The Lancet: Health, human rights, and the Palestine exception

3 views
Skip to first unread message

Sid Shniad

unread,
Jan 26, 2026, 7:18:03 PM (2 days ago) Jan 26
to

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)02629-7/fulltext

THE LANCET        Volume 407, Issue 10526p331-332January 24, 2026

Health, human rights, and the Palestine exception

In December, 2025, Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health announced that Mary T Bassett would be stepping down as Director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights. Framed as an institutional reorientation on children's health, the announcement omitted that Bassett had been abruptly asked to resign following more than a year of political pressure over the Center's work on Palestinian health and human rights.
Under Bassett's leadership, the FXB Center partnered with Palestinian institutions to document the health consequences of occupation and military violence, in line with reporting by international humanitarian organisations including Israeli human rights groups. More than 90% of Gaza's hospitals have been damaged or destroyed, health workers have been systematically targeted, and the civilian population has been deliberately deprived of food, water, electricity, and medical care. These are not incidental effects of war but a manufactured public health catastrophe.
Documenting such devastation lies at the core of health and human rights, a field that combines epidemiological analysis, health-systems assessment, and legal accountability under international humanitarian law to expose forms of violence that states and institutions seek to obscure. Bassett's removal therefore signals not merely a personnel change but an erosion of institutional ethics and academic freedom; Harvard has made clear that universal principles are tolerated only when they do not threaten power.
At stake is the credibility of global health and human rights themselves. Both fields claim universality—that preventable suffering demands documentation, that all lives are equally grievable, and that health cannot be separated from the political conditions that shape violence and deprivation. Yet critics have shown how these fields have developed within a geopolitical order marked by selective application and double standards, operating from their origins to shore up colonial and neocolonial inequalities.
Elite universities help sustain these contradictions. They proclaim universal truth, free inquiry, and independence from partisan loyalties, yet their horizons are bounded by donor interests, state power, and reputational risk. Appeals to institutional neutrality function less as principled commitments than as strategies for avoiding confrontation with entrenched power.
In this context, institutions increasingly invoke a familiar distinction between rigorous scholarship and advocacy. Work on Palestinian health has been recast as advocacy—not because of methodological failure, but because its findings implicate powerful actors. But public health has never been politically neutral. Its tools are designed precisely to identify preventable harm and clarify responsibility. Branding such work as advocacy allows institutions to dismiss uncomfortable findings instead of confronting the political consequences of the knowledge they claim to seek.
Calls for balance, viewpoint diversity, or counterpoints are similarly misplaced. There is no serious scholarly dispute over the protected status of hospitals and medical personnel or the health effects of siege, blockade, and occupation. Treating the documentation of these realities as merely one perspective among others collapses the distinction between empirical inquiry and partisan apologetics.
The Palestine exception refers to the selective suppression of discourse that supports Palestinian rights or critically examines Israeli policies—particularly scholarship and speech that document Palestinian experiences of injustice, occupation, or inequality—despite broader ostensible institutional commitments to free expression. Although the Palestine exception has long been evident at elite North American universities, such as Harvard, and at prominent medical and public health journals, it clearly also extends far beyond them. Across the USA and increasingly in Europe as well, clinicians, scholars, and researchers have faced reprimand or dismissal for documenting Gaza's devastation. When the legitimacy of human rights work depends on political convenience, universality collapses into an empty slogan, used not to challenge oppressive power but to obscure and entrench it.
A public health field that cannot describe the destruction of Gaza's health system forfeits its ethical authority everywhere, a human rights discourse that excludes Palestinians cannot credibly claim universality, or any legitimate basis at all, and a university that disciplines scholars for applying established methods to politically inconvenient realities does not merely betray its ideals; it actively reshapes itself in the service of repression.

Competing Interests

ER declares receipt of honoraria for lectures from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. JMA-R declares no competing interests.
Editorial note: The Lancet Group takes a neutral position with respect to territorial claims in published text.

References

Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health
FXB Center update
Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Dec 9, 2025
Ravi, A
Harvard dismisses director of FXB center for health and human rights. Harvard Crimson
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/12/10/fxb-center-director/
Date: Dec 10, 2025
Date accessed: December 22, 2025
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
UN experts appalled by relentless Israeli attacks on Gaza's healthcare system
United Nations, Aug 13, 2025
Mann, I ∙ Aburass, A ∙ Leibowitz, T ∙ et al.
Destruction of conditions of life: a health analysis of the Gaza genocide
Physicians for Human Rights Israel, July, 2025
Pai, M ∙ Bandara, S ∙ Kyobutungi, C
Shifting power in global health will require leadership by the Global South and allyship by the Global North
Lancet. 2024; 404:1711-1713
Bok, Derek
Universities in the marketplace: the commercialization of higher education
Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA, 2003
Rooks, NM
White money/Black power: the surprising history of African American studies and the crisis of race in higher education
Beacon Press, Boston, MA, USA, 2006
Center for Constitutional Rights; Palestine Legal
The Palestine exception to free speech: a movement under attack in the US. Center for Constitutional Rights; Palestine Legal
Turfah, M ∙ Reinhart, E
The world's top medical journal is giving cover to genocide
The Nation, March 26, 2025
Wispelwey, B ∙ Muhareb, R ∙ Gilbert, M
Permission to narrate a pandemic in Palestine. Middle East Policy
Middle East Pol. 2020; 27:162-168
Hagopian, A
When professional associations fail public health
Lancet. 2025; 406:2536-2537
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages