NUPSAW Eastern Cape condemns Israeli presence in public hospitals and rejects any collaboration with apartheid Israel
The National Union of Public Service and Allied Workers (NUPSAW) in the Eastern Cape expresses its outrage and total rejection of reports that an Israeli delegation has been granted access to Mthatha General Hospital and Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital under the guise of “healthcare cooperation” with Sheba Medical Center, a flagship institution of the Israeli apartheid state.
Let it be stated without hesitation or diplomacy:
There can be no normalisation, cooperation, or partnership with an apartheid regime.
NUPSAW Eastern Cape aligns itself fully and unambiguously with the position of the democratic government of South Africa, which has correctly declared Israel an apartheid state and has taken Israel to the International Court of Justice for genocide against the Palestinian people. Any attempt to introduce Israeli institutions into South African public hospitals is a direct affront to this principled stance and an insult to South Africa’s own liberation history.
As a militant working-class union representing healthcare workers, we find it morally repugnant that institutions linked to a regime that:
- Bombs hospitals
- Assassinates doctors and nurses
- Destroys medical schools and universities
- Uses healthcare denial as a weapon of war are being presented as “partners” in healthcare development.
You cannot teach healthcare with blood on your hands.
NUPSAW Eastern Cape rejects the dangerous fiction that healthcare cooperation exists in a political vacuum. Healthcare is political. Hospitals are political. Silence in the face of genocide is political. To host Israeli delegations in our hospitals while Palestinian hospitals lie in ruins is nothing less than complicity in apartheid and crimes against humanity.
We further warn hospital management, provincial officials, and any individuals facilitating these engagements that:
- Public hospitals are not autonomous entities free to conduct foreign relations
- Such engagements must comply with DIRCO, national health policy, and South Africa’s foreign policy framework
- Any unilateral cooperation with Israeli institutions constitutes a breach of protocol, ethics, and revolutionary morality
NUPSAW Eastern Cape will not hesitate to mobilise workers, engage communities, and pursue all organisational and political avenues to block the normalisation of apartheid Israel within public institutions of the Eastern Cape.
We reaffirm our unwavering solidarity with the people of Palestine and declare, as South Africans who defeated apartheid through struggle and sacrifice, that we recognise apartheid when we see it — and we reject it in all its forms.
There will be no neutrality, no false balance, and no silence.
An injury to one is an injury to all.
From the Eastern Cape to Gaza — solidarity forever.
Free Palestine. End Apartheid Israel.
~END~
For media enquiries contact Provincial Chairperson, Cde Thandile Mangele on 078 673 8442