How an American-Born Jewish Feminist and Zionist Helped Build Israel’s Healthcare System

A persistent — and increasingly aggressive — claim circulating today insists that Israel’s world-class universal healthcare somehow exists “at the expense” of Americans. In this scapegoating narrative, the only reason the United States lacks universal healthcare is because American taxpayers are supposedly bankrolling Israel’s. Like most modern anti-Israel conspiracy theories, this one crumbles on contact with actual history. But nowhere does it disintegrate more completely than when confronted with a story its champions have almost certainly never heard: the story of Henrietta Szold.

Henrietta Szold, born in Baltimore in 1860, was a scholar, editor, translator and organizer of remarkable brilliance. She never studied medicine, yet she grasped something far more consequential: that Jewish national renewal required not only political aspiration but the creation of a society capable of sustaining life, dignity and hope. And here is the part the conspiracy theorists never mention — decades before the United States provided a single dollar of security aid to Israel, Szold and the women she inspired were building the medical infrastructure that would become one of the Jewish state’s central pillars.

If this sounds surprising, it is only because her legacy has been nearly erased from modern day discourse about Israel — whether out of neglect or because her story destabilizes fashionable narratives about Zionism. The truth is unmistakable: Israel’s healthcare system did not emerge from Pentagon budgets or from the modern U.S.-Israel alliance. It was created through the activism, philanthropy, and institutional genius of American Jewish women, led by Szold, beginning in 1912 — 36 years before Israel reclaimed sovereignty.

Szold’s mission took root in 1909, when she visited Ottoman-controlled Palestine and encountered a land in medical collapse. Malaria swept through entire regions. Trachoma robbed children of their sight. Typhoid and dysentery decimated infants. In many towns and villages, one in three babies died before reaching their first birthday. Healthcare was scarce. Sanitation was inconsistent. What Szold saw was not just poverty; it was a land too weakened by preventable illness to imagine a future, let alone build one.

She understood immediately what few had yet recognized: a people cannot rebuild their homeland while battling diseases that modern medicine already knew how to prevent.

Back in America, Szold founded Hadassah and mobilized American Jewish women into one of the most effective public-health and humanitarian movements of the 20th century. Her mission was not charity in a simplistic sense. It was statecraft — before there was a state. She built clinics, sanitation programs, child-welfare stations, nursing schools and, eventually, hospitals. She laid the groundwork for a healthy society long before the modern state of Israel existed to inherit it.

By 1918 — decades before any U.S.-Israel alliance — Szold had organized the dispatch of a Jewish American medical unit to newly British-controlled Palestine. Twenty doctors, 20 nurses and sanitation specialists arrived armed with sterilization equipment, modern medical tools and supplies — all funded through Jewish philanthropy. Their impact was immediate. They trained local staff, standardized nursing education, launched hygiene and vaccination campaigns and fought malaria by draining the swamps where mosquitoes bred. Infant mortality plummeted. Public health improved dramatically for everyone: Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Arabs and Bedouins.

This chapter of history, conspicuously missing from today’s discourse, is essential to understanding Zionism itself. From the 1910s through the 1940s, Hadassah clinics treated tens of thousands of patients, often in communities where most were not Jewish. British Mandate officials frequently relied on Hadassah because, in many regions, it was the only functioning medical system. These facts alone dismantle the claim that Zionism was inherently exclusionary or exploitative. In practice, it was a movement whose humanitarian reach uplifted all who lived in the land.

And this history does more than correct the record — it obliterates the contemporary claim that American military assistance finances Israel’s healthcare. Szold’s network of hospitals, clinics and public-health programs existed decades before Israel had a military and half a century before America became its strategic partner.

Today’s U.S. military aid — $3.8 billion annually — is spent almost entirely inside the United States, supporting American defense manufacturers and American jobs. It does not subsidize Israeli hospitals. It plays no role in Israel’s universal healthcare system, which is funded by Israeli taxpayers and operated by Israeli HMOs. And even if one imagines that this money could somehow be rerouted into American healthcare, the math is absurd. The United States spends nearly $5 trillion annually on healthcare. $3.8 billion wouldn’t cover even one major American city for more than a few weeks.

The narrative that Israel’s healthcare exists “at the expense of Americans” is not merely incorrect — it is a modern repackaging of an ancient antisemitic trope: the idea that Jewish well-being must inevitably come at someone else’s cost. The reality is precisely the opposite. Israel’s healthcare system is a testament to Jewish women, Jewish philanthropy and Jewish institution-building — decades before Washington recognized the strategic value of the U.S.–Israel alliance.

And it is a system that dramatically improved the lives of non-Jews. Hadassah’s founding ethos was to treat every person with dignity, regardless of faith, ethnicity or economic means. Malaria eradication saved thousands of Arab lives. Nursing programs trained Jews and Arabs together, creating rare spaces of shared civic purpose that transcended political divisions.

Healthcare, however, was just one dimension of Szold’s work. As head of Youth Aliyah, she helped rescue roughly 30,000 Jewish children fleeing Europe before and during the Holocaust, placing them in youth villages, schools and agricultural communities she helped design. By the time Israel declared independence in 1948, many of the medical institutions and public-health frameworks that sustained the young state already existed — thanks largely to her vision, discipline and organizational brilliance.

Henrietta Szold never held political office. Yet she shaped Israel’s character more profoundly than many who did. Her life, dedicated to the Jewish return to Zion, offers a decisive answer to those who claim Zionism is colonialism. Colonizers extract; Szold built. Colonizers enrich themselves; Szold mobilized women to lift a land out of illness and despair.

So, the next time someone insists that Israel’s healthcare exists because of American taxpayers — or that Israel’s well-being somehow undermines America’s — remember Henrietta Szold. Remember that the foundation of Israel’s medical system, now ranked among the world’s finest, was laid by American Jewish women armed not with weapons but with conviction, compassion and the belief that public health must be part of the bedrock of national self-determination.

Israel’s healthcare system wasn’t born of geopolitics or American aid. It was built with the help of a Jewish feminist and Zionist who understood that real nation-building begins with creating the institutions that safeguard everyone in the land.

Micha Danzig served in the Israeli Army and is a former police officer with the NYPD. He is currently an attorney and is very active with numerous Jewish and pro-Israel organizations, including Stand With Us and the FIDF, and is a national board member of Herut North America.