Group Analysts for Palestine

Group Analysis is a long-established, radical, personal, and socio-political enterprise underpinned by ‘an open-ended list of ethical and political values’. Our approach draws inspiration from psychoanalytic traditions, emphasizing the importance of truth-seeking, introspection, and perseverance in the face of contentious subjects and difficult emotions. We recognize the necessity of grappling with discomfort and pain to access deep-seated truths within the personal and social unconscious, working towards the alleviation of suffering and the healing of fractured people and societies. Motivated by its radical beginnings, Group Analysts uphold values of fairness, democracy, social responsibility, and the sense that ‘we are all each other’s consequences’.

It is in this context that now we find the socio-political voice of group analysis in relation to the Palestine/Israel conflict:

We have been distraught and perturbed by historical, recent, and ongoing events concerning Israeli state violence against Palestine and its people. A combination of warfare, territorial theft, harassment, and forcible displacement has devastated millions of Palestinian lives. Israel’s position as a settler colonial regime that practices military occupation and apartheid against the Palestinian people can no longer be overlooked. For over half a century, Israel has ruled over Palestinian land with a system of structural racialised asymmetry, inequality, and oppression. Israeli state crimes include evicting Palestinians from long held land, the demolition of Palestinian homes and villages, unrestrained settler violence along with periodic aggressive military assaults on the besieged and vulnerable civilian population of Gaza.

There have also been shoot-to-kill policies, and the deliberate maiming of civilians, imprisonment without trial and the use of torture, night-time arrests, abusive interrogation, the incarceration of children and the kidnapping of the bodies of Palestinians killed by the armed forces. It has been increasingly clear that Israel’s deliberate occupation and expansion of settlements has the aim of eliminating Palestinian identities and culture, as well as lives and territories.

We note that, principally in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, we are witnessing the determined displacement and erasure of an indigenous population. All the while many countries, including the UK, refuse to condemn Israel or hold it to account.

Hamas’ appalling attack on 7th October, itself a war crime, must be seen in the context of the pre-existing and longstanding dispossession and oppression of Palestinians and the 16- year blockade of Gaza that wilfully limits even food and water entering the area. We are deeply shocked and appalled by the relentless bombardment of Gaza, killing thousands of civilians.

The United Nations Security Council’s countless previous resolutions condemning Israel’s actions and calling on it to end its illegal occupation of Palestine have been blatantly ignored. The continued silence of the international community and citizens of the world to speak out and hold Israel accountable for its illegal activity makes us all culpable in enabling Israel to continue and even accelerate its flagrant violation of international law and disregard for human rights. Israel’s attack on Gaza has to date resulted in the genocide of thousands of civilians, nearly half of whom are children, the injury of hundreds of thousands and the displacement of nearly the entire Palestinian population of Gaza. The continuing endorsement by many nations across the globe of Israel’s actions forces us to speak out. We refuse to stand by and be silent.