UCSF Campus Faces Uproar After Doctor Allegedly Targets Israeli Student on Social Media

A social media post by a University of California San Francisco professor suggesting that an Israeli medical student may have participated in genocide has generated backlash within a health care community already divided over the war between Israel and Hamas.

The Sunday post on X by Dr. Rupa Marya, a professor of internal medicine, referenced student concerns that a medical student from Israel may have, she wrote, “participated in the genocide of Palestinians in the IDF before matriculating to medical school in CA.”

She then asked, “How do we address this in our professional ranks?”

The post quickly caught steam on social media, with more than 214,000 views, nearly 1,000 shares and hundreds of comments in support of both the student and Marya, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

That prompted a rebuke from state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco).

“I was absolutely horrified when I saw Dr. Marya’s post,” Wiener told KQED. “She is a professor at UCSF, and for her to basically publicly encourage people to harass a first-year med student is just unconscionable.”

Wiener, who co-chairs the Legislative Jewish Caucus, said the committee has been focused on the experiences of Jewish students on the state’s college campuses since the Hamas attack on Israel that killed over 1,200 civilians on Oct. 7, 2023.

Wiener and Marya clashed online in January after Marya wrote that the “presence of Zionism” in U.S. medicine should be examined as a “structural impediment to health equity.”

“She promoted a conspiracy theory that ‘Zionist doctors at UCSF were going to harm patients,’ which is an old antisemitic conspiracy theory about Jewish doctors,” Wiener said. “And now she’s at it again, trying to demonize med students — her own students at her own institution — because they are Israeli. It’s completely unacceptable.”

Marya, who co-founded Do No Harm, a policy advocacy coalition, has been a vocal proponent of a cease-fire resolution. In San Francisco, she has long been known as a local physician, musician and activist. In 2021, she co-authored Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, a book about how the socioeconomic background of patients can influence their health.

“I’ve never come up against the kind of repression and, specifically, racist repression that I’ve seen and experienced since I’ve said ‘stop bombing hospitals,’” she told KQED earlier this month.

Marya, who has since deleted her X account, did not respond to KQED’s request for comment on this story.

On Monday, UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood promised “immediate action to address the situation,” according to a letter published on social media. A spokesperson for the UCSF declined to elaborate.

Campuses across the UC system have been roiled by conflict over the Israel-Hamas war. At UCSF, which is the city’s second-largest employer and serves over 40,000 patients a year, the graduate school and the university’s public hospitals are closely intertwined.

Concerned staff and students have said the school is prohibiting them from speaking out against the health implications of a war that has destroyed Gaza’s medical infrastructure and claimed more than 40,000 Palestinian lives.

“A lot of the discussions with faculty are in huddled, quiet spaces for fear of being reprimanded, for fear of being counseled, for fear of being unfairly written up and in some cases publicly attacked,” Jess Ghannam, chair of UCSF’s faculty association, said. “There’s no place or space where we can openly and freely speak about this.”

Ghannam declined to speak about Marya.

On Sept. 19, some faculty members at UCSF joined faculty from across the state to accuse the UC system of carrying out an illegal campaign to repress academic freedom in the wake of pro-Palestinian campus protests. This came after a UCSF employee was allegedly fired for expressing support for Marya and then sharing colleagues’ complaints in an email, which was a violation of school policy.

UCSF was also notably the site of the stiffest university opposition to student encampments among Bay Area campuses.

“All of us are bearing witness to the fact that this genocide is going on, and health workers are uniquely qualified and obligated to speak up against this,” Ghannam said. “The idea that we would be silent in the face of this grotesque violence that’s being carried out right now goes against everything that we believe as health workers, as physicians, as nurses, as doctors.

“And it goes against the very values of UCSF.”