Por Palestine Mental Health Networks
 |
An injured child receives treatment at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital after Israeli airstrike of the Nuseirat refugee camp, Gaza Strip. © 2023 UNRWA Photo by Ashraf Amra.
A call from the International Palestine Mental Health Networks
We, the International Palestine Mental Health Networks, mark three years of genocide. Let the record speak.
Since October 2023, we have witnessed unfathomable carnage. For the first time in human history, a genocide was livestreamed on our phones. More than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, and that is an undercount. Over twenty-three months, one Palestinian child was killed every hour. A UN Commission of Inquiry found that Israeli forces deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children. Ninety-nine American doctors and nurses who served in Gaza wrote to President Biden that they had witnessed “crimes beyond comprehension.” Every one of them who worked in emergency, intensive care, or surgery treated young children shot in the head or chest, regularly, even daily. They wrote that this violence must have been deliberately directed at children, and that shooting on this scale, sustained for a year, could not be accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities. We have witnessed a man-made famine, with children no more than skin and bones on our screens. Torture and sexualized violence against Palestinian captives have been documented.
Gaza has broken records no place should hold. The UN Secretary-General called it a graveyard for children. It has become the cemetery of international law. It has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. Children’s limbs were amputated without anesthesia because anesthesia was treated as contraband. People are dying of curable infections because antibiotics are blocked. Israel has killed more journalists than any government since records began, at least 189 in Gaza alone. More than 1,700 health workers have been killed. Between 7 and 12 October 2023 alone, approximately 6,000 bombs were dropped, destroying over 12,600 homes. More than 200,000 tonnes of explosives were dropped on Gaza in almost two years – the equivalent of the total energy of approximately 13 Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs.
Hospitals were bombed and besieged. Israel claimed Hamas was using them. The UN human rights office found those claims vague and unsupported. Western governments and media repeated them anyway.
A ceasefire was declared in October 2025. Since then, Israel has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians.We watched the UN Security Council hand Gaza to a “Board of Peace” chaired by the United Stqtes president whose administration armed the genocide.
The violence is not contained in Gaza. In the West Bank, more Palestinians were killed between 2023 and 2025 than in the previous seventeen years combined, among them 268 children. Nearly 46,000 Palestinians have been driven from their homes by military raids, settler attacks, and demolitions.
This genocide is funded by our taxes, and it continues because of our silence. How many more children must be murdered before our professional bodies say the word genocide?
The late psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton gave us a name for this: malignant normality. It is the imposition of destructive expectations that are made to seem ordinary and legal. He came to it through his study of the Nazi doctors, ordinary professionals who adapted to the norms of their time. He warned that “professionals are required for maintaining that malignant normality.” He saw it again in our own field, when not only individual American psychologists but their professional organization accommodated torture. Lifton called on us to become witnessing professionals who use what we know to expose malignant normality and refuse it.
We call on our colleagues worldwide to uphold the ethic of do no harm.
We are not without power.
However, when we remain silent or neutral on issues of injustice, we are being complicit. As Desmond Tutu stated, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Under the Genocide Convention, complicity with genocide is considered a criminal act; and, the obligation to prevent such acts of genocide arises the very instant the threat of genocide is recognized. That moment has passed.
The 2005 call by Palestinian civil society for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, and the call of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, have never been more urgent. On October 22, we will be meeting with Omar Barghouti to learn how to contribute to the end of this carnage. Join us. Register here.
We call on mental health practitioners and their professional organizations worldwide to heed this call:
1) Cut all ties with apartheid Israel and its complicit institutions, as well as with corporations implicated in its gross human rights violations.
2) Audit their ties to identify what must be cut: agreements, conferences, and trainings with complicit Israeli organizations, and investments, sponsorships, and purchases involving companies that UN and civil society research identify as complicit.
3) Exclude complicit Israeli organizations from their spaces, including co-hosting, presenting, and affiliation, in keeping with the PACBI guidelines, until they publicly recognize Palestinian rights under international law and end all complicity in violating them.
We mark these three years with rage, grief, and contestation, and with hope. There is no healing without liberation. There is no end to trauma without justice and accountability.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário