Earlier this month, NYU Langone Health awarded a labor and delivery nurse for her compassionate care of mothers who have lost their babies. But soon after, the nurse said, the hospital fired her because of her speech when accepting the award.
In it, she talks about the suffering of Palestinian women during the Israel-Hamas war, which she calls “genocide.” Nurse Hesen Jabr is not the first medical staff member to be fired at NYU Langone, a large hospital system in New York, for comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hospital is currently embroiled in a lawsuit by a famous cancer researcher, who was fired from his job as director of the cancer center after he posted many anti-Hamas political cartoons. Some included insulting caricatures of Arabs.
A young physician-intern was also “removed from service” at NYU Langone hospital on Long Island, according to the hospital, after allegedly posting a message on Instagram defending the Hamas attack on October 7 into Israel – although he was later quietly reinstated.
In his speech, according to to a video she posted on social mediaMs. Jabr drew connections between her work with grieving mothers in New York and the war in Gaza.
“It pains me to see women in my country experiencing unimaginable losses in the current genocide in Gaza,” said Ms. Jabr, a Palestinian-American. “This award is deeply personal to me for those reasons.”
she added“Even though I cannot hold their hands and comfort them as they grieve for their unborn children and the children they have lost in this genocide, I hope to continue to make them proud by I continue to represent them at NYU.”
Ms. Jabr said these comments led to her being fired on May 22 after returning to work after the ceremony. “As soon as I entered the unit, I was pulled into an impromptu meeting with the President and Vice President of Nursing at NYU Langone to discuss how I had ‘put others in danger’ and ‘ruined the session’. ceremony’ and ‘insulting people’ because a small part of my speech was to pay tribute to the grieving mothers in my country,” she wrote in an Instagram post. She said she then worked most of her shift before being summoned to the office, where she was fired and escorted off the premises.
Israel does emphatically denies the accusation that it is carrying Genocide in Gaza.
NYU Langone spokesman Steve Ritea confirmed that Ms. Jabr was fired after her speech and said that there had also been “a prior incident.”
“Hesen Jabr was warned in December, following a previous incident, not to bring his views on this divisive and charged issue into the workplace,” Mr. Ritea said in a statement. “Instead, she chose not to draw attention to it at a recent employee recognition event that was well attended by colleagues, some of whom appeared upset after the comments. her argument.”
“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 said there had been tension at work for a long time. Her posts describe heated political debates on the labor and delivery floor. “The pure psychological warfare that NYU has waged on me as a nurse, as a Muslim, as a Palestinian, and as a woman, has only made me resolute,” said a message she posted on Facebook.
Ms. Jabr’s activism stems from her childhood: When she was in fifth grade in Louisiana, the American Civil Liberties Union File 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 night.
Ms. Jabr, who has worked at NYU Langone since 2015, said that in recent months she had been questioned repeatedly by hospital administrators 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 employees around the country have fired, ban or investigation for their comments on the Israel-Hamas war. While some states, such as Connecticut, have limited the ability of employers to fire workers for their opinions or speech, New York’s protections for workers very strict. more limited.
In Ms. Jabr’s case, she was invited to the podium and gave a brief speech at the awards ceremony, in which, according to the hospitalshe received the award given to “a nurse who exemplifies the meaning of compassionate care for patients and their families during the period of perinatal bereavement.”
Before turning to the war in Gaza, Ms. Jabr expressed gratitude to her colleagues and said the award belonged to them: “Honestly, it belongs to all the nurses in labor who took the hand of a grieving mother.
In the interview, Ms. Jabr defended her speech and said that talking about the war was “very appropriate” given the nature of the award she won.
“It’s an award for the bereaved; it is for mothers who are grieving,” she noted.
