Two weeks before Canada recognized the State of Palestine, UBC was visited by Dr. Deirdre Nunan.
Nunan is an orthopaedic surgeon and a graduate of the Northern Medical Program in Prince George, a partnership between UBC and the University of Northern British Columbia. For much of the past decade, she’s been doing humanitarian work internationally. This summer, she spent three weeks in Gaza — her sixth trip there — having spent the equivalent of two years in the occupied territory since 2019.
On Sept. 8, Nunan delivered her “Health Report From Gaza” to a packed audience at the Frederic Wood Theatre. The event was hosted by BC Physicians Against Genocide with the support of several campus units and groups, the Jewish Faculty Network, geography department, Middle East studies program and Climate Justice Centre among them.
In the weeks since her talk, the first divestment protest of the year was held, demanding the Board of Governors take action on severing UBC from its subsidiary’s investments in companies that — in some way — lend support to the Israeli military. At its most recent meeting, governors were told a working group has been formed and the development of a human rights investment framework is underway.
Joined by author and UBC Professor of Climate Justice Naomi Klein, who spoke after, Nunan testified to witnessing first-hand the brutal disfiguring of Gaza’s health infrastructure. Her minimalist presentation — images, white background and little to no text — recreated day-to-day life with photos from within and outside the operating room, screenshots of text messages with her colleagues at Nasser Hospital and some annotated maps. And it took you into a world of chaos. The kind that most in Vancouver are used to hearing about via social or news media — and the one described by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory as concomitant of Israel committing four of the five acts consistent with the meaning of genocide in second article of the convention to define and prevent it we agreed on after the Second World War.
Nunan’s report also introduced viewers to her colleagues and their stories: Dr. Hassan, Dr. Aseel, Dr. Jamal, and Dr. Wesam, a “brilliant surgical partner.” I spoke with her a few hours before she delivered it.
Here’s what we discussed — edited for length and clarity.
The Ubyssey: You have done a lot of humanitarian work internationally in the past decade. What's different about Gaza?
Dr. Deirdre Nunan: It's the concentration and the intentionality. And the avoidability.
I have been to other places in the aftermath of a conflict, seeing the longer-term results rather than being within an area that is actively under attack.
It's certainly not the first time I've been somewhere where there are ongoing attacks, but never so many, never in such a small area, and never in such a short time.
What was happening in the other places that you’ve worked, where there have been ongoing attacks?
In 2019, I was in Gaza when there was a three-day period of more intense aerial strikes from the Israeli military. In 2019, I was on the outskirts of the conflict between Turkey and the Kurdish military and the north of Syria. In Iraq, there were some peripheral attacks outside of the urban area in Mosul when I was there. In Afghanistan, there were some suicide bomb attacks by ISIS on buses.
Things were happening in the area, but not this relentless, constant, ongoing bombardment.
I anticipate tonight’s talk is not the first event that you've delivered like it. What are the moments you want to stay with people?
I want to focus tonight on attacks on health-care institutions and health-care personnel. I feel like in Canadian society we are starting to accept the unacceptable. We're starting to treat things as inevitable, and we are not taking a step back and recognizing that some things are simply wrong. There are some things that are simply not defensible in terms of international humanitarian law. Societally, when we start to accept the unacceptable, it's a slippery slope.
It's not only Gaza. Gaza is the worst affected in terms of attacks on health care, but since 2023, we’ve been seeing ever-escalating attacks on health-care institutions and health-care personnel around the world in different environments.
The worst attacks are happening in Palestine, but attacks are also happening in Myanmar, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ukraine. These are all places where we have started to lose any sort of sense of the sanctity of health care and the protection for patients and the wounded and the places that can treat them.
This is a global problem. We see Gaza as the worst symptom of this, and I'm very afraid when I look at Canadian discourse, when I look at Canadian media, that we're not treating this as the outrage that it is. When we accept the unacceptable, we establish new tolerance for norms, and that's not a world I want to live in. I don't think that it's a world that Canadians really want to live in, but unless we push back against the normalization of something that should never be normalized, that's exactly the kind of world we're going to let be created for ourselves.
What manifestations of attacks on health-care institutions and personnel are you most concerned about?
Globally, we’re seeing the erasure of the protected status of a health-care institution, or the use of very specious arguments against maintaining the safety of health-care institutions. Under international law, only in very particular moments can a health-care institution lose its protected status. But what we see in Gaza is that every single Israeli attack on a health-care institution is always justified, is always claimed to be necessary military action against Hamas or another armed group said to have a presence in hospitals. I see very little pushing for evidence for this. Few are asking, ‘What is this actual presence?’ ‘Does it meet the threshold for removing the protected status of this institution?’ ‘Were the other requirements followed, including giving warning to the hospital, allowing evacuation for patients, making sure that the reaction is proportional and that the damage done is not out of proportion to the risk that was posed by what was happening in that hospital that was used as a justification for attacking it, and the provision of ongoing health care for people that are deprived of health care when you attack a hospital or when you kill healthcare workers?’ That’s the big picture. We’re not looking at the true meaning of international law regarding the security and safety of health-care workers.
Who needs to be contesting these justifications from the Israeli government? News media, governments in Canada, et cetera.?
All of the above. It is the media’s responsibility to provide context and delve into things deeper, and not just to act as a conduit for statements. We have had no international journalists on the ground in Gaza for the past 22 months. Where is the outrage on that? People just sort of rolling over and accepting [that], saying, ‘Ah, pity we can't get good reporting.’
The journalists who are there are Palestinian. Their credibility is constantly being undercut, and they are being killed at a higher rate than we’ve ever seen since we've measured the targeting of journalists.
This is the context our media should be presenting, but there are also questions that our government should be asking. Our government has trade relationships with Israel. We've got diplomatic relationships with Israel. We have citizens of Canada who are active within the Israeli armed forces. If our government is not asking these questions, we become complicit in war crimes. We continue to trade weapons with Israel despite having an arms embargo in name, but it is not really playing out in practice.
I anticipate that there will be a few medical students at tonight’s talk or attending online. What should medical students at UBC or across the country understand about the role of the health-care professional in times like these?
I think the role of the health-care professional in some ways is the same as the role of anybody else. Sometimes I think we pedestal health-care professionals a bit too much.
But that being said, we do pledge to do no harm, we do pledge that we will heal people, we do pledge that we will take care of people without discrimination, and to a large extent, the formal medical institutions that we have built in this country, from the academic ones to the professional ones, have shown a very large discrepancy in their official reaction to a Russian invasion of Ukraine versus the reaction to an Israeli genocide in Gaza. And that's incredibly problematic. We all need to be interrogating why that is.
We all need to be asking ‘Why has that happened?’ ‘Why do we treat things so differently?’ ‘Why have so many people been silenced when speaking out about Palestine versus other situations in the world?’ ‘Why aren't we more vocal about something like Sudan or the DRC? Or Haiti?’
I hope that as medical students enter the profession, they come in with a fresh perspective, questioning the understanding they grew up with. I hope they will hang on to that. I hope they do not become amalgamated into the greater whole and modelled into a doctor of the past, but that they will be keeping their own priorities, their own morals, their own ethics, and taking those with them into their careers.
I'm sure things have changed since your time in the program, but is there anything, as you look back with the experience that you have now, that you wish you had been taught in medical school about bringing this disposition to medical work?
Obviously, a lot has changed. (It's been longer than I liked — not that I don’t like to admit I’m getting older, but I feel a whole lot younger than I am on paper.) It doesn't feel in some ways like I've been out of university for as long as I have.
I know that the curriculum has changed a lot, but we used to have a class called “Doctor, Patient and Society” and it kind of felt like this dumping ground for anything that wasn't hard science. That class was asked to do so much, and I don't recall that it ever really delved into global health as such — there are many, many things that it needed to cover in Canadian health and social determinants of health. But I would like to see that aspect of medical school expanded and dealt with side by side with the anatomy, physiology, [and] pharmacology coursework. With medicine, we need the art of it alongside the science.
I hope that that “Doctor, Patient and Society” class has metamorphosed since when I was in medical school to become a more underarching principle rather than just a Wednesday afternoon.
Last question. You've done a lot of interviews. Are there any questions that you wish you had been asked or wished you were asked more often?
I didn't spend a lot of time at UBC, physically, and I never really felt a whole lot of pull towards UBC as an alumnus. I don't have that kind of institutional pride that some people take away from their education.
I definitely got a good education, a respected degree that has allowed me to do exactly what I wanted to do with my life, so I'm very grateful for that. But I have to say that within the last year, I, for the first time, felt this awakening of sort of institutional pride when I got in touch with a few of the students who were involved in the on-campus protests, some of the hunger strikers, some of the students that were doing the teach-ins.
In my undergraduate experience before medical school, I was very heavily involved in activism and anti-war demonstrations. In the present, I felt an affinity and a connection with these undergraduate students at UBC that I had really never thought or felt before.
It’s nice to have a little bit of connection coming back to UBC. I don't think I was back on campus or not even much in Vancouver since I graduated, and I've now gone back to Prince George to talk at medical school there and now come to Vancouver a number of times this year. It's been a nice reopening of a connection that I had really closed.
Okay, I have a follow-up question, because that was very interesting. Out of curiosity, what do you study in undergrad?
I started in biology at the University of Calgary. I dropped out after a semester because I did not make the transition from small-town Saskatchewan to big-city university very well. I went back into the English program, and I ultimately came out with a BA in English and a BSc in biology that I did concurrently over five years.
Okay, I was curious if you had done an undergraduate degree in natural sciences, and if you noticed that among the activism circles you were participating in, if there were more social science or humanities people or people studying natural sciences. What was the distribution, if you recall?
Basically all my friends were in the humanities — they were polisci, international development, and history majors. I went to biology and science classes because I knew I wanted to do med school, eventually. I needed to get through those prerequisites. But where I found my people was on the other side of the university.
Do you think you bring your English major with you to your work quite frequently?
I was having a discussion with a friend recently about this, and I honestly believe that my English degree is still more useful to me now than my science degrees because it taught me to think, it taught me to be analytical.
My English degree is where I really developed the ability to synthesize different pieces of information and put them into a cohesive argument to demonstrate something. Whereas in biology, chemistry, physics, et cetera, I was really good at memorizing facts and spitting them out, but it was reproducing. It wasn't synthesizing, it wasn't thinking.
And so I honestly think that my English degree is more important of those two, by far.
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