Hello, dear one, you are listening to Green Dreamer, and I'm your host, Kamehashane.

A few weeks ago in early July, I went live on Substack to interview Dr. Rupa Maria,

who we had the honor of having on the show a couple years ago.

She was fired by her employer back in May for speaking up for Palestinian

liberation and is now gearing up to pursue legal action for her protected speech. I wanted to share

our live recorded conversation as an episode here with you as well, as the people and more than

human community in Gaza continue to face

increasingly dire and deadly forced starvation. You can watch the full video version of our

conversation on my substack at kamea.substack.com. And thank you so much for your support to help make our interviews possible.

And I'm here if you need somebody to call, but I might not pick up, because I'm going through a lot,

you know, feeling it all, all of the time really not doing well

if you couldn't tell. Dr. Maria, welcome. It's an honor to get to speak with you again.

Thank you for having me back. Thank you for continuing to do what you do, the voice you bring to so many important issues and perspectives. Thank you.

We're here to talk about some major recent events in your life as a physician. And this particular quote from you sums a lot of this up,

but you say, I didn't expect that my career ending move would be to say stop bombing hospitals,

end quote. So for people who are not familiar with your case and what you've been going through,

what were the timeline and reasons behind your suspension leading up to you being fired?

Yeah. Well, I was a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, or UCSF for, I've been there for 23 years. I started there as a medical resident and then continued on as a professor for many years.

And throughout my time at UCSF, I was harassed by the leadership whenever I would advocate for marginalized people.

Whether it was my patient, Charles Hill, who was shot by the BART police, whether it was my patients in the hospitals who were, you know, not getting the standard

of care because they happened to be black or poor. So these kinds of things would always be

met with pushback. I was often called unprofessional or called aggressive or, you know,

...