Full Statement on Normalization, Erasure, and Our Professional Obligations During Genocide by Palestine-Global Mental Health Network

We issue this joint statement concerning the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Henri Parens Symposium, scheduled for March 7, 2026…. Against this backdrop, the Henri Parens Symposium convenes to discuss “Resilience in Response to Violence & War.” It features three presenters: Ann Masten, PhD, a resilience researcher presenting the science; Merav Roth, PhD, described as “one of the organizers of the psychoanalytic on-the-ground response to the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel”; and Salem Eid S. Al-Arjani, PhD, a Palestinian psychotherapist who will “present a case.”

Examine the structure. Dr. Roth represents an organized national psychoanalytic response. Her subjectivity is recognized; her people’s suffering is given historical context and institutional resources. The Palestinian presenter, by contrast, does not represent Palestinian suffering. He presents clinical material—an illustration. His inclusion provides the appearance of balance while the architecture of the event ensures that Palestinian experience remains absent as experience. A symposium on trauma and war, held during the genocide in Gaza, does not see Palestinians as people who suffer. It sees them as providers of case material.

By characterizing the current genocide as a “war,” the symposium performs a further erasure: it frames apartheid and genocide as a conflict between comparable parties. Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people is not a war. It is apartheid and genocide.