"Connecting health with identities and then allowing society to abuse or dispose of people deemed unhealthy or undesirable is a slippery slope. What's waiting for you at the bottom?" -Shanspeare
"Invoking preexisting conditions or comorbidities in this way suggests that a person's death is somehow 'natural' or 'unavoidable' or the product of a mixture of 'destiny' meets 'biology,' rather than the explicit policy of siege and famine being imposed as a condition of genocide. When you see the death of a starving Palestinian being reframed in terms of 'preexisting health issues' ... the crucial question to ask someone trying to make that contextual reframe is: if food, medicine, and adequate care had been available, would this person almost certainly be alive, and would another person under these conditions be facing the same fate?" -Beatrice Adler-Bolton, "Can the Subaltern Starve?" Death Panel Podcast
"Health, then, for Palestinians, is inextricable from the ongoing Israeli settler-colonial project of dispossession and erasure and from the capitalist policies and practices that undergird that project in Palestine, in refugee camps, and in diaspora communities. This includes the complicity of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in political repression and security coordination with the State of Israel. This is not to say that settler colonialism is a social or political determinant of health. Rather, it is to say that settler colonialism precedes and is fundamental to all other determinants of health—be they clinical, economic, social, or political. Settler colonialism is woven, in ways both known and unknown, into these determinants. In its direct attacks on us and on the environments in which we live and seek care, settler colonialism distorts our relationships with our bodies." - Danya Qato, "Introduction: Public Health and the Promise of Palestine" Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. 49 No. 4-Summer 2020
