A professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, says the university violated her freedom of speech rights by suspending her for her online comments about Israel’s war in Gaza in a new lawsuit.
The suit was filed by Rupa Marya, an internal medicine physician and professor at UCSF, identified as an expert in decolonial theory. Marya was placed on leave in September 2024 and had her clinical privileges briefly suspended by the UCSF executive medical board following comments she made on X that questioned the impacts of Zionism as “a supremacist, racist ideology” on healthcare.
Without naming Marya directly, the university subsequently published a statement across its social media accounts that said such comments were a “tired and racist conspiracy theory” that “Zionist doctors were a threat to Arab, Palestinian, South Asian, Muslin and Black patients, as well as the US healthcare system” and should be condemned.
Mark Kleiman, an attorney for Marya, said in the court filing that his client was fired last month “despite requesting a hearing, which she was entitled to”, according to NBC News.
“Firing Dr Marya doesn’t only violate her right to free speech, it threatens all of us,” he said in a statement to the network.
“We all need to urgently speak up against these kinds of attacks on our basic rights to advocate for justice, and we expect the court will agree with us that Dr Marya’s rights have been violated and must be remedied.”
According to court documents, Marya’s posts “never impeded the performance of her duties as a physician or faculty member, or the regular operation of the university”.
“As a medical doctor, American citizen and as a person of south Asian descent raised in the Sikh religious tradition, Dr Marya has long been concerned about American foreign policy, including in the Middle East and the issues surrounding the conflict between Israel and Palestine,” the complaint reads.
“Her posts take aim at state policy and supremacist political ideologies, not at any religious or ethnic group.”
According to the lawsuit, Marya received “rape and death threats” as well as “repeated harassment and threats” because of her posts. She says her posts also expressed “solidarity with the hospitals and healthcare workers that Israel was attacking in Gaza” and that she “felt an obligation to speak out and did so using her X account”.
In a September 2024 post, Marya wrote on social media that UCSF students were concerned that a first-year student from Israel may have served in the IDF; she asked “if he participated in the genocide of Palestinians” and asked her colleagues what to do about it.
The post drew the attention of the state senator Scott Wiener, who posted on X that “the same UCSF professor who promoted the ‘doctors’ plot’ – an age old antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish doctors are harming patients – is now targeting a 1st year med student for harassment b/c he’s Israeli. This professor is creating a toxic, hostile environment at UCSF.”
UCSF’s chancellor, Sam Hawgood, said he took “immediate action to address this situation”, adding that “targeting any member of our UCSF community – especially in a way that fosters hostility or discrimination – will not be tolerated”, according to a letter obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle.
In a March interview with the Guardian, Marya asked: “How do we integrate [Israeli] reservists into the medical community – with [Palestinian] students who have lost 50 or 60 family members? What is the moral obligation of medicine?”
The lawsuit comes as there is ongoing and widespread disagreement across the US about academic freedom on college campuses.
Last week, the Trump administration stepped up its efforts to force US universities to crack down on what it deems antisemitic activity. The Department of Education warned New York’s Columbia University it could lose accreditation, and thus access to federal grants, over an alleged violation of federal anti-discrimination laws.
The Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services said last month that it had found that Columbia had acted with “deliberate indifference” toward the harassment of Jewish students during campus protests.
Israel’s war in Gaza is estimated to have killed more than 54,000 Palestinians and levelled much of the territory. Last week, the Guardian reported that on Sunday at least 31 Palestinians were killed after Israeli forces opened fire near a food distribution center in Rafah, Gaza. A separate incident at the same site on Monday killed three people.
International criticism intensified last week over a new aid distribution system in Gaza, run by the Israeli- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), and not UN or international aid organisations.
The UN’s human rights chief, Volker Türk, said that Palestinians in Gaza face an impossible choice: “Die from starvation or risk being killed while trying to access the meagre food that is being made available.” The attacks on civilians, he added, constituted a war crime.
The Guardian has contacted UCSF and Marya’s legal team for comment.
