Leen Ezzeddine, the US-Lebanese graduate at Harvard Medical School who chose to speak out

“Leen Ezzeddine, the US-Lebanese graduate at Harvard Medical School who chose to speak out Submitted by Adam Chamseddine on Mon, 06/01/2026 - 15:30 At its core, her message was simple: medicine is not only about treating the body in front of you. It is about refusing the systems that decide some bodies are less worthy of care Harvard Medical School graduate Leen Ezzeddine dedicates her commencement speech to Lebanon and Palestine, in Boston, US, on 28 May 2026 (screengrab) Off When Leen Ezzeddine stood before her classmates at Harvard Medical School, the moment could have been framed as a familiar story of immigrant success: a Lebanese woman graduating as a doctor from one of the world’s most prestigious institutions. But Ezzeddine chose to tell a different story. In her graduation speech last week, she spoke of circumstance, borders, luck and the thin line separating her life from the lives of medical students in Lebanon and Palestine who share the same ambition but are made to study under drones, bombardment and displacement. That line, for her, was not abstract. While she was pursuing her studies at Harvard, a US missile launched by Israel levelled her family home in Arab Salim, her mother’s village in southern Lebanon, in October 2024. It was the village where she used to spend her summers, surrounded by cousins, relatives, and her grandparents, Hayat Chamseddine and Ali Zayour, who were later forced to leave and relocate to Beirut after their house was destroyed. Arab Salim has remained under repeated Israeli bombardment , including as Ezzeddine delivered the speech that would later circulate widely online. Leen Ezzedine, a graduate student of Harvard Medical School, dedicated her commencement speech during the graduation ceremony to "the youth of Dahyie, the sons of Nabatiyeh, the people of Tyre." During the speech Ezzedine condemned her university's involvement in supporting… pic.twitter.com/dzX5Jmub8j — Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) May 30, 2026 The contrast was stark: she was standing in Harvard as a new doctor, while the village that helped shape her childhood and family memories was being attacked. That contradiction became the emotional and political centre of her intervention. Her speech was not only about Gaza, or Lebanon, or the violence of war. It was about what it means to become a doctor inside an elite institution while entire communities are being denied the basic conditions of life. Battlegrounds, from Gaza to US campuses “I know that I am not here just because of hard work or because I am more deserving,” she told Middle East Eye after the speech. “I simply had a very different set of circumstances.” Her remarks at the graduation ceremony came at a moment when Harvard, like many US universities, had become a battleground over Palestine, academic freedom, donor pressure, student protest , and the limits of institutional speech. ‘The only difference between me and students who shared the same dream... is that they had to pursue that dream in conditions no student should ever have to endure’ - Leen Ezzeddine Across American campuses, students demanding divestment from companies linked to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza have faced disciplinary measures, police crackdowns, suspensions, and accusations that their activism crosses the line from political protest into campus disorder or antisemitism. At Harvard, that debate had already reached commencement. A year earlier, hundreds of graduates walked out in support of students who had been barred from graduating over their involvement in a pro-Palestinian encampment. The university’s handling of Gaza-related activism has since become part of a broader national argument over whether US academia protects dissent or punishes it when the subject is Palestine. Ezzeddine’s speech entered that charged space not as a political performance, but as personal testimony. She spoke as a doctor, a Lebanese woman, and someone acutely aware that her own life had been shaped not only by effort, but by luck - a chance that many did not have. That comparison became one of the emotional centres of her address. Ezzeddine connected her own path in medicine to students in Lebanon and Palestine who share the same determination, discipline and devotion to medicine, but are forced to pursue it amid collapsing infrastructure and the constant threat of death. Harvard wins lawsuit against Trump, restoring nearly $3bn in funding Read More » “The only difference between me and students who shared the same dream, the same work ethic, and the same devotion to medicine,” she told MEE, “is that they had to pursue that dream in conditions no student should ever have to endure.” For Ezzeddine, that contrast was about restoring faces to people who are often discussed only as numbers, victims or political problems. Citing Black liberation activist Assata Shakur, she said dehumanisation is a precondition for violence. “People who live in other places have no faces,” she said, quoting Shakur. “Dehumanisation is a prerequisite of most forms of violence.” That, she said, was why the comparison mattered. She wanted to remind her peers, colleagues and mentors that the people being killed, displaced or denied the basic conditions of life are not abstractions. “We are human beings with faces, families, and dreams,” she said. “Lives no less full, no less sacred, and no less worthy than their own.” ‘Our work does not begin and end at the bedside’ The speech resonated because it was delivered from inside one of the institutions most associated with elite professional success. Ezzeddine was not speaking from outside the system, but from within it, at the very moment of being welcomed into one of its most powerful professions. That is what made her message sharper. For her, medicine cannot be separated from the structures that decide who has access to safety, care, food, movement, shelter and hospitals. “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale,” she told MEE. “Our work does not begin and end at the bedside.” A patient’s health, she argued, is shaped long before they reach a doctor. “A patient’s health is shaped by whether they have housing, clean water, food, safety, freedom of movement, and access to a hospital that has not been bombed or defunded,” she said. “So when political decisions determine who is allowed to live with dignity and who is denied the basic conditions of survival, doctors cannot pretend medicine and politics are separate.” A doctor checks the vitals of a Palestinian child at Al-Ahli Arab hospital, also known as the Baptist hospital, in Gaza City on 8 January 2025, during Israel’s war on the Palestinian enclave (Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP) Her words were also a challenge to medical education itself. In classrooms, students are trained to recognise dehumanisation as dangerous. They learn the language of health equity, structural violence, trauma, and the social determinants of health. But Gaza, she suggested, exposed how quickly those principles can disappear when the lives in question become “politically inconvenient”. That contradiction has haunted many students and faculty across the United States since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Universities have issued statements, tightened protest rules, investigated students, negotiated with encampments, faced donor revolts, and been pulled into congressional and media battles over antisemitism and free speech. Ezzeddine’s intervention was important because it refused to treat silence as neutral. Asked whether she felt there were personal or professional risks in speaking out, she placed herself within a longer history of people whose moral positions were treated as dangerous in their own time. “Speaking out in moments of injustice has never been easy in real time,” she said. She pointed to figures such as Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr, all of whom, she noted, were condemned before later being celebrated. “Moral clarity is often most costly before it becomes widely accepted,” she said. Then she invoked another Afro-American rights activist and thinker, Audre Lorde: “Your silence will not protect you.” Taking action If the speech drew support, it was because many heard in it not only anger, but responsibility. Ezzeddine was not asking doctors to become politicians. She was asking them to accept that medicine has political consequences when entire populations are denied the conditions required to survive. “For the past few years, the people who have reminded me why I went into medicine were not my professors with hundreds of publications or prestigious titles,” she said. Palestinian doctor Abu Safiya's health in 'alarming' condition, Israeli rights group warns Read More » Instead, she cited medical students like Ezz Lulu in Gaza, whose family was killed by an Israeli strike on their home, and physicians like prominent British-Palestinian surgeon Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta , “who have shown courage, service, and moral clarity under conditions most of us can barely imagine”. “To me,” she added, “they embody the deepest meaning of what it means to be a doctor.” The response to the speech soon moved beyond praise and online circulation. Ezzeddine launched a GoFundMe campaign to support pregnant women, newborns and displaced families in Lebanon with urgent essentials, including baby formula, diapers, mattresses, blankets, basic medical supplies and other living needs. But she sees the campaign as more than emergency relief. “It reminded me how many people in the US really are looking for a way to help,” she told MEE. “And how much power there is when fundraising becomes organised, community-rooted and accountable to people on the ground.” That may be the next stage of what began as a graduation speech: turning a moment of moral clarity into a structure of support. Longer term, Ezzeddine hopes to build something more formal: a grassroots organisation that can respond to urgent needs in Lebanon while also helping more people from communities like hers enter institutions such as Harvard, medicine and other spaces of power. “Because we need more of us in these rooms,” she said. 'We need more of us in these rooms' - Leen Ezzeddine Her speech did not resolve the contradictions she named. Harvard remains Harvard. US academia remains deeply contested terrain. Gaza remains a test of whether institutions that teach ethics, medicine, law, human rights and public service can apply those principles when the victims are “politically inconvenient”. But Ezzeddine’s speech mattered because it punctured the ceremony’s comfort. It insisted that a medical oath means little if it stops at the clinic door. It asked what it means to become a doctor in a world where some hospitals are protected and others are bombed, where some students graduate into prestige and others study under drones, where some lives are mourned by institutions and others are explained away. At its core, her message was simple: medicine is not only about treating the body in front of you. It is about refusing the systems that decide that some bodies are less worthy of care. And in a university environment where many have learned the cost of speaking about Palestine and Lebanon, Ezzeddine chose to speak anyway. Campus protests Beirut News Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:19 Update Date Override 0

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