Hundreds of people rallied outside the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) offices on July 26 to condemn the regulatory body’s decision to implement the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
“As healthcare workers, we could not remain silent about Gaza and Palestine,” Mark Murphy, an activist with Nurses and Midwives for Palestine, told the protesters.
Healthcare workers will not be silenced by APHRA when “the health care system in Gaza has been and continues to be systematically annihilated” and hospitals are no longer places of safety or a sanctuary, but “are death traps”.
Murphy told Green Left that he had been a registered nurse for 30 years. “I’ve been a part of Nurses and Midwives for Palestine for the past two and a half years. We’re a group of rank-and-file union members who are opposed to the ongoing, brutal, racist, illegal, colonising, military occupation of sovereign Palestinian land.
“We've been showing up at events. We've been holding our own fundraisers. And we will not stop. We will not be silenced by a regulator who now deems that criticism of Israel is conflated with antisemitism.
“We have no issue with Jewish people whatsoever. In fact, we organise, we rally, we congregate with Jewish people on a regular basis.”
Ian Lisser, a member of Jews Against the Occupation ‘48, who was at the protest told GL: “This IHRA definition is highly problematic and it’s going to lead to a lot of vexatious complaints against both clinicians and nurses and health workers. And that has a profound impact not just on them as individuals but on the people they work with, the services that they provide and also patient care [if] they’re stood down or they have to take time off their work and focus on defending themselves.”
Cassandra Barford, another nurse, told the protest: “We’re clear that what Israel is committing is wrong. Our position is well supported by genocide scholars, international law academics and experts. the opinions of leading NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israel's two lead human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights and finally, decisions from the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice.”