Hospitals

A black and white satellite map of Gaza, with red dots indicating the ten hospitals which were bombed.

Class A: Medical Neutrality and the Politics of Humanity

Key Terms

humanitarianism; neutrality; legitimacy; infrastructure; care

Readings

Peter Redfield (2011) “The Impossible Politics of Neutrality” (53-72) in Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism Between Ethics and Politics, edited by Erica Bornstein and Peter Redfield. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research.

Sherine Hamdy and Soha Bayoumi (2016) “Egypt’s Popular Uprising and the Stakes of Medical Neutrality,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 40: 223-241.

Guy Shalev (2015) “A Doctor’s Testimony: Medical Neutrality and the Visibility of Palestinian Grievances in Jewish-Israeli Publics,” Culture, Medicine, and Society 40: 242-262.

Podcasts

Ghassan Abu-Sitta (2023) “The Wounds of War: The Gaza Experience Through the Eyes of Ghassan Abu-Sitta,” Institute for Palestine Studies. [Start at 7:21, end at 38:00].

Discussion Questions

  • What does the framework of “humanitarianism” both reveal and obscure? What are its consequences when it comes to distributions of care?
  • What is “medical neutrality”? How is it related to humanitarianism? 
  • What roles do medical neutrality and the hospital play in the testimonies of Palestinian physicians Abuelaish (in Shalev) and Abu-Sitta? 
  • How does the legitimacy of suffering intersect with the nation-state’s claim to legitimacy?

Further Reading

Sa'ed Atshan and Adia Benton (2016) “Even War has Rules”: On Medical Neutrality and Legitimate Non-violence. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 40(2) 151–158.

Saree Makdisi (2023) “Physical Destruction in Whole or in Part,” n+ 1 Magazine.

Class B: Architecture

Readings


Eyal Weizman (2007) “Evacuations” (221-235) in Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. New York: Verso.

Saree Makdisi (2023) “Physical Destruction in Whole or in Part,” n+ 1 Magazine.

Stefan Tarnowski (2023) “On Bombing Hospitals,” The London Review of Books Blog.

Muhammad Abu Salmiya (2023) “Gaza Hospitals: Military siege and bombing,” The Lancet 402: 10418: 191. (1-page dispatch)

Multimedia

Visualizing Palestine, “Treating Trauma Under Israeli Fire”

Forensic Architecture & Al-Haq, On the bombing of al-Ahli

Discussion Questions

  • Whose suffering matters? How can health and its infrastructures provide a useful framework to understand visibility/invisibility, human/inhuman?
  • How is the work of healing reflected in the hospital’s architecture?
  • Why are hospitals targeted in war? What work does destroying a hospital do?

Further Reading

Avram Bornstein (2010) “Hasbara, Health Care, and the Israeli-Occupied Palestinian Territories” (209-240) in The War Machine: A Critical Medical Anthropological Examination of the Human Costs of Armed Conflict and the International Violence Industry (Eds Merrill Singer and G. Derrick Hodge).

Ayah Abo-Basha and Sourik Beltrán (2021) “Palestine and the case for abolitionist medicine,” Mada Masr.

Esmat Elhalaby (2023) “The Israeli Bombing of Al-Shifa Hospital in 1956 (and After),” Past and Future Present(s).

Omar Dewachi, “I Was a Doctor in Iraq. I Am Seeing a Nightmare Play Out Again,” New York Times, December 16, 2023

Liat Kozma and Yoni Furas (2020) “Palestinian Doctors Under the British Mandate,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 52

Michael Murphy (2021) The Architecture of Health: Hospital Design and the Construction of Dignity. Washington, DC: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum