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We have published a new position paper revealing, for the first time, the severe disparities in access to family medicine specialists between Palestinian and Jewish communities in Israel. Although healthcare and health policy experts widely agree on the essential importance of family medicine expertise, these gaps remain unaddressed.
A comparison between two neighboring towns provides an illustrative example. The Palestinian town of Yafa an-Naseriyye, with a population of 19,000, has only one primary care physician who is a trained family medicine specialist. All others are either general practitioners without a recognized specialty or specialists in internal medicine. Meanwhile, in the neighboring Jewish town of Migdal HaEmek, there are eight family medicine specialists for 26,000 residents. Migdal HaEmek offers eight times as many weekly hours of specialist family medicine care per capita as its neighboring Palestinian town.
Like the residents of Yafa an-Naseriyye, tens of thousands of residents in Palestinian communities across Israel, and hundreds of thousands more in East Jerusalem, face severely restricted access to specialist family medicine. Only 19% of primary care physicians in Palestinian localities are trained family medicine specialists, with an additional 11% specialized in internal medicine. By contrast, in Jewish communities, 40% of primary care physicians are family medicine specialists and 19% are internal medicine specialists. Put differently, 70% of primary care physicians in Palestinian communities are general practitioners without any medical specialty, compared to 41% in Jewish communities (a figure that is itself far from ideal).
These disparities, along with the broader discrimination in primary care services in Palestinian communities, reflect the institutional discrimination faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel and the general disregard for their lives. To date, efforts to separately address specific manifestations of inequality between Jews and Palestinians in Israel have failed. Health gaps, like other forms of inequality, are not narrowing. Reducing these disparities requires recognition of the structural discrimination faced by Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel; acknowledgment that this discrimination must be dismantled at its root; and the implementation of comprehensive policy changes commensurate with that.
