Alberta Health Services cracks down on support for Palestine
AHS managers tells employees that Palestine advocacy is "political" if not "discriminatory," sharply contrasting with its messaging of unconditional support for war-torn Ukraine.
For the past nine months, Israel’s attacks on Gaza have targetted all aspects of life in the besieged coastal enclave—agriculture, food production, education, media, mosques and churches, housing and even humanitarian aid.
But arguably the most devastating attacks have been on Gaza’s health-care system. Throughout Israel’s campaign of revenge and slaughter for the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel, Israeli forces have killed 500 Palestinian health-care workers, according to the UN Human Rights Office.
Zero hospitals in Gaza are fully functional, owing to Israeli attacks on these facilities under the pretext that they are being used as Hamas military bases, an extraordinary claim for which evidence hasn’t been compelling, to put it mildly.
Mohamed Abu Salmiya, the director of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City—the strip’s largest before it was destroyed in March, which the Israelis claimed was home to a sprawling Hamas “command and control centre”—was recently released from custody after seven months in an Israeli prison without charges. He says he was brutally tortured “almost daily” and denied access to a lawyer.
Meanwhile, in Edmonton, public health-care workers have been expressly prohibited from expressing sympathy for their Palestinian colleagues in Gaza, with management accusing those who do of being inappropriately “political” if not outright “discriminatory” towards their Jewish patients and colleagues, who are presumed to have support for Israel’s conduct baked into their identity.
This occurs in the context of repression against those who have raised objection to Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza, which the International Court of Justice is investigating as potentially genocidal, in various professions throughout Canada, including law, media, and higher education, as documented here and elsewhere.
Workers at Alberta Health Services (AHS), the arms-length organization that delivers public health care in Alberta, say this culture of enforced silence stands in stark contrast to health-care workers’ foundational obligation to advocate for patients, regardless of their race, culture, nationality, religion or ethnicity.
This culture, they say, sharply contradicts how AHS employees have been actively encouraged to express support for more geopolitically convenient causes—a stark reminder of the singular institutional delegitimization of pro-Palestinian perspectives.
Requests for comment from AHS about the incidents described in this story have gone unacknowledged.
On May 27, employees at the Stollery Children’s Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) received an email signed by hospital patient care managers Carmen Bateman and Pam Lavallee regarding “concerns brought forward regarding the use of the white board located in the washroom of the staff locker rooms shared by NICU and PICU.”
The phrase From the river to the sea, which they characterized without elaboration as “discriminatory in nature,” had been written on the board “on more than one occasion,” they wrote.
“White-board messages must not be disrespectful to any staff or patients,” Bateman and Lavallee added.
They said this phrase is a violation of AHS’s Respectful Workplaces Policy, which requires all employees to “promote and sustain safe and respectful behaviour” to create a workplace which “is free from disrespectful behaviour, discrimination, harassment, and violence.”
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free is a common refrain heard at pro-Palestine rallies, one which supporters of Israel claim is inherently hateful, because the State of Israel already exists between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. This criticism adopts a zero-sum logic, in which the outcome of Palestinian freedom is axiomatically assumed to be the expulsion of Jews from the region.
Vahedah Mehrabani, a nurse with Health Link who contacted Bateman to express her concerns about the May 27 email after it circulated on social media, told The Orchard that Bateman confirmed this was her understanding of the phrase.
Mehrabani said she found it odd how vague Stollery management’s statement was.
“Who does it discriminate against? It doesn’t say,” Mehrabani said. “There should be more to that statement.”
Wesam Khalid, a Palestine solidarity organizer in Calgary, was arrested and charged with a hate-motivated offence for leading a From the river to the sea chant at a November rally. The charge was soon after stayed by the Crown, which determined there “was no reasonable likelihood of conviction on the charge laid.”
In an Ontario Superior Court decision granting the University of Toronto’s request for an injunction against the pro-Palestine encampment at its downtown campus, Judge J. Koehnen nonetheless concluded that there’s “no evidence” that From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free is inherently antisemitic.
Meanwhile, the founding platform of Israel’s governing Likud Party—which has never been repudiated by the party’s leadership—says “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
One is simply a call for freedom for Palestinians, wherever they live in historic Palestine; the other explicitly tells Palestinians that they will forever live under Israeli occupation.
But, Mehrabani cautioned, calling for Palestinian freedom is discriminatory—not against Jewish people, many of whom are at the forefront of Palestinian solidarity activism, but against supporters of Palestinian subjugation.
“It's discriminatory in the same sense as the statement Black Lives Matter is discriminatory against … anyone who believes that Black people belong on plantations instead of as equal members of our society,” she said.
A non-health-care worker at Stollery who goes by the name Domi, which isn’t her given name, told The Orchard that AHS management declaring From the river to the sea to be a threat of violence raises questions about “who is in power and who gets to define what violence is.”
“It seems that every time folks who are marginalized, oppressed call for liberation, those in power call it violence because that's all they know,” she said. “You call it violence because you believe in violation.”
Domi added that the muzzling of pro-Palestine employees at AHS for something as minor as scribbling a slogan on a staff white board calls into question the health provider’s oft-stated commitment to decolonization at home.
“When I look at the email, what I immediately think of is the countless policies, procedures, info sheets, web pages and even podcast episodes that AHS has released around decolonization here on Turtle Island and reconciling with the Indigenous Peoples,” said Domi.
“If we jog our mind a little bit, we see parallels between the genocide here and the genocide in Palestine. So it puts AHS’s integrity into question. Do you actually believe in decolonization?”
Some supporters of Israel claim that Zionism is a form of decolonization, pointing towards the long-standing presence of a pre-Zionist Jewish minority in Palestine.
Early Zionists, including Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Theodor Herzl, would have likely found that insulting, given how they explicitly pitched Zionism as a colonialist project.
The way Palestinians are rendered invisible by AHS, said Domi, mirrors the anti-Indigenous racism plaguing health-care systems across Canada, including at AHS.
An April 2024 study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that not only are First Nations people in Alberta more likely to seek medical care than the non-First Nations population, but they’re also far more likely to leave without receiving treatment due to experiences of racism.
Last year, a study out of the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine found “unacceptably high” levels of anti-Indigenous racism among Alberta physicians, with 67% showing implicit preference for non-Indigenous patients.
“We can have a million smudging ceremonies and it doesn't make healthcare any more accessible,” said Domi.
“There's no tangible initiatives to build bridges for Indigenous folks to actually access health care. and it's a parallel to the way that medical infrastructure is not afforded or assumed civilian life and any value … in Gaza.”
The white-board incident wasn’t the only case of muzzling pro-Palestinian perspectives at AHS. Mehrabani was the target of one herself.
Mehrabani, who is on maternity leave, was locked out of her AHS email account after sending out two emails to her colleagues calling on them to pressure their union, United Nurses of Alberta (UNA), to take a clear stand against Israel’s genocidal onslaught.
On May 31, Mehrabani sent an email to her fellow nurses, providing her phone number for anyone interested in taking action to contact her.
“For those of you nurses who do not support the genocide of Palestinians please [sic] reach out to me so we can come together and get our union to take action,” Mehrabani wrote.
The day Mehrabani sent out this email, UNA issued a statement denouncing “the intentional targeting of hospitals and health care facilities by the armed forces of Israel [emphasis added].”
On June 7, Mehrabani wrote a second email to everyone at HealthLink, including management, noting Canada’s role in the unfolding horrors in Gaza through record-high military exports and Canada Pension Plan’s investments in companies that profit from Israeli militarism.
She added that while the union statement acknowledging the deliberate decimation of Gaza’s health-care system was a positive development, its use of euphemistic phrases like loss of life read “as if Palestinian children dropped dead spontaneously, as opposed to being viciously murdered.”
On June 12, Edmonton Health Link manager Darlene Turenne emailed Mehrabani to tell her that AHS is a “politically neutral organization, and employees are not to use AHS resources to support, assist or critique any political activity.”
Turenne added that she was freezing Mehrabani out of her professional email account until she returns from maternity leave “to put a stop [to] this activity.”
The notion that speaking about the situation in Gaza constitutes inappropriate “political activity” didn’t sit right with Mehrabani.
She crunched the numbers and counted 40 emails from colleagues regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including a dozen from a colleague who travelled to Ukraine to care for patients there, between March and December 2022.
Health Link’s Staff Engagement Committee, according to Mehrabani, sent out an email proposing that employees wear yellow and blue—the colours of Ukraine’s flag—to work for a week in March 2022 to express their support for embattled Ukraine, which one manager responded was a “wonderful” idea.
It’s difficult to comprehend how wearing the colours of a foreign nation at war is apolitical, Mehrabani said.
Her colleague who went to Ukraine, whose work Mehrabani stressed she supports, received an official leave of absence from AHS to do so and was permitted to send out links to her GoFundMe. She was repeatedly honoured for her work in AHS’s email newsletter, with one November 2022 email referring accurately, but politically, to her work in Ukraine’s “occupied and eastern cities [emphasis added].”
Management expressed no concern about the impact these emails would have on supporters of Russia’s invasion and it’s easy to understand why. The Ukrainian right to self-determination aligns with Canadian state interests, and is thus sacrosanct, whereas the Palestinian right to self-determination does not.
“The issue is not that it's too political. It's because it's Palestine,” Mehrabani said. “It's the wrong people. Only Ukrainian lives matter. Palestinian lives don't. And if you talk about it, you get banned.”
As part of weekly pro-Palestine protests in Edmonton, on June 22 health-care workers were invited to participate in a die-in on Whyte Avenue to draw attention to Israel’s decimation of the health-care system in Gaza.
Fatima Saleh, a local Palestinian-Canadian organizer, told The Orchard that while Israel has targetted the entirety of Palestinian life in Gaza, there’s something uniquely pernicious about destroying its health-care facilities.
“It gets rid of the elderly, the sick, the disabled as quickly as possible and allows all of these people to just die off,” said Saleh.
“Anybody that's sick and injured who can't get any help is just dying. Nobody is getting better.”
This is one reason why the reported death toll of more than 38,000 is likely a vast underestimate. A July 5 letter to the prestigious Lancet medical journal from public health experts Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuk provided a “conservative estimate” of 186,000 as a more accurate death toll.
While AHS weaponizes notions of Jewish safety to suppress speech that some Jewish people might find offensive, their Palestinian colleagues are intimidated into silence.
Saleh noted the difficulty of finding Palestinian health-care workers in Edmonton who were willing to participate in the die-in, lest they risk their employment prospects—the same reason no Palestinian health-care workers are quoted in this story.
“It's been over eight months and health-care workers are still holding die-ins, and Canada still says, ‘I stand with Israel.’ I don't get it,” she said.
“I could scream about this all day, though I don't know what else to say.”