By The BIPOCanalysis Collective

We are a collective of Black, Indigenous, and other folks of color who are also mental health clinicians based in the global south and the settler colony now known as the United States. We are writing at this time of urgency to express our unequivocal solidarity with the Palestinian people in their just fight for self-determination and liberation from the settler colonial regime that has been imposed on them since 1948.

We say to you all, with no hesitation, Palestinians are united in fighting for their liberation from their *captors*. They join a long history of liberation fighters throughout history, all of whom were also smeared, dehumanized, and denigrated. They, too, were called “human animals”. 

It was only when they became heroes that many people in the global north, including mental health clinicians, felt able to co-opt their struggle, utilizing the language of Frantz Fanon and others, to perform solidarity.

Now is the time to break this violent cycle of persistent performativity, of intentional “missing the point”, of both-sideisms. We cannot join in the conscription and identification with power that demands we disavow, deny, and, therefore be complicit with 75 years of oppression. Decolonization is happening NOW. And as decolonization happens, we must be most concerned with the violence done to and the mental wellbeing of those who have always been the most vulnerable, the oppressed, the systematically abused.

As clinicians we call on other mental health clinicians of conscience and the larger public to categorically REFUSE the psychological operations we are witnessing before our eyes. These psychological operations include the weaponization of clinical language, liberal humanism, and civilizational discourse in order to transform Palestinians, a besieged people, into the aggressor. They include animalization of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. They include fabricating lies that find traction because Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment are pernicious. 

These maneuvers are not new to many of us. They are unethical, racist, and most clearly, are in service of imperialism, coloniality, and the continued subjugation of a people who have been brutalized for 75 years.

We call on people, especially of and from the global south, to break through their imperialist and colonial ideological priming. In doing so, we call on you to join us in actively dis-identifying from State discourses that would have us believe that Palestinians, especially those forcibly encaged, dehumanized, and trapped in Gaza, what is known as the biggest open-air prison in the world, are themselves the terrorists. 

We reject this dangerous framing and understand, especially as mental health practitioners, how these racist tropes are used to mobilize fear and green light the full-scale genocide we are seeing unfold in real time. We also understand that this framing is actively endangering our Palestinian, Arab and Muslim siblings the world over, and especially in the settler colony of the USA and the imperial nations of Europe.

We call on all clinicians of conscience and the larger public to immediately abandon the language and framing of the Occupier, of Colonizers, of settler colonial allies, and imperialist partners, especially in Europe. Abandon the framing that asks us to identify with the aggressor and deploy affectively charged words that make us forget the root of violence: settler colonialism, military occupation, apartheid.

We remind all of those who fight for justice: these same State powers lied about Algeria; they lied about Apartheid South Africa; they lied about Vietnam; they lied about Hiroshima and Nagasaki; they lied about Iraq and Afghanistan; they lied about countless other in wars of aggression that they fought. And each time they lied, they asked us to join them.

They are also lying now, and dangerously mobilizing the media, as well as fascists and liberals alike, as their psyops arm. These psychological operations affect an entire community of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, all of whom are under heightened surveillance and threat at their workplaces, in their places of education, and even in clinical training and their own therapeutic spaces.

We must reject and resist these psyops by sustaining our responsibility to the Palestinian people, to center their rights to liberation, to understand context, history, and especially power. We call on you to immediately abandon these lies and pointed deflection and instead, speak to the rights of an occupied and brutalized people to actualize their liberation, by all means necessary—an internationally recognized right. 

We cannot be innocent bystanders and we cannot join in the violent depoliticization, dehistoricization, and defanging of a liberation struggle out of discomfort, faux moralization, or ignorance.

Palestine will be Free and we call on all clinicians of conscience and the public to ensure that you do NOT obstruct this liberatory uprising.

The BIPOCanalysis Collective is an anti-space for black, indigenous, and other people of color within the psychoanalytic community, whether living in the settler colony of the United States, in imperial Europe, or the global south. We define anti- not as a relationship to or with whiteness, but rather, in the radical tradition of disruption of a particular normative order, economically, socially, politically, and in psychoanalysis, theoretically, clinically and in learning and training spaces. To this end, as an anti-space, the BIPOCanalysis collective is explicitly abolitionist, queer, non-binary and trans-affirming, and feminist. It is also explicitly anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist, and anti-caste. BIPOCanalysis is decolonial in its approach, with specific focus on decentering hegemonic modes of praxis and knowledge and recentering that which has been displaced, dismembered, and discarded by settler-colonialism, coloniality, ableism and cis-heteropatriarchical white supremacy. Most importantly, it is a space meant to nurture, support, and uplift us collectively and in solidarity against ever-oppressive and violent functions of the State, the profession, and the field.