A Call to All Mental Health Bodies to Declare Themselves Apartheid Free Zones
From the International Palestine Mental Health Networks
We have all been witness to Israel’s deliberate and catastrophic destruction of Gaza, including infrastructure, hospitals, schools, and universities, during its ongoing genocidal assault since October 2023, killing over 70,000 Palestinians and displacing millions. We have also been witnessing the increase in illegal Israeli settlements, state-sponsored settler terrorism, and the intensified ethnic cleansing of the occupied Palestinian West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
In 2022, Amnesty International and the United Nations Special Rapporteur both found Israel guilty of the crime against humanity of apartheid. By September 2025, international bodies had declared that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide: the UN Commission of Inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and Amnesty International among them. In November 2025, the UN Committee Against Torture found Israel guilty of organized and widespread torture of Palestinian detainees. In March 2026, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese reported in Torture and Genocide that torture has become state doctrine in Israel. The Palestinian Feminist Collective’s A Predatory State documents the systematic sexual torture of Palestinian detainees.
As mental health workers and as citizens, we are implicated in these events. Such horrific events are enabled in part because of what Robert Jay Lifton called “malignant normality,” the social acceptance of “expectations that are highly destructive but are rendered ordinary and legal.” To counter a culture of apathy in the face of social evil, he urged that witnessing professionals make an ethical commitment to alleviating suffering, accepting a responsibility to act beyond their narrowly defined field of work.
In its call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), Palestinian civil society has provided us with an effective nonviolent strategy of solidarity to pressure Israel to end its ongoing genocide, system of apartheid, illegal military occupation, and denial of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return to their homeland. This includes calling for severing links with complicit Israeli institutions, not with Israeli individuals. This is a principled, necessary, and morally compelling step for a discipline with an inbuilt commitment to resolving differences through dialogue. For what makes an institution complicit, we follow the PACBI guidelines.
Israeli mental health associations and major figures within the field have remained silent in the face of even the most egregious state policies toward the Indigenous Palestinian population. Human rights organizations have long accused Israeli healthcare workers of tacitly facilitating, colluding, or being complicit in the torture of Palestinians in Israeli detention. In January 2025, the International Federation of Social Workers censured the Israeli Union of Social Workers for refusing to ask the government to exempt social workers from combat roles in Gaza. Since October 2023, more than 1,000 Israeli army mental health officers, trained in psychology, social work, or psychiatry, have served with its forces inside Gaza.
The suspension of normal relations with complicit Israeli mental health associations is a necessity if we are to cut complicity and join with the global solidarity movement to maximize pressure on Israel. It would contribute to humanity’s rejection of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
We therefore call on professionals to work to rid the mental health field of complicity in Israel’s grave crimes against Palestinians. Mental health associations, unions, journals, collectives, solidarity groups, and grassroots organizations can begin by declaring themselves Apartheid Free Zones (AFZ), following the steps of the Palestinian BDS National Committee. To be an Apartheid Free Zone for a mental health collective means:
Naming these crimes and standing by the organization's own statements and ethical standards.
Auditing its affiliations with complicit Israeli organizations, including memorandums of understanding, conferences, sponsorships, and trainings, to identify what must be cut.
Not co-hosting, presenting, affiliating with, or giving complicit Israeli organizations any part in its spaces, in keeping with the PACBI guidelines, until they meet the ethical standards of our professions, publicly recognize Palestinian rights under international law, and end all complicity in violating them.
Pledging not to purchase goods or services from companies that are most complicit in Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights.
Divesting any funds from the most complicit companies listed by authoritative UN and civil society research groups.
By declaring itself an Apartheid Free Zone, your organization joins a global community of mental health workers who are putting their ethical codes into practice. Values that have too often served as decoration become commitments we act on.