A Call to All Mental Health Bodies to Declare Themselves Apartheid Free Zones
Mental health associations, unions, journals, collectives, solidarity groups, and grassroots organizations worldwide
Organizational sign-on only.
The International Palestine Mental Health Networks call on all mental health associations, unions, journals, collectives, and solidarity groups to declare themselves Apartheid Free Zones.
Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza has killed over 70,000 Palestinians and displaced millions. In the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, settlements, settler terrorism, and ethnic cleansing are intensifying. UN bodies, Amnesty International, and genocide scholars have named these crimes: apartheid, genocide, and systematic torture.
As mental health workers, we are implicated. Palestinian civil society’s call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) gives us a nonviolent way to act. It targets complicit Israeli institutions, not individuals. For what makes an institution complicit, we follow the PACBI guidelines.
To be an Apartheid Free Zone, a mental health organization commits to:
- Naming these crimes and standing by its own ethical standards.
- Auditing its ties with complicit Israeli organizations and cutting them.
- Giving complicit Israeli organizations no part in its spaces, in keeping with the PACBI guidelines.
- Not purchasing from the companies most complicit in Israel’s violations.
- Divesting from those companies.
Read the full call here
Petition by
To:
Mental health associations, unions, journals, collectives, solidarity groups, and grassroots organizations worldwide
From:
[Your Name]
We call on you to declare your organization an Apartheid Free Zone. By signing, your organization commits to ending complicity with Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, in keeping with the PACBI guidelines.
You will join 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.