The International Association of Relational Psychotherapists and Psychoanalysts has responded with fear and suppression to efforts by advocates for Palestinian mental health to raise awareness of Palestinian conditions at its June conference in New York– even calling for a police presence. The association is promoting Israel and its plan to hold its 2019 conference in Tel Aviv, despite a groundswell of opposition.
The New York Times article, “’Next Year in Jerusalem!’ In Israel, Eurovision Win Is Seen as a Diplomatic Victory, Too,” has enough accuracy to sound credible, but wreaks of the kind of bias and double speak that infects much of the main stream media.
Why hold an international mental health conference which many of the psychoanalysts and psychotherapists will not be able to get into the country? Dr. Samah Jabr, a Palestinian clinician, and Jewish Voice for Peace have created a petition asking the IARPP to change the location of its 2019 conference from Tel Aviv. Maybe Jordan or Cyprus?
Haaretz reports: “Israel says the migrants have 60 days to accept the offer to leave the country for an unnamed African destination in exchange for $3,500 and a plane ticket. Those who don’t by April 1 will be incarcerated indefinitely.”
The Israeli Knesset voted earlier this month to amend the penal code in order to remove restriction on judges issuing the death penalty for those involved in murders while carrying out “terrorist operations.” The bill has not been adopted yet. From the monthly report on Palestinian health and human rights from Jewish Voice for Peace.
Kadima, the Seattle Reconstructionist Jewish community, gave an award to a grassroots immigrants’ rights group, the Northwest Detention Center Resistance/Resistencia al NWDC, which focuses on a federal detention center in Tacoma, after the Jewish Federations of Seattle chose to honor the police department, despite its record of excessive force.
When journalists ask, Will Palestinians turn to violence? they express the belief that Israelis are peaceful. And they ignore the fact that the occupation in many dimensions is a form of violence: functionally, institutionally, politically, emotionally.
Alice Rothchild attended a benefit dinner for the Institute for Middle East Understanding and found it to be a fundraiser, a celebration, a showcase of the active, committed Palestinian community, and also a uniquely Yom Kippur moment. She writes it was an opportunity “to join the celebration of a movement of creative, thoughtful, very visible Palestinians who are building their own powerful voice in U.S. society, linking arms with others in the struggle for justice.”
During the high holidays, Jews must consider the nature of the state that claims to speak in their name: Political Zionism in practice in Israel has produced a settler colonial state founded on the basis of establishing an Arab free state, where Jewish trauma, aspirations, and history are privileged at the expense of everyone else and this continues to this moment.
Washington Senator Maria Cantwell is a co-sponsor of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act that the Israel lobby has pushed in Congress, and she claims to be a supporter of human rights and free speech. Several of her constituents meet with a Cantwell staffer to explain that the boycott movement is trying to free Palestinians living under occupation and is not anti-Semitic.