5 November 2026
As this statement by Dyab Abou Jahjah for the Hind Rajab Foundation explains, the genocide unleashed on the people of Gaza is the work not just of one man or one government but of a whole nation which has embraced. (cover photo by Hosny Salah, courtesy pexels)
Torture in a White Coat: Medical complicity, societal impunity, and the necessity of regime change in Israel
4 November 2026
On the seventh of October this year, we, the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF), filed a complaint at the ICC against the Israeli Medical Association and several individuals, including doctors, for complicity in torture practices. We also declared our intention to file cases against the individuals involved in national jurisdictions, based on their dual nationalities. This filing sparked a major debate in Israel and among the Israeli medical community, leading to editorials in some media outlets demanding a review of policies adopted and effectively admitting that the current medical protocols in Israeli prisons and detention camps amount to torture.
Most doctors, however, and most voices in that debate, showed no regret or self-reflection—merely fear of the repercussions for themselves and their careers. In other words, to them, the crimes they commit or are involved in are not the problem, however inhumane they may be. The problem is that exposing these crimes and their role in them could damage their reputations and cost them career opportunities outside Israel.Subscribe
I know that this attitude will not come as a surprise to most people reading this. It has been pervasive across all segments of Israeli society: “We do not care about the genocide, the war crimes, the torture, the rape. It is just annoying that some people care, and it can be annoying for us when we go abroad.” The Israeli collective voice would be saying: “The problem with dead Palestinian and Lebanese children, women, and men is not that we killed them. We know that we are entitled to kill them, and that we are moral and noble despite that. The problem is that the world knows what we did, and that it does not share our view that we were noble and honorable while killing children—because the world is antisemitic.”
Israeli soldiers who were recently interviewed about cases filed by the HRF said that, of course, there was no genocide and there were no war crimes; everything that happened in Gaza was justified. But now they face headaches when they travel, and that is not fair.
Journalists take part in the army’s criminal campaigns and then imagine they are uninvolved in the crimes, even heroes of the peace movement, because they write a piece criticizing Netanyahu.
Orchestra conductors mobilize for a genocidal campaign and use their positions to spread propaganda glorifying it, then still expect to be applauded because they say the images from Gaza have caused them distress—a statement made so they can keep performing in Europe.
Liberal Zionists are somehow more obscene than other Zionists in their refusal to recognize their own role in the genocide. Much of the responsibility for sustaining this delusion also lies with international institutions, such as the World Medical Association, UEFA, European cultural houses, and many more, that allow these figures into their auspices, facing neither boycott nor exclusion. This absence of consequences normalizes the crimes Israel is committing and makes those institutions complicit in them. We all know this, and have repeated it for a while now.
Yet there is something different about doctors reacting in exactly the same way. Doctors in any society should represent a higher sense of morality and sensitivity to human suffering, by the very definition of their profession and its obligations. This is demanded by the oath they have taken and by the nuanced awareness they are trained to develop—an understanding of what constitutes abuse, torture, and a violation of a body and of the humanity embodied in it. Yet it seems that these doctors, the crème de la crème of Israeli society, those sensitive souls, are not so different in their reactions from the fanatical children of poor neighborhoods recruited into Givati, Golani, or any other Israeli death squad.
Not only is this not the case—in some instances doctors have gone further than soldiers. For instance, in November 2023, around 100 Israeli doctors signed an open letter explicitly calling for the destruction of hospitals in Gaza. It is important to pause here and to analyze what this actually means.
The physicians’ reaction is particularly damning because medical ethics are codified in instruments like the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Tokyo, which explicitly prohibits physician participation in torture and detention abuse. When those same physicians call for hospitals to be destroyed, they are violating the very international standards their profession claims to uphold—and the silence of the WMA on this contradiction is itself revealing.
Liberal Zionists are somehow more obscene than other Zionists in their refusal to recognize their own role in the genocide. Much of the responsibility for sustaining this delusion also lies with international institutions, such as the World Medical Association, UEFA, European cultural houses, and many more, that allow these figures into their auspices, facing neither boycott nor exclusion.Subscribe
When a country commits genocide, there is hardly a segment of that country that is not mobilized to contribute to it. Genocides are therefore committed by societies, not merely by elites. A society driven by a certain self-image and narrative into a frenzy that justifies the worst crimes of all. Genocides are national projects, and in settler-colonial entities, they are nation-building projects, since the settler nation can only be built on the ruins of the indigenous nation.
This is why it is important to shed light not only on what the army did in abstract terms, but on what each individual soldier did—and on how an entire society was mobilized to destroy the Palestinian people. Literally. Including doctors.
This mobilization to destroy Palestinians and expel them from their historical land did not start in 2023. It is the very nature of the Israeli state. The Israeli state’s Zionist core idea, its raison d’être, its soul, is the destruction of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinians, who have been the indigenous population of that land since the Bronze Age and before. Together with the Lebanese and other Levantine populations, they carry the ancestral heritage of the region’s ancient peoples, including the Canaanites and Israelites. Their continued existence is the antithesis of Zionism.
The genocide in Gaza did not fall from the sky. Nor did its history begin on October 7. It is the culmination of a settler-colonial, genocidal project born in nineteenth-century Europe with the rise of Zionism. The Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of 1967, the devastation of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982, Sabra and Shatila: these are chapters of the same history.
And that history was made by more than generals and ministers. Behind the army stood institutions, professions, and a settler-colonial society mobilized to sustain the project. Responsibility reaches far beyond the cabinet room. It will not disappear when a new prime minister walks into it.
Yet, this whole structure cannot endure indefinitely without profound transformation. History does not guarantee that every state responsible for genocide will collapse, nor that every regime built on mass atrocities will inevitably be replaced. But it teaches us that where such crimes are rooted in the very foundations of a political order, genuine justice requires more than replacing the individuals who govern it. It requires dismantling the structures, institutions, and ideologies that made those crimes possible. This is what regime change means. Regime change is not a change of government. It is not the replacement of one ruler by another. It is the transformation of the political order itself.
Imagine that, after the Second World War, a new leader of Nazi Germany had emerged and said that Hitler had made terrible mistakes, and that he, unlike Hitler, is now a “good Nazi” willing to work with the international community to investigate some of the crimes committed by Hitler and his bunch. This would not have been regime change. Regime change meant the end of Nazi Germany and the emergence of another form of state. The same applies to South Africa: the end of apartheid meant the end of apartheid South Africa as a regime, and the emergence of a new state with a new flag and a new constitution.
In the same way, regime change in Israel means the end of Zionism and the emergence of a new state, with another name and another flag. A state that belongs to all its citizens, rather than to Jews alone. By its very definition, Israel cannot be that state.
Palestinians must have their rights restored, and those responsible for crimes must answer for them. This is what “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” means: the end of Zionism, the end of settler colonialism, and the emergence of a single democratic state—Palestine—that belongs equally to all its citizens.
This is the only just solution that also guarantees the rights of the millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, whose dispossession cannot be written out of any settlement. Their right of return is inalienable.
The form, the approach, and the mechanisms can all be discussed and will be shaped by many factors. But the logical consequence of committing genocide is the end of the regime, the ideology, and the system that made that genocide possible, and even necessary. Jewish settler society in Palestine, encompassing all colonial settlers and their offspring, can redeem itself and become a society of citizens only by distancing itself from the settler-colonial, expansionist, and genocidal ideology that is Zionism.
Saying “Oops, sorry, my bad,” and blaming this genocide on a few men, and stopping the killing and bombing for a while, will not suffice. Zionists cannot gaslight the world anymore into treating these crimes as incidental, disconnected from the ideology that drives their state and defines its very identity.
