We are members of psychoanalytic organisations in solidarity with our colleagues in Gaza, standing with Palestine against the genocide currently being waged by the Israeli state. This current onslaught, which has already resulted to date in the death of more than ten thousand people in Gaza, and many murders by settlers of Palestinians in the West Bank, is being conducted with the support of regimes in the global north that care nothing for human life. The Israeli state and those who deliberately abet it care nothing for those they portray as sub-human, and whom they tolerate, at best, as powerless victims.
We are also aware of instances of clinical practitioners inside the Israeli state siding with that state and causing obstructions in the contracted supervision of Arab psychotherapists, with consequent effects on already traumatised Arab patients. This is unconscionable complicity in oppression, a betrayal of the ethics of psychoanalytic practice. This context, as many international organisations and local Israeli organisations have declared for many years, is apartheid. Still worse are the proclamations of psychoanalysts inside and outside Israel that instrumentalise the 7 October attacks in order to support the ongoing invasion of Gaza.
Critical support does not preclude unconditional support for a people dispossessed of their land for 75 years (nor condemnation of the Hamas attacks). Ambivalence about organisations and slogans engaging in resistance does not warrant hypocritical ‘neutrality’ over the rights of the Palestinian people. Our task is to resist the ideological and state offensive carried out against the Palestinians. We call on our colleagues to dissociate themselves from the war on Gaza, and to state unequivocally that they will speak and act for Palestine. This is no time to be silent. Yes to resistance.
You can read the statement and see the current list of signatories, individuals and organisations here. The Red Clinic, a collective of communist mental health workers, is actively supporting psychotherapists through Arabic-speaking groups in Palestine, and organised an online solidarity meeting in October 2023. We ask psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic organisations willing to sign this statement and to be involved in further solidarity events to contact us at redclinicenquiries@gmail.com
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