"Once the moral grammar that protects medical spaces begins to erode in one place, its dismantling proceeds elsewhere." Now in Lebanon. @joelleabirached.bsky.social

"What we are witnessing is the renewal of a nakedly imperial project: a politics of permanent siege, existential paranoia, and millenarian last stands." @joelleabirached.bsky.social on apocalyptic politics and the threat of ethnic cleansing in Southern Lebanon www.bostonreview.net/articles/mil...

In Lebanon, Israel seems to be following the same logic it deployed in Gaza: emptying out entire areas through what amounts to ethnic cleansing. @joelleabirached.bsky.social writes from Beirut as bombs rain down once again:

« What we are witnessing, then, is the renewal of a nakedly imperial project: a politics of permanent siege, existential paranoia, and millenarian last stands… » www.bostonreview.net/articles/mil...

What happens once the destruction of hospitals can be argued for—rationalized, narrated, managed—as legally and morally sanctioned “necessity”? @joelleabirached.bsky.social on healthocide, from Gaza to Minneapolis:

🔥🔥🔥

Alex Pretti's murder struck a nerve in the health care community, not just as a tragic loss of one of their own but as emblematic of the dangers facing workers and the moral basis of medicine itself. @joelleabirached.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/articles/occ...

If not now, when? (Hillel the Elder) or when does health and human rights as a field become politically inconvenient? My latest with @eric-reinhart.com on institutional and moral integrity as well as the future of global health. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Throughout 2025, our writers delivered fearless analysis and creative resilience—refusing to compromise on fundamental values of justice and humanity in the face of brazen cruelty and democratic decline. Revisit the writing readers turned to the most:

@joelleabirached.bsky.social on Gaza and the collapse of the liberal international order:

Through the disasters of this year, our writers delivered fearless analysis and creative resilience—refusing to compromise on fundamental values of justice and humanity in the face of brazen cruelty and democratic decline. Revisit the writing readers turned to the most:

Join us this Tuesday for a book talk with Catherine Conybeare on her beautiful new biography, Augustine the African.

Join us this Tuesday for a book talk with Catherine Conybeare on her beautiful new biography, Augustine the African.

Congratulations to contributors @joelleabirached.bsky.social and @samklug.bsky.social, whose 2024 essays “The View from Besieged Beirut” & “Who’s Afraid of Frantz Fanon?” are recognized as notable essays in the Best American Essays 2025, edited by Jia Tolentino and series editor Kim Dana Kupperman.

Thrilled that "Lebanon Anatomy of a Collapse" which I co-edited w @joelleabirached.bsky.social will be published by @hurstpublishers.bsky.social in 2026.The book traces the unravelling of Lebanon including riveting-if unsettling-chapters by inspiring contributors. hurstpublishers.com/book/lebanon-3

🗣️ [TMR 53 OUT OF OUR MINDS] Joelle Abi-Rached (@joelleabirached.bsky.social) exposes the limits of psychiatry and language to hold Gaza’s trauma—where grief, violence, and survival are inseparable from justice. 🔗 Read: bit.ly/trauma-after-... #TheMarkazReview #TMR53 #OutOfOurMinds

Deeply honored that my essay “Trauma after Gaza” was selected as the centerpiece of this timely special issue …

🖋️ Featuring: @warghetti.bsky.social, @joelleabirached.bsky.social, @jordanelgrably.bsky.social, Sara Shamma, @bookfabulous.bsky.social, Malu Halasa, Mohammad Rabie, Real Bakhit, Dina Shehata, Safa Elnaili, Robert Bociaga, @aycacu.bsky.social, @michaelfakhri.bsky.social, and Farah Ahamed.

The special section from our 50th anniversary issue, The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide, is now online. Robin D. G. Kelley revisits Noam Chomsky’s classic argument, with @dwaldstreicher.bsky.social, Jennifer Zacharia, and @martinoneill.bsky.social.

"By underwriting Israel’s genocidal onslaught—financially, materially, and ideologically—Western governments have hastened the final discrediting of the rules-based legal order that the West itself developed in the wreckage of World War II" www.bostonreview.net/articles/gaz...

If you're in Berlin on August 29, come along to the launch (again) of Medicine on a Larger Scale (open access CUP 2025)! #histmed #histstm #sts

Gaza has become a symbol both of Western hypocrisy and of its victims’ recourse to human rights and international law as a final forum of appeal for collective deliverance—the deliverance of the “wretched of the earth,” whoever and wherever they may be. @joelleabirached.bsky.social

The word is capacious

'Petro thus spoke in Bogotá of the need both to condemn prevailing “barbarism” and to give real meaning to the principles now being betrayed—to keep alive, that is, “the possibility of another kind of humanity, one that can love and think collectively.”'

Our 50th anniversary issue heads to the printer soon. Featuring Robin D. G. Kelley in a special section on the responsibility of intellectuals in the age of fascism and genocide, w/ @dwaldstreicher.bsky.social, Jennifer Zacharia, & @martinoneill.bsky.social. To get it, subscribe now (link below):

"We can’t allow ‘healthocide’ to become the norm, in Gaza or elsewhere" -Andre Picard theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti... I also wrote on attacks on medical facilities👇 There must be consequences: Accountability for war crimes can help stop attacks on hospitals justiceinconflict.org/2025/07/02/t...

'Targeting medics and hospitals in acts of war should be called “healthocide”, academics have urged, amid an increase in such attacks in recent years.' Link to original comment in BMJ Global Health: gh.bmj.com/content/10/8...

Historian Charles Rosenberg said a disease “does not exist unless you name it.” By naming this pathology of modern warfare, we aim to rally medicine, social science, education & law to confront its vast toll on human wellbeing. #healthocide #Gaza gh.bmj.com/content/10/8...

It took a year to get this paper out after earlier versions, incl. one in Nov 2023, were rejected without peer review given the astounding silence of US journals. Medical neutrality is collapsing, yet it remains the last shield for health workers in war zones #healthocide gh.bmj.com/content/10/8...

Historian Charles Rosenberg said a disease “does not exist unless you name it.” By naming this pathology of modern warfare, we aim to rally medicine, social science, education & law to confront its vast toll on human wellbeing. #healthocide #Gaza gh.bmj.com/content/10/8...

Honoured to see our new BMJ Global Health article on the deliberate destruction of health systems in war — what we call "healthocide" or “sanicidio” in Spanish — profiled today by Agencia SINC, the news agency of the Spanish Foundation for Science & Technology. www.agenciasinc.es/Noticias/Exp...

“Health” is of Germanic origin and means “whole” ..by “healthocide” we mean the destruction of the right to health and healthcare of an entire population. Gaza today is the paragon of healthocide. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

"[Gaza] exposes what is fundamentally wrong today: a persistent inability to recognize every human being as equal and deserving of dignity and life, whatever their beliefs, skin color, or religious affiliation." thank you @joelleabirached.bsky.social for this painful but essential piece

Thank you for telling this story, a forceful yet surgical account that resists simplification while confronting the enormity of the horror.

• @joelleabirached.bsky.social on Gaza and the discrediting of the liberal international order • @davidaustinwalsh.bsky.social on Mamdani’s triumph and the future of the Democratic Party • @samuelhayimbrody.bsky.social on memoirs of the Arab Jewish world destroyed by colonialism

“Gaza has become a symbol both of Western hypocrisy and its victims’ recourse to human rights as a final forum for collective deliverance—the deliverance of the wretched of the earth, whoever and wherever they may be. The consequences cannot be overstated.” @joelleabirached.bsky.social

By underwriting Israel’s genocidal onslaught so flagrantly, Western governments have hastened the final discrediting of the legal order the West itself developed after World War II. @joelleabirached.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/articles/gaz...

Painful to write—born of disappointment. I call for critical engagement with the West, not bashing its epistemic frameworks: expose its racism and double standards while salvaging and advancing the universal human‑rights framework forged after WWII. Perhaps the baton now rests w/ the ‘Global South.’

One word: criminals www.naharnet.com/stories/en/3...

Disconcerting. www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Now that measles is on the rise again in the US, along with bird flu becoming 'endemic', it is worth pondering the question once again: Do pandemics ever end? www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

“Medicine is a social science and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale.” Virchow

When Trump speaks of turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East,” he draws on a deep reservoir of American imperial myths and reflects the increasingly naked and brazen imperatives of today’s hyper-capitalism. @joelleabirached.bsky.social on the Rivierization of the world:

When Trump spoke of turning Gaza into the most beautiful “Riviera of the Middle East,” he was drawing on a deep reservoir of imperial myths and reflecting the increasingly naked and brazen imperatives of today’s hyper-capitalism. @joelleabirached.bsky.social

American sociologist George Ritzer once wrote of the “McDonaldization of society,” the process whereby the logic of consumerism became a totalizing form of social control. Now, it seems the “Rivierization of the world” will supplant it. @joelleabirached.bsky.social on Trump’s plans for Gaza:

From the editors: introducing TRUMP’S RETURN, our new issue. Featuring @davidaustinwalsh.bsky.social @morefius.bsky.social @econmarshall.bsky.social @joelleabirached.bsky.social @mschmitt9.bsky.social @janicefinewjl.bsky.social @samuelhayimbrody.bsky.social Noura Erakat, Robin D. G. Kelley, & more

Brilliant @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social : www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

I wrote this several months ago when Jared Kushner’s unsettling suggestion went largely unnoticed. Now, it’s no longer just a misstep—it’s becoming policy.

“Are Gaza and the West Bank merely the targets of a grand real estate project, as Jared Kushner unashamedly confessed during a conversation at the Harvard Kennedy School earlier this year?” @joelleabirached.bsky.social