“I’m going to report you. I can get you fired for that,” an ex-IDF soldier threatens in the hospital hallway. The former IDF soldier now working in my hospital does not realize I am a student and cannot be fired, only expelled. The interaction began when the former soldier asked me to step outside to talk about my keffiyeh-print scrub cap.

I spent the first months of the genocide unaware of the massive campaign to silence and discipline any med student who talked about it. I was living in Amman, where I had lived for five consecutive years while completing my PhD work. In August 2024, I returned to the US to finish my rotations as an MD/PhD student.

Thankfully, living in Amman, I missed out on that crucial period of socialization in which I might have learned to be quiet about a genocide for the sake of my residency match. Instead, I spent those months sitting with my friends in Amman as their family members were killed by the dozens with bombs sent by the US.

I first became aware of the repression taking place in the US when someone sent me a link to a livestream of the December 2023 anti-semitism hearings while I was on my way to dinner with a friend. In her car, we watched top US government officials debate about whether or not the use of the word “intifada” counted as violence. I don’t remember how many of her relatives in Gaza had already been killed at that point. But Israel eventually killed them all and they did it with bombs sent by the same politicians we watched debating the meaning of a word from a language that none of them spoke.

Two thousand pound airstrikes that wipe out entire families. A debate on Arabic linguistics in the US Congress. To watch both at the same time is disorienting, like looking through a camera that hums and clacks as it struggles to find an aperture that can bring two disparate realities into focus.

The frame through which these impossibly discordant scenes can somehow be reconciled is that of the Genocide Enablement Apparatus described by Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah. He identifies repression not as a byproduct but a central component of a singular apparatus operating across distant continents and disparate scales — from the microscopic to the genocidal — as it seeks to erase symbols of Palestinian life — like a keffiyeh print scrub cap — from the workplace and the earth.

It feels absurd to dissect the mechanisms of students’ repression after witnessing 18 months of violence carried out on a genocidal scale. Yet understanding the logic through which this microscopic form of violence operates allows us to resist it more effectively and, after all, Palestinians will free Palestine. The most effective form of solidarity we can offer from the imperial core is to clean up our own dirty backyard: to trace the winding pathways through which our institutions operate to enable the US-backed genocide, articulate these causal links with precision, and demand accountability in the places where we have maximum leverage.

Institutional violence operates almost invisibly through structures of protocol and policy that displace and distribute responsibility widely across a hierarchy of individuals just doing their jobs. Violence without a clear perpetrator often disappears against the background of the everyday — the way things work.

The ex-IDF soldier demands to see my name-tag which has slipped under my sweatshirt. A nurse I’ve always worked with amicably volunteers, helpfully: “if you want to report her, call upstairs and ask the charge nurse to contact her supervisor.”

The ex-IDF soldier follows this advice. An hour later as I attempt to suture a finger laceration for the first time, hands shaking, I can hear the conversation held publicly. There is some debate about who is the........

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