Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore said that claims “Zionist” doctors harmed patients were a tenet of anti-Semitism.
“A call to purge dangerous ‘Zionist doctors’ and ‘decolonise’ medicine,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“Out of the slime of racist history crawls the blood libel and Stalin’s anti-Jewish Doctor’s Plot: he devised personally the lie of Jewish faux-healers who killed.
“Even for our times this is gross.”
Katherine Brodsky, a US author, asked: “How come it’s so common for those who claim to be actively “anti-racist” to turn out to be some of the most racist people out there?”
However, Ms Rao was supported by Rupa Marya, professor of hospital medicine at the University of California San Francisco.
“The presence of Zionism in US medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity,” she said.
“Zionism is a supremacist; racist ideology and we see Zionist doctors justifying the genocide of Palestinians. How does their outlook/position impact priorities in US medicine?”
She continued: “Zionism in US medicine — coupled with the Israeli government’s operations to discredit and destroy the careers of any critics, funded by the large donors who support US academic medicine — is why US medical institutions have said nothing while Gaza’s hospitals are bombed.”
Pair dropped by agency
As the Gaza conflict unfolded in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel, Ms Rao was an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause.
It led to Ms Rao and Ms Jackson, who were working on a play based on Race2Dinner, being dropped by the Creative Artists Agency, which represented them.
“Our theatre agent at CAA has dropped me and Regina Jackson because she is offended by our words in support of Palestinian life,” she wrote on X.
“Our words denouncing genocide. This is McCarthyism on steroids and ethnic cleansing. We are disgusted but not shocked.”
The agency, which said it represented many people who supported Palestine, explained it dropped Ms Rao because it believed she had crossed the line into anti-Semitism and hate speech.
It had been offended by Ms Rao describing Zionists as “bloodthirsty genocidal ghouls”.
