A Doctor Said Israel’s War Is Fueling Health Crises in Gaza. UCSF Fired Her.

A doctor and professor is suing the University of California, San Francisco, alleging that school officials fired her for her advocacy for Palestinian human rights in an attempt to silence her.

In late May, UCSF terminated Rupa Marya following a nine-month suspension from the elite medical school based on social media posts in which she criticized Israel’s genocide in Gaza and questioned how Zionist ideology affects health care outcomes. As a part of her dismissal, UCSF officials will place a letter of censure in Marya’s file for 10 years, which she said will likely damage her ability to seek future employment and continue practicing medicine. 

In two free speech complaints, filed simultaneously this week in state and federal courts in Alameda County, California, Marya alleges the school discriminated against her for advocating on behalf of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students and colleagues. She told The Intercept that it’s especially important that those who work in medicine feel free to call out the conditions in Gaza, where Israel’s attacks on hospitals and its blockade on aid have caused a suite of overlapping health crises, prompting a famine risk amid ongoing bombardment.

“It’s critical that we have the ability to speak out about this as professionals, as health care workers, as citizens, and not only of the United States but of the world, but also as U.S. taxpayers whose money is going to fund this genocide,” Marya said.

Her lawsuits seek damages for loss of income and emotional and psychological distress, and come at a time when the University of California system has censured multiple faculty and staff members for speaking out about Palestine.

The University of California and UCSF did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. 

The complaints, which name as defendants UCSF officials, including the school’s Chancellor Sam Hawgood, allege that UCSF began to target Marya’s advocacy even before she began to speak out about Palestine. Marya’s scholarship includes research into the impacts of colonialism and structural racism in health care. The state complaint says her advocacy for her Black or unhoused patients had drawn criticism from some of her white colleagues, who allegedly used “racist tropes” against Marya, a woman of Indian descent and raised in a Sikh household. 

“UCSF leadership repeatedly characterized Dr. Marya’s advocacy for marginalized patients as ‘unprofessional,’ ‘aggressive’ and ‘harmful,’” the complaints read.

Such targeting was magnified, the complaints argue, when Marya began to speak out on social media against Israel’s offensive in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 attacks. After she criticized the school’s silence on the killings of Palestinians in her posts, UCSF Provost Catherine Lucey called Marya in for questioning, according to the state complaint. 

Marya continued to post about Gaza. She posted a viral tweet calling for solidarity with Gaza’s health care workers, drawing threats of death and rape. Marya notified school officials, including Lucey, about the threats, asking the school to temporarily remove her personal email and her profile from the school’s public website, the complaints said. In the past, Lucey and school officials had taken similar protective measures amid the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. 

In this instance, however, UCSF officials ignored Marya’s requests. Instead, Talmadge King Jr., the dean of UCSF’s School of Medicine, emailed Marya, informing her that officials would assess whether Marya’s social media posts about Gaza had “violated university policies,” the complaints alleged.

Marya had also reported “racist, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian remarks,” including Islamophobic comments made by her colleagues in school email threads to the school’s anti-harassment and discrimination office. The cases were closed without any serious investigations, the complaints alleged. Meanwhile, the university went on to highlight controversial pro-Israeli speakers such as Elan Carr, a U.S. Army veteran and CEO of the Israeli American Council, an influential pro-Israel lobbying and advocacy group, despite complaints from a broad coalition of Jewish, Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, LGBTQ+ students and staff at UCSF.

A November investigation by The Intercept revealed widespread anti-Palestinian and pro-Israeli bias across UCSF, which runs the biggest hospital system in San Francisco. UCSF officials canceled and censored lectures by medical researchers for mentioning health impacts on Palestinians under Israel’s apartheid system and its assault on Gaza. Some doctors were subject to internal investigations after giving talks that mentioned Palestine. One nurse practitioner, who had previously volunteered in Gaza, was fired earlier this year for wearing a watermelon pin to work. And in April, UCSF fired Denise Caramagno, a therapist and pioneering violence prevention advocate at the school, after she spoke out in defense of Marya.

UCSF isn’t the only school in the University of California system accused of stifling pro-Palestine speech. A January report issued by the UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Muslim Racism found similar patterns of bias at UCLA’s medical school, ranging from censoring academic work; suppression of speech of students, medical residents, and faculty around Palestine; and ignoring incidents of racism against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim members of campus. And in early May, UCLA fired a faculty member, Eric Martin, for taking part in UCLA’s pro-Palestine encampment one year earlier, the first known faculty firing of its kind across the UC system.  

Marya said she hopes her legal fight will help others know they can speak out against Israel’s genocide despite ongoing attacks on pro-Palestine speech by both universities and the federal government.

“I’m hoping that a legal remedy would push the university for accountability, would educate the public more fully about what’s happening — where our free speech rights are being violated around the country, as we are trying to stand for the right for all people to live in peace,” Marya told The Intercept.

Since Palestinian solidarity encampments erupted on campuses nationwide in the spring of 2024, school officials have punished students and professors with arrests, firings, suspensions, and expulsions amid pressure from both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. The Trump administration has only escalated such attacks on universities and colleges over the supposed failure of schools to address reports of antisemitism, cutting federal funding at schools such as Columbia and Harvard, revoking visas for thousands of international students, and abducting pro-Palestinian students and professors. The Trump administration now plans to target the University of California system. 

Last week, Leo Terrell, head of the Justice Department’s antisemitism task force, told Fox News the UC system should expect “massive lawsuits” in the coming days.

“We are going to go after them where it hurts them financially,” Terrell said later in the Fox News interview. The UC responded by pledging to cooperate with the Trump administration to “counter and eradicate [antisemitism] in all its forms across the system.”

“Dr. Marya’s case fits this pattern that we’re seeing across the United States,” said Wade McMullen, a human rights attorney who is a part of Marya’s legal team, “where universities and academic institutions are bowing to pressure from elected officials, whether that’s the federal government or state and local government, combined with billionaire donors who sit on the boards of trustees and run these universities, to weaponize notions of antisemitism to suppress pro-Palestinian speech and organizing.” 

The new complaints nod to the outside pressures on UCSF to quiet its pro-Palestine movement. 

Mentioned in the complaint are social media posts from January 2024 in which Marya questioned the impacts of Zionism on health care, calling it “a supremacist, racist ideology.” The posts drew immediate criticism from pro-Israel colleagues and from Democratic California state Sen. Scott Wiener, who accused her of antisemitism and “attacking Jews.”

The complaints allege that Wiener publicly criticized Marya on social media “intentionally and maliciously in coordination with others.” Shortly after his post, Canary Mission, a pro-Israeli site that doxxes and blacklists academics and students who criticize Israel, created a profile on Marya, “unleashing a flood of defamatory statements, hate mail, and threats against Dr. Marya.” 

The Helen Diller Family Foundation, UCSF’s largest donor, gave $100,000 to Canary Mission in 2016, the complaint notes. Jaclyn Safier, the foundation’s president and a member of UCSF’s board of directors, has since distanced herself from the 2016 donation, which was handled by her late father, Sanford Diller.

The university responded to the controversy by publishing a statement across its social media accounts addressing the posts without naming Marya, disavowing her statements as a “racist conspiracy theory” and “antisemitic attacks.” One of the complaints notes that a public records request later revealed the statement was indeed meant to target Marya. Wiener, the San Francisco-based lawmaker, immediately thanked UCSF for the statement. 

Wiener went on to single Marya out on social media for the September social media post that led to her suspension. In a tweet, Marya wrote that UCSF students were concerned that a first-year student from Israel may have served in the Israeli military in the prior year, then asked, “How do we address this in our professional ranks?” Wiener shared Marya’s tweet, accusing her of “targeting the student “for harassment [because] he’s Israeli” and that she was “creating a toxic, hostile environment at UCSF.”

“Wiener again misrepresented Dr. Marya’s post on his social media, publicly accusing her of wrongdoing and mentioning her employment at UCSF,” the complaints state. The federal complaint called students’ fears “objectively reasonable,” citing the two Israeli military veterans who sprayed students at Columbia University with a noxious gas last year and an Emory University medical school professor who volunteered with the Israeli military in Gaza after October 7 before resuming classes and practicing medicine at the Atlanta school. 

During her suspension last October, the complaints allege, Marya’s direct supervisor had attempted to solicit one of her colleagues at UCSF to file an incident report against Marya “to claim that she was posing a threat to patient safety.” The colleague ultimately declined the request, according to the suits.

In filing the lawsuits, Marya and her attorneys said they also seek to uncover any possible collaboration between the Diller Foundation, other donors, lawmakers, and university officials in the school’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech. 

The federal complaint asks the court to prevent the University of California from affecting her ability to practice medicine and to bar the school from sharing “any comments about Dr. Marya based upon anything other than her clinical competence” with other hospitals. She had originally intended to seek injunctive relief from the courts to prevent her firing, but she received a surprise notice of dismissal on May 20. Marya and her attorneys said the university violated its own bylaws in firing her without a hearing before the school’s academic senate. 

Marya said her firing was largely based on her various social media posts and Substack essays that referenced her advocacy for Palestinians, in which she at times called out her colleagues for their support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Some of her Jewish colleagues have responded by accusing her of creating a hostile work environment.

Marya and her supporters at UCSF, who include anti-Zionist Jewish colleagues, have dismissed the conflation of anti-Zionism, which critiques an ethno-nationalist political ideology, with antisemitism. 

Mark Kleiman, a member of Marya’s legal team, said this conflation “disenfranchises a vast number of younger Jews, medical students, residents and younger clinical faculty, all of whom are terrified of speaking out, but certainly have very very strong feelings that what’s happening [in Gaza] is horrendous and is a war crime.”

Marya said she hoped the lawsuit and her continued advocacy would draw attention back to the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. 

“The real issue is that the entire health care system in Gaza has been destroyed, and health care workers have been kidnapped and tortured — some have been raped to death like Dr. Adnan Al Bursh, who’s a professor of orthopedic surgeon surgery in Gaza,” Marya said. “The real issue here is not whether what I said hurt the feelings of some people.”