Are Burned Babies and Mass Graves a Global Health Crisis? What Does Decolonization Got to Do With It? Comment on "The Rhetoric of Decolonizing Global Health Fails to Address the Reality of Settler Colonialism: Gaza as a Case in Point?"

In this commentary, the author situates the article of Engebretsen and Baker in the larger history of exceptionalizing and evading Palestine in the global health literature. The political root causes for ill health in Palestine such as settler colonization, apartheid and racism are evaded and deemed "too political" and Palestinian health is flattened to the humanitarian realm, thus reinforcing Palestinian dependency on humanitarian aid, rather than subjects of Israeli necropolitics. The commentary focuses on this moment of genocide in Gaza and the importance of shifting the narrative on Palestinian health and global health more generally to focus on current imperialism, wars and settler colonialism. The commentary highlights the importance of showing moral clarity at this moment and center the Gaza Genocide in classrooms, publications and conferences rather than avoiding "controversy" and developing a moral outrage when it is no longer useful and after the smell of death has dissipated.