- everything is fine*
- Posts
- 'Dear friends of Hamas'
'Dear friends of Hamas'
Who's who at Melbourne's Israeli health conference
Alex McKinnon
March 11, 2025
This week, the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre is hosting the ARC APAC Innovation Summit. Hosted by the ARC Centre for Digital Innovation at Israel’s Sheba Medical Centre and sponsored by the Victorian government, the Summit bills itself as “a convergence of minds, ideas and unwavering commitment to transforming healthcare … [and] to create impact in global healthcare and digital health by connecting partners and delegates in a meaningful way”.
Located in Tel Aviv, Sheba Medical Centre is Israel’s largest hospital — one that vocally voices support for the IDF and the war on Gaza on its social media accounts. Sheba has also stayed silent regarding medical atrocities committed by Israel since the start of the war, including the killing of at least 1200 Palestinian healthcare workers, the 136 air strikes carried out on Gaza hospitals as of July 2024, and the ongoing abduction and torture of Palestinian medical workers.
Besides its high-minded theme, ‘Transforming Healthcare by Fostering Innovation’, the Summit also represents a deepening of the longstanding ties between the Victorian government and the Israeli tech industry. While a memorandum of understanding between the Victorian jobs and industry department and the Israeli defence ministry was allowed to lapse in December 2024 following public pressure, initiatives like the Victoria-Israel Science and Technology Research and Development Fund, which supports “the support of new technologies from proof of concept to a minimum viable product stage of development in respective markets,” and the Trade and Investment office established in Tel Aviv by the Andrews government in 2017, are ongoing.
The Summit’s two-day program features some of the biggest names in Israeli, Australian and international health. Royal Melbourne Hospital CEO Shelley Dolan, St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne CEO Adj. Prof. Nicole Tweddle, NSW Health chief medical officer Dr Sid Vohra, Sydney Local Health District chief executive Dr. Teresa Anderson, Monash Health CEO Prof. Eugene Yafele, Beyond Blue CEO Georgie Harman, former Governor of Victoria the Hon. Linda Dessau and Medibank group chief medical officer Dr. Andrew Wilson are on the bill alongside Sheba Medical Centre director general Prof. Yitshak Kreiss, Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce national chairman Leon Kempler AM, New Zealand commissioner of health Prof. Lester Levy, and Dr Björn Zoéga MD, PhD, deputy CEO of the King Faisal Specialist Hospital Research Centre in Saudi Arabia.
Several especially prominent figures are no longer on the Summit’s program. Israeli director of public health Sharon Alroy-Preis and Victorian secretary of health Prof. Euan Wallace AM withdrew from the lineup after activist group Healthcare Workers for Human Rights drew public attention to the Summit. A petition demanding that Victorian governmental and healthcare organisations withdraw from the conference and cut ties with Sheba has gathered nearly 1800 signatures, and Victorian Greens MP for Brunswick Dr Tim Read has spoken out about the conference following a meeting with the group.
“Australian healthcare leaders and organisations have both an ethical and legal obligation to assess their work through the lens of human rights. This includes evaluating institutional collaborations to ensure that partners adhere to international humanitarian and human rights law,” HCWHR wrote in letters to the Summit’s prominent Australian attendees.
“Israel’s total destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system further highlights the ethical and legal risks of Australian Health leaders engaging with Israeli institutions in such a context. The collaboration between Sheba Medical Centre and the ARC APAC Summit raises serious questions about the duty of healthcare leaders, institutions, and research organisations to cut ties with a country that violates international law. Collaborations of this nature bear ramifications beyond clinical, technological or economic advancement that leaders of any institution yet to cut ties with states accused of genocide and crimes against humanity … should carefully consider.”
Besides the tacit acknowledgement of the backlash represented by Alroy-Preis and Wallace’s withdrawals from the conference, only one other attendee responded to HCWHR’s letters. The group received two replies from Prof. Stephen Davis, a professor of translational neuroscience at the University of Melbourne and the director of the Melbourne Brain Centre at Royal Melbourne Hospital who is set to appear on a Summit panel on remote and at-home care.
Writing from one of his professional email accounts on February 20, Davis disputed the central points HCWHR raised in their original letter. “[The Summit] is not a political conference, which renders the vast majority of your points raised irrelevant and unhelpful,” he wrote.
“It is clear from your rhetoric … which includes a number of factually incorrect or misleading political points, that your aim is to turn this into a political issue, when it has nothing to do with this. Much of the technology and innovation discussed at the conference will support Israel’s hospitals and their medical professionals to continue to provide vital healthcare to both Israeli and Palestinian people.”
Four days later, HCWHR received another reply from Davis, this one from his personal email:
“Dear friends of Hamas,
I look forward to participating in this important event. I have also blocked your emails. I do agree that the suffering in Gaza is a tragedy due to your terrorist colleagues who delight in using Palestinians as human shields, hiding in hospitals, killing and torturing Israelis on Oct 7 and their heinous treatment of the hostages.
Sincerely
Stephen Davis AO”
HCWHR also provided me with an image taken from Davis’ Facebook which appears to show Davis holding an assault rifle alongside the caption: “Hebron guarding our land!”
I sent questions to Davis, Royal Melbourne Hospital and the University of Melbourne on March 4 asking for comment, and followed up yesterday. I have not received a reply. Nor have I received a response to questions sent to the Summit’s contact email yesterday.
As of today, Davis is still listed on the Summit’s ‘Speakers’ page.
If you’ve got anything to spare, please consider giving some money to this fundraiser I’m running for Noor Hammad, a young mum in Gaza, and her baby daughter Hoor. Any money raised will be sent to Noor's brother Abdallah Abdalrahim, who lives in Sweden and can send her money directly.
Become a paid subscriber
If you’d like to further support this newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. I don’t paywall anything, but paid subscriptions help pay the bills and let me keep doing this work.
Reply