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ABSTRACT
A contentious issue in the Israel-Palestine conflict is the ongoing construction of settlements in the occupied West Bank along with its related policies, both of which have had impacts on the lives of resident Palestinians. These impacts have been documented by various UN and non-governmental agencies yet have been insufficiently studied in the academic literature. This article aims to review the literature on the social determinants of health for West Bank Palestinians and understand how settlement construction and policy influence these determinants. To accomplish these aims, the article first includes an analysis of how military infrastructure, resource allocation, land appropriation and house demolition related to the settlements influence the lives of West Bank Palestinians. The article then proceeds to review available literature on the social determinants of health in the West Bank, most notably: access to healthcare, exposure to political violence, economic conditions and water contamination, with the goal of understanding how settlement-related policies are related to these social determinants of health.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Dr. Harry Shannon and Laura Banfield for their support during the early stages of organizing and outlining this review. We would also like to thank the students and faculty in the MSc Global Health programme at McMaster for their feedback on the oral presentaton of this work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Khalid Fahoum
Khalid Fahoum is a medical student at Weill Cornell Medical College with primary research interests in the social determinants of health and how they disproportionately impact vulnerable communities locally and abroad. His experience ranges from basic to clinical research at the undergraduate, graduate, and medical school level. During his MS in Global Health, his research focused on the social determinants of health for West Bank Palestinians and his work in large part is published in this paper. At the medical school level, his research has focused on alcohol-related liver disease with the goal of exploring how social determinants can be prioritized to a greater extent in clinical decision-making.
Izzeldin Abuelaish
Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Palestinian Canadian physician and an internationally recognized human rights and inspirational peace activist devoted to advancing health and education opportunities for women and girls in the Middle East, through both his research and his charitable organization: The Daughters for Life Foundation. He has dedicated his life to using health as a vehicle for peace, and, despite all odds, succeeded, aided by a great determination of spirit, strong faith, and a stalwart belief in hope and family. He is a man who walks the walk and who leads by example. Dr. Abuelaish has been nominated five times for the Nobel peace Prize, and he is fondly known as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi and the “Martin Luther King of the Middle East”, having dedicated his life to using health as a vehicle for peace. Dr. Abuelaish’s impact on peace-seeking communities is exceptional. He is an internationally-renowned speaker, having spoken at the Canadian House of Commons, the American Congress, the Chilean Senate and Parliament, the European Parliament at Place Du Luxembourg in Brussels, the State Department, Forum 2000 in Prague, and many more. Dr. Abuelaish has also spoken at academic institutions and organizations in Canada, the United States, Europe, Africa, and Australia and Asia. Currently, Dr. Abuelaish is an associate professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. He remains deeply committed to his humanitarian activism in addition to his roles as a charity leader and inspirational educator.