian victims of this Zionist witch-hunting have been ignored for many weeks.

I hope the promised anti-doxxing legislation is applied evenly to all, but fear that it is being introduced only as a cudgel to silence the free speech of Australians who oppose genocide.

We doctors of ANDFP remain undeterred and will continue to speak out against the systematic silencing of Australian doctors and the complicity of the Australian government with the Gaza genocide. We feel it is part of a medical doctor’s ethical obligation to oppose genocide.

We share social media posts to increase awareness, we engage in letter-writing campaigns and petitions, and we attend marches in our towns and cities organised at a grassroots level. We march shoulder to shoulder with our courageous anti-Zionist Jewish allies to demonstrate that many Australians oppose the attempt to dehumanise and annihilate the people of Gaza.

We have been encouraged to see more and more Australians engage in attempts to boycott the genocide and to oppose the transfer of weapons to Israel to kill more civilians. Yet, it is not enough. Now is the time to oppose apartheid and genocide being committed by the Israeli regime. We need to see freedom of expression for widespread solidarity from the Australian people.

It should be natural for the workers’ unions to be at the vanguard of this mobilisation in support of justice and the protection of civilian life as stated in the Geneva Convention but many of the large workers’ unions in Australia are just as beholden to Israel as the Labor Party seems to be.

Yet, the winds of change are stirring. Even as the media may try to blackout the genocide and our unions and political parties bow to their donors, the average Aussie does not support genocide if they are made aware of it.

We at ANZDFP call for Zionist doxxing social media pages to be subject to takedown notices as they are causing harm in the Australian health community.

We also believe it is time for the Australian people to send a message to government:

Stop arming a regime that is accused in the ICJ of committing genocide and call for an immediate ceasefire!

The people of Gaza must be set free of the burden of Israeli domination and collective punishment!