Open letter: A call to boycott the Society of Psychotherapy Research (SPR) for its complicity in Israel's occupation, apartheid, and genocide in Palestine
Israeli universities as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians
Israel is committing the world’s first livestreamed genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, and in line with international law, Israel should be isolated and expelled from international fora. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has since 2004 called for a global boycott of apartheid complicit Israeli universities, as South African universities were likewise boycotted during the apartheid regime.
PACBI’s call for boycott, part of the wider Palestinian-led BDS movement, is not directed at individuals, but at institutions. This call targets Israeli universities because of their direct and indirect structural involvement and/or complicity in settler-colonialism, institutional discrimination, apartheid, persecution, military occupation, and now genocide. Maya Wind’s book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2024), demonstrates that all Israeli universities, from their inception (the first being Hebrew University in 1918) until the present, contribute to the system of colonial oppression of Palestinians, including the systematic destruction of the Palestinian centers of education and learning, or ‘scholasticide,’ a term coined by Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian academic at Oxford. Israeli universities also develop weapons, criminal military doctrines, and security technologies; they also contribute to the racial discrimination, slandering, and repression of non-Jewish students and staff.
SPR’s role as a complicit partner in Israel's crimes
By selectively presenting apartheid Israel as a hub of academic excellence, obscuring the role that Israeli universities play in sustaining and enabling a regime of military occupation, apartheid, and genocide, the Society for Psychotherapy Research (SPR) actively whitewashes and legitimizes Israel’s crimes. Rather than holding Israeli universities accountable or endorsing the growing international calls for boycott, SPR contributes to the normalization and international prestige of a state engaged in settler colonialism and systematic violence. By promoting the work of these institutions and ignoring their complicity, SPR lends credibility to actors embedded in structures of colonial domination. Whitewashing Israeli institutions that constitute a pillar of Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide renders SPR complicit in these atrocity crimes against the Indigenous people of Palestine. SPR’s complicity manifests in several ways, including:
- Creating a regional Israeli group in 2018 to foster psychotherapy research in Israeli universities
- Embedding the Israeli regional group within SPR’s European chapter, a decision that symbolically and institutionally positions apartheid Israel as a western, European nation to grant it the cultural and political alliance with the European Union (a main funder and supporter of Israel’s colonial enterprise)
- Further allowing the European chapter to be chaired by someone affiliated to an Israeli university partially located in East Jerusalem, a legally recognized stolen Palestinian land, and therefore someone knowingly participating in a war crime.
- Hosting the 2016 SPR annual conference in Jerusalem, despite an open letter, endorsed by over 180 SPR members, calling to change the location and explaining how that decision helps normalize Israel's apartheid and illegal occupation in Jerusalem
- Allowing its recent 56th annual conference in Krakow to be dominated by scholars affiliated with complicit Israeli universities (almost 25% of the conference program was by such scholars, which is similar to contributions in previous years) without due diligence on those participants to ensure no complicity in or incitement to war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.
- Remaining silent during the ongoing televised genocide in Palestine directly serves and supports Israel, as silence and “neutrality” have always been an endorsement of the oppressor
A call to boycott SPR until it ends its complicity in Israel's crimes
Given SPR’s ongoing complicity in Israel’s genocide and colonial domination against Palestinians, we call upon all psychotherapists, mental health workers and researchers worldwide to boycott SPR, by suspending their memberships, and/or by boycotting all forms of webinars, conferences, and activities organized by SPR until the organisation fulfills the following demands:
- End all forms of partnerships with Israeli institutions complicit in Israel’s settler-colonial and apartheid regime, including by dissolving the Israeli regional group under the European chapter
- Institute ethical policies for SPR membership, its journal and its conferences, requiring due diligence on scholars participating in any way from states accused of atrocity crimes by authoritative international bodies or charged with such crimes in international courts.
- Adopt a consistent policy of Land Acknowledgement for universities in all settler-colonial situations, including Palestine, in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and acknowledge the complicity of Israeli universities in their state’s crimes against Palestinians.
- Release a statement condemning the genocide in Palestine, that situates the genocide within Israel’s 77 year system of settler-colonial oppression of Palestinians (for reference check the statement by Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues)
- Release a statement apologizing for hosting the 2016 annual conference in Jerusalem and offer reparations to all Palestinians affected by that decision, especially members and ex-members of SPR. In case the Palestinian member or ex-member was killed by the Israeli occupation forces, SPR must pledge to make a donation to support Palestinian scholars in honor of the martyr's name.
We, the undersigned, call on SPR to take a stand for justice and end its complicity in Israel’s crimes. Until it meets our demands, we urge all psychotherapists, researchers, and practitioners to join our boycott of SPR.
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