Earlier this month, NYU Langone Health presented an award to a labor and delivery nurse for providing compassionate care to mothers who had lost babies. But soon after, the nurse said, the hospital fired her because of the speech she gave when she accepted the award.
In it, she spoke about the suffering of Palestinian women during the war between Israel and Hamas, which she called a “genocide.” The nurse, Hesen Jabr, is not the first medical worker to be fired from NYU Langone, a major hospital in New York, for commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The hospital is currently involved in a lawsuit by a prominent cancer researcher, who was fired from his job as director of the cancer center after posting a variety of political cartoons against Hamas. Some contain offensive caricatures of the Arab people.
A young medical intern was also “removed from duty” at an NYU Langone hospital on Long Island, according to the hospital, after he was accused of posting an Instagram post defending the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel – although he did so quietly later. restored.
In her speech thus to a video she posted on social mediaMs. Jabr drew a connection between her work with grieving mothers in New York and the war in Gaza.
“It pains me to see the women of my country itself suffering unimaginable losses during the current genocide in Gaza,” said Ms. Jabr, a Palestinian-American. “For those reasons, this award is very personal to me.”
She added“Even though I cannot hold their hands and comfort them as they grieve their unborn children and the children they lost during this genocide, I hope to continue to make them proud as I continue to represent them here at NYU.”
Ms Jabr said these comments led to her dismissal on May 22, after she returned to work following the ceremony. “As soon as I entered the department, I was pulled into an impromptu meeting with NYU Langone's president and vice president of nursing to discuss how I was 'endangering others' and 'ruining the ceremony' and 'offending people' because a small part of my speech was a tribute to the grieving mothers in my country,” she wrote in a post on Instagram. She said she then worked most of her shift before being summoned to an office, where she was dismissed and escorted from the premises.
Israel has categorically denied the accusation that it carries to provoke a genocide in Gaza.
A spokesman for NYU Langone, Steve Ritea, confirmed that Ms. Jabr was fired after her speech and said that “a prior incident” had also occurred.
“Hesen Jabr was warned in December, following a previous incident, not to bring its views on this divisive and charged issue to the workplace,” Mr Ritea said in a statement. “She instead chose not to address it at a recent staff event that was widely attended by her colleagues, some of whom were angered by her comments.”
“As a result, Jabr is no longer an employee of NYU Langone,” he added.
Mr Ritea did not say what the “previous incident” was. On Facebook, Ms. Jabr suggested that there had been long-standing tensions in the workplace. Her posts described heated political discussions on the labor and delivery floor. “The sheer psychological warfare that NYU has waged against me as a nurse, Muslim, Palestinian and woman has only made me more determined,” read a message she posted on Facebook.
Ms. Jabr's activism goes back to her childhood: When she was in fifth grade in Louisiana, the American Civil Liberties Union organized filed a lawsuit on her behalf after she was forced to accept a Bible from her school principal. “This is not my first rodeo,” she said in an interview Tuesday evening.
Ms. Jabr, who had worked at NYU Langone since 2015, said she had been repeatedly questioned by hospital administrators in recent months about her social media posts about Israel and the war in Gaza. She described her speech at the awards ceremony as “the straw that broke the camel's back.”
Other workers across the country have done so dismissed, suspended or examined for their comments on the war between Israel and Hamas. While some states, such as Connecticut, have limited employers' ability to fire employees for their opinions or speech, New York's protections for workers more limited.
In Ms. Jabr's case, she was invited to the lectern and gave a short speech at the awards ceremony, where: according to the hospitalshe had received an award given to “a nurse who exemplifies what it means to provide compassionate care to patients and their families during perinatal grief.”
Before addressing the war in Gaza, Ms. Jabr expressed her gratitude to her colleagues and said the award belonged to them: “Frankly, it belongs to all the nurses who are in labor and who hold the hands of a grieving mother detained.”
In the interview, Ms Jabr defended her speech, saying that talking about the war “was so relevant” given the nature of the award she had won.
“It was a mourning award; it was for grieving mothers,” she noted.