The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) under the leadership of Chancellor Sam Hawgood, has engaged in a systematic and widespread pattern of repression and attacks on the free speech and academic freedom of its students, staff, and faculty who advocate for Palestinians’ rights to life and freedom and against Israel’s latest attempt to displace, expel, and exterminate the Palestinian people. This follows an alarming nation-wide move across healthcare to attempt to suppress the voices of people committed to anti-racism to advance health for all.

UCSF’s and Hawgood’s attempted silencing of our support for Palestinian lives and condemnation of Israel’s genocide and ongoing Nakba exposes their unethical behavior and hypocrisy. Over the past year, UCSF has demonstrated a commitment to its donors and politicians who support Israel’s genocide over its stated mission to “advance health worldwide” and its own PRIDE values. UCSF’s largest donor, the Diller Family foundation, built from the profits of a predatory real estate company, has funded illegal West Bank settlements and right-wing extremist hate organizations, including the anti-Palestinian doxxing project, the Canary Mission, which targets UCSF’s own faculty and graduates and incites career-threatening and life-threatening violence against them.

In lockstep with the year-long intensification of the Israeli-US campaign to expel and exterminate the Palestinian people and expand their attacks on Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, UCSF’s leadership has refined and is escalating its repression against its own community. As Israel has murdered likely well over 42,000 Palestinians, including 1000 of our Palestinian healthcare colleagues, and is imposing starvation and conditions incompatible with survival on over 2 million people, UCSF has not made a single statement uplifting the humanity of Palestinians. Additionally, UCSF has not held a single training on anti-Palestinian racism nor provided any material support to its Palestinian students, staff, and faculty, some of whom have lost over 100 family members.

Examples of UCSF leadership’s attacks on its own students, staff, and faculty, include, but are not limited to:

• Canceling the only medical school teaching session about the impacts of Israel’s occupation, apartheid system, and genocide on the health of Palestinians that was to be given by a Palestinian faculty member with decades of expertise in trauma prevention and intervention in Gaza.


• Weaponizing the UCSF Faculty Code of Conduct to attack the Constitutionally protected free speech and the clinical career of a faculty member of color who is an internationally renowned scholar on the impacts of colonialism on health


• Making moves to permanently damage the career and future employment of a faculty member of color for their free speech


• Firing the founding co-director of the UCSF CARE program, an unwavering advocate for the safety and rights of oppressed people at UCSF and beyond, for her speech in defense of the Palestinian people and students, staff, and faculty of color who advocate for Palestinian liberation.


• Attempting to fire a Palestinian Chief Resident after he spoke about Israel’s genocide two weeks before finishing his final and seventh year of residency


• Banning a Jewish faculty member from creating educational content for UCSF’s continuing medical education program after she spoke about Israel’s genocide and its targeting of Palestinian children, families, healthcare workers and the health care system in Gaza during a talk on trauma informed care


• Sending a plain-clothes university police officer to surveil the talk of a UCSF faculty member of color, which intimidated students of color present


• Targeting and harassing a faculty member of color across multiple social media platforms in coordination with California Senator Scott Weiner


• Weaponizing white fragility to get pro-Palestinian staff fired


• Directing staff to remove personal cultural items of clothing and demanding that nurses and other staff remove symbols of solidarity with the Palestinian people (e.g., watermelons or the Palestinian flag)


• Suspending a nurse for refusing to remove a watermelon pin


• Threatening legal action against residents for posting Constitutionally protected free speech on social media in defense of Palestinian life


• Condoning the shutting down of departmental listservs in response to communications that support the human rights of Palestinians


• Accusing those who advocate for the safety and health of Palestinian people of being antisemitic when they criticize Israel’s genocide and/or ideology of supremacism, Zionism.


• Prohibiting publicity about a student-led Jewish Voice for Peace@UCSF event to screen a Jewish-made film that critically examines Israel’s occupation, apartheid system, and violence against Palestinians; the publicity was prohibited by the UCSF Office of Diversity and Outreach (ODO) which is supposedly committed to “DEI” leadership.


• Platforming Elan Carr, a transphobic self-avowed advocate of Zionism and white supremacy, and presenting Carr as an expert on “antisemitism and anti-bias” shortly after he incited life-threatening violence against the UCLA community, ignoring numerous UCSF students, staff, and faculty who wrote to our leadership pleading for a cancellation of Carr’s talk because of his hateful rhetoric.


• Ordering the UCSF police department (UCPD) to surveil, harass, intimidate and repeatedly dismantle the UCSF Free Palestine Camp situated within the designated “free speech” zone of the campus


• Installing permanent military-grade surveillance equipment to surveil the free speech zone


• Closing and converting the main campus library into a police station during finals week, to attack and dismantle the UCSF Free Palestine Camp


• Violating our faculty workplace rights as outlined in an Unfair Labor Practice filing against the University of California.

The UCSF Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) has weaponized Title VI to repress advocacy for Palestinian life and criticism of Israel or Zionism as a political ideology. UCSF’s manipulative use of language equating critiques of Zionism with antisemitism dangerously obfuscates true antisemitism. UCSF faculty, students and staff who identify as Arab, Palestinian, Muslim, SWANA, Black, Indigenous, Anti-Zionist Jew, South Asian, Sikh, Asian, Queer, Disabled, other marginalized identities, and allies have had our voices categorically silenced as we seek to criticize the violent Israeli apartheid, genocide regime and uplift the humanity of thousands of victims of that violence, many of whom are healthcare workers and the family members of UCSF learners, staff, and patients.

When all of the tools guaranteed by the Civil Rights Era have been turned and used against the marginalized people they were designed to protect, we are left without the protection we need to ensure all people’s safety in our university community or even the space to voice our concerns. When UCSF leadership threatens the protected free speech of students, staff, and faculty of color and their allies for advocating for Palestinians, suspends and fires staff and faculty who oppose racism, they further endanger marginalized communities locally and globally.

As members of the UCSF and University of California community, we ask:
When it is UCSF leaders who falsely equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, platform anti-Palestinian, racist, Islamophobic speakers, and weaponize Civil Rights enshrined in Title VI in service of Zionism, where can marginalized people and our allies go for protection?

When UCSF leadership fires our confidential source of support, our CARE Advocate, for doing her violence-prevention job, whom can we turn to for advice and support about violence and trauma?

When it is your words and behavior, Chancellor Hawgood, that further endanger us when you have been informed repeatedly that we are doxxed and receive death and rape threats for our ethical anti-racist behavior, where do we turn for safety?

UCSF and Hawgood have weaponized the Palestinian exception to free speech and academic freedom in ways that threaten the health, safety, and careers of its own community members who uphold our ethical healthcare worker’s oath. We are uniquely situated in a university wholly dedicated to medicine and health professions education. When we witness our institution desecrate our healthcare oath to “Do No Harm” and its own UCSF Physician’s Declaration, we feel sickened by UCSF’s hypocrisy and moral and ethical rot.

By muzzling our voices as Israel attempts to exterminate the Palestinian people, UCSF’s repression is complicity in genocide. No matter how forcefully UCSF and Chancellor Hawgood wages a war of repression on its own community, we will continue to speak out in service to humanity, on behalf of health for all and, urgently, for the liberation of the Palestinian people.

We demand that UCSF and Chancellor Hawgood immediately:

• Recognize and denounce the genocide in Palestine while working with UCSF staff and faculty to find the best ways to support healthcare workers, health professions students, and patients in Palestine and Lebanon.
• Order the UCSF Foundation Investment Company to divest holdings in Israel, in companies complicit in the ongoing genocide, including those involved in military and surveillance technologies and entities that proliferate racism. Furthermore, we demand that UCSF leaders engage with their colleagues at UCOP and systemwide CIO Jagdeep Bachher to demand full divestment of UC funds from Israel and complicit corporations.
• Cut all ties with the Diller Foundation and any other foundations that fund entities that promote racism and other ideologies of supremacism.
• Reinstate all staff who were fired and cease disciplinary proceedings against faculty, staff, and students for their advocacy around Palestine.
• Stop any action to suspend the clinical privileges of faculty who exercise their freedom of speech to support Palestinian liberation.
• Stop repressive measures taken against faculty, staff, and students for the advocacy around Palestine. This includes repealing the ban on cultural items of clothing and symbols of Palestinian solidarity and ceasing media and social media attacks on UCSF faculty, staff, and students who have spoken in solidarity with Palestine.

We understand our current struggle against UCSF’s repression is a continuation of the Civil Rights movement, to ensure the rights to free speech and to advance our academic understandings of the plight and health of all people. We will confront these reactionary forces that seek to set us back where we refuse to go. The Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at UCSF with the full support of the University of California Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine invite organizations and individuals to express their solidarity and support against UCSF’s racist repression and for our demands.

Co-sponsors:

Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at UCSF (FSJP@UCSF)
University of California Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (UC FSJP)

Endorsing Organizations (email UCSFFSJP@proton.me to endorse)

Students for Justice in Palestine at UCSF (SJP@UCSF)
Jewish Voice for Peace at UCSF (JVP@UCSF)
Doctors Against Genocide
Black Panthers Party Alumni Legacy Network
Poor Magazine
Moms4Housing
Do No Harm Coalition
Jewish Voice for Peace - Bay Area
Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC)
Anti Police-Terror Project
Union Nurses for Palestine
Public Health Justice Collective
Healthcare Workers for Palestine - Bay Area (HCW4Pal-BA)
Health Justice Commons
Bay Area Labor 4 Palestine
Labor for Palestine
International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN)
Council on American-Islamic Relations San Francisco Bay Area (CAIR SFBA)
California Nurse-Midwives Association
Library Freedom Project