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By: Travis Wayne
BEACON HILL, MA – On the morning of September 9, 2025, organizers from an anti-Zionist coalition of Massachusetts residents arrived at the Massachusetts State House to rally with supporters for their cause: stop a partnership signed by Governor Maura Healey with Israel’s largest medical system to launch an Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup accelerator in the Bay State.
Sheba Medical, its primary site in operation since the Nakba, is funding its AI arm under the name ARC: Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate. ARC aims to shape healthcare by “connecting entrepreneurs and clinicians, advancing the development and implementation of new technologies.” The main goal of the ARC startup accelerator is to create pipelines, to make it easier for experimental products to be used in clinical settings, with a particular focus on three kinds of technology: diagnostic tools, digital health platforms, and “workforce support technologies.”
Sheba ARC is thus poised upon its 2026 launch to fundamentally alter the management of both patients (through diagnostic tools and digital health platforms) and workers (through workforce support), making both more heavily integrated and reliant on AI technology from the State of Israel.
Start-up Accelerator Against a Backdrop of Genocide
The Governor’s Office announced the partnership back in May 2025. While Governor Healey at the time mainly focused on Massachusetts’ status as a “global hub for healthcare” ready for the accelerator to contribute to the state’s so-called “innovation-based economy,” the Consul General of Israel to New England Benny Sharoni was more explicit about the contract’s actual impact:
Opportunities for deeper collaboration between Israel and Massachusetts are both real and exciting—especially in biotech and life sciences, where both are global leaders. Together, the innovation ecosystems of Israel and the Greater Boston Area can drive breakthroughs in science and medicine for the benefit of all.
The benefit of all pointedly does not include benefits to the Palestinian healthcare system. While Sheba floods money into an AI accelerator to make patient and worker management less human, accessing Massachusetts’ healthcare as a “soft landing pad” in U.S. markets, Gaza’s healthcare system in totally collapsed, with Israel has killed more than 55,000 Palestinians less than forty miles from Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv.
“The Israeli medical establishment in general identifies with Israel’s colonial project and puts the colonial project over the most basic ethical principles of their profession,” wrote Neve Gordon, the former inaugural director of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and one of three authors who wrote “The Shame of Israeli Medicine” cited by the organizers of Sheba Out of MA, which describes the ways in which the apartheid system is endemic to Israeli medicine. The authors call for the total boycott of the medical institutions of Israel — like Sheba.
Or as one organizer read: “we must not partner with entities that serve as arms of the regime.”
Taxpayer Coalition Petitions the Governor
The ways in which Sheba ARC will make Massachusetts even more complicit in the U.S.-Israeli genocide, taxpayer dollars even more blood-soaked, is what drove the taxpayer coalition to the steps of the State House.
The Sheba Out of MA coalition is led by Healthcare Workers for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine but assembled together signatories from 38 other local organizations including thirteen neighborhood-based pro-Palestine formations, Doctors Against Genocide, Physicians for Humanity, United American Indians of New England, and the Boston Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
HAPPENING NOW—WE ARE DELIVERING OUR LETTER TO THE HEALEY ADMIN
More than 2,800 MA residents and 30+ organizations have signed our letter
MA residents and taxpayers say NO to Sheba ARC and NO to genocide!
Add your name: https://t.co/IJ362kR911 pic.twitter.com/pyER5GrNJr
— Jewish Voice for Peace – Boston (@JVPBoston) September 9, 2025
Jordana Laks, an organizer with the Healthcare Workers for Palestine, read from the letter to the gathered crowd while other organizers delivered the letter itself. They shared the words of one signatory after another from across Massachusetts. One Weston medical professional wrote that, “as a physician, I find it particularly appalling to welcome an Israeli healthcare company when Israel has made [destroying Gaza’s medical facilities] its priority.” Another taxpayer said it was a true shame for the Governor to forge such a partnership, “especially in the name of AI technology.”
Around noon, organizers returned from delivering the signed letter to the Governor’s Office.
Speaking to Working Mass as the crowd dispersed, Laks said:
We want safe homes, abundant food, excellent schools, healthcare as a human right–not financial and moral support for Israel. Call Governor Healey to stop Sheba ARC from pervading Massachusetts healthcare.
Sheba isn’t the first such partnership that anti-Zionist coalitions have forced to end in the Greater Boston area. In April 2025, BDS Boston successfully forced MIT-ILP to cancel its lucrative contract with Elbit Systems.
You can sign the Sheba Out of MA petition as an individual or organization or call the Governor’s Office to call for Sheba Out of MA.
Travis Wayne is the deputy managing editor of Working Mass and a member of Boston DSA.
The post Sheba Out of MA: Taxpayers Deliver Letter Demanding No Israeli AI in MA Healthcare appeared first on Working Mass.
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