Mastodawn

"Leen Ezzeddine, the US-Lebanese graduate at Harvard Medical School who chose to speak out
At its core, her message was simple: medicine is not only about treating the body in front of you. It is about refusing the systems that decide some bodies are less worthy of care

When Leen Ezzeddine stood before her classmates at Harvard Medical School, the moment could have been framed as a familiar story of immigrant success: a Lebanese woman graduating as a doctor from one of the world’s most prestigious institutions.

But Ezzeddine chose to tell a different story.

In her graduation speech last week, she spoke of circumstance, borders, luck and the thin line separating her life from the lives of medical students in Lebanon and Palestine who share the same ambition but are made to study under drones, bombardment and displacement.

That line, for her, was not abstract. While she was pursuing her studies at Harvard, a US missile launched by Israel levelled her family home in Arab Salim, her mother’s village in southern Lebanon, in October 2024."

#lebanon #USA #israel #palestine #gaza

🧵

Show thread

Regendans

2/3

Video downloaded via xcancel uploaded to Mastodon.

https://xcancel.com/MiddleEastEye/status/2060701568819658880

Show thread

Regendans 3d ago

3/3

.,.,,.,.

“Because we need more of us in these rooms,” she said.

Her speech did not resolve the contradictions she named. Harvard remains Harvard. US academia remains deeply contested terrain. Gaza remains a test of whether institutions that teach ethics, medicine, law, human rights and public service can apply those principles when the victims are “politically inconvenient”.

But Ezzeddine’s speech mattered because it punctured the ceremony’s comfort. It insisted that a medical oath means little if it stops at the clinic door. It asked what it means to become a doctor in a world where some hospitals are protected and others are bombed, where some students graduate into prestige and others study under drones, where some lives are mourned by institutions and others are explained away.

At its core, her message was simple: medicine is not only about treating the body in front of you. It is about refusing the systems that decide that some bodies are less worthy of care.

And in a university environment where many have learned the cost of speaking about Palestine and Lebanon, Ezzeddine chose to speak anyway.