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The American Academy of Pediatrics Punished Me for Speaking Up About Gaza

The AAP has shown sustained moral failure when it comes to confronting the genocide—as I know firsthand.

Palestinian children receive treatment at es-Seraya Sahra Hospital in Gaza on November 9, 2025.

“We allow negroes to come to our meeting and we fix a separate place for them to sit. They do not become members. If they became members they would want to come and eat with you at the table. You cannot hold them down.”

These notes from a November 1944 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Executive Committee meeting capture the conundrum leaders of the relatively new medical society faced over the anticipated challenge of allowing highly regarded Black pediatricians, specifically Drs. Alonzo deGrate Smith and Roland Boyd Scott, to become members.

Nearly 60 years later, in the months after the murder of George Floyd, the AAP Board of Directors issued a statement titled, “Truth, Reconciliation, and Transformation: Continuing on the Path to Equity,” formally apologizing for “the racism that contributed to the inequities that Drs deGrate Smith, Scott, and other pediatricians have endured.” The board then declared, “The AAP as an organization is on a firm pathway to broadly establishing an equity agenda through meaningful diversity and inclusion.”

For me, as a board-certified physician in pediatrics and internal medicine, that 2020 statement made the AAP a compelling professional home. I believed the AAP had stood by its values of putting kids first and being dedicated to the health of all children. During the 75th anniversary of AAP’s flagship publication, Pediatrics, I was invited to write a reflective perspective and noted that “the AAP calls out pediatrics’ history, reckons with its current state, and calls all in to a future in which Pediatrics, both the journal and profession, truly meet all the needs for all children to live full and healthy lives.” I was proud to serve the AAP in a variety of state and national capacities, eventually being elected by my peers as the chair of the AAP’s Council on Health Equity.

But just over five years after AAP’s national leadership publicly committed to moral clarity and courage in the work to bring about health equity, we have seen that commitment tossed aside in favor of a sustained moral decay—particularly when it comes to the AAP’s failure to speak out against Israel’s slaughter of children as part of what is now widely agreed to be a genocide in Gaza.

I know this firsthand, because in February, I was summarily removed from my chairmanship and barred from serving in any leadership role in the Academy for five years—all because I urged the AAP to follow its own stated principles as they pertained to the Gaza genocide. But my expulsion was only one part of a larger pattern of complicity from the organization.

Throughout 2024 and 2025, numerous members, including the AAP’s member-elected health equity leadership, raised serious concerns about the Academy’s handling of the genocide as well as anti-Palestinian racism. A group of over 100 pediatricians sent a letter to the board and the CEO in the fall of 2024, stating that unless the AAP advocated for all children, it did not represent them. They committed to leave the Academy unless the AAP used its lobbying resources to speak up for, and help end the active killing of, children in Gaza.

Their deadline came and went. AAP leadership seemed unconcerned about losing engaged members who were clearly aligned with the vision laid out in the AAP’s bylaws, “that all children shall have optimal health and well-being and are valued by society.” A letter was eventually sent from then-AAP president Dr. Sue Kressly to outgoing Secretary of State Anthony Blinken regarding kidnapped Palestinian pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya and inquiring about the status of access to pediatric care in Gaza. After this small step received backlash from pro-Israel groups, the AAP did not........

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