Ideology and biomedicine in the Palestinian West Bank (Israel)

Health care services in the Palestinian West Bank have been highly politicized from their inception. The dissertation examines the intersection of ideology and medicine in four cases: the Israeli military health services provided for the Palestinians under occupation until 1994; the "leftist" health organizations aligned with the three Palestinian nationalist Marxist political parties; the Islamic institutions widely associated with the "fundamentalist" organization Hamas; and the Palestinian Ministry of Health which took over the Israeli-run system in 1994. The first chapter considers how a military Zionist colonialist ideology was "materialized" in the health service infrastructure. I argue that the health services functioned ideologically as an "epidemiological control zone" to protect the Israelis from their own fears of contamination from the Arab Other. Chapter Two on the "leftist" doctors first describes their discourse of "revolutionary" medicine. It considers how doctors' most personal stories, beliefs, and values are "external" to the individual: that is, the fantasies of Marxists reflect the ideological fantasies of Marxism itself. The third chapter analyzes the particular ideological confluence of Islamic "fundamentalism" and scientific biomedicine. I focus in particular on an "anti-smoking" machine which was much touted in the clinic, and which I see as reifying an Islamic identity, purified of contaminating Western desire. The final chapter first considers both the productive capacity as well as the limitations of the current Palestinian Ministry of Health's utopian nationalism. In a second section, I explore how the new "post-colonial" authorities have retained and replicated the vertical and centralized system they inherited from the Israelis and the ideological implications of this. Each chapter aims to develop a deeper understanding of ideology by adopting the Lacanian-inspired framework of Slavoj Zizek.