Open letter: A call to boycott the Society of Psychotherapy Research (SPR) for its complicity in Israel’s occupation, apartheid, and genocide in Palestine

3rd July 2025

Israeli universities as pillars of Israel’s system of oppression against Palestinians

Israel is committing the world’s first livestreamed genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, and in line with international law, Israel should be isolated and expelled from international fora. The Palestinian Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has called for a global boycott of Israeli universities, as South African universities were likewise boycotted during the apartheid regime. The boycott is not directed at individuals, but at institutions. This call targets Israeli universities because of their direct and indirect structural involvement and/or complicity in institutional discrimination, apartheid, persecution, occupation, and now genocide. Maya Wind’s book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso, 2024), demonstrates that all Israeli universities, from their inception (the first being Hebrew University in 1918) until the present, contribute to the oppression of Palestinians, including the systematic destruction of the Palestinian centers of education and learning, or ‘scholasticide,’ a term coined by Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian academic at Oxford. Israeli universities also develop weapons and security technologies, and contribute to the discrimination, slandering, and abuse of non-Jewish students and staff.

SPR’s role as a complicit partner in Israel’s crimes

By disseminating and celebrating research produced by Israeli universities, Society for Psychotherapy Research (SPR) actively whitewashes and legitimizes Israel’s crimes. Whitewashing operates through the selective presentation of Israel as a hub of academic excellence, obscuring the role that Israeli universities play in sustaining and enabling a regime of occupation, apartheid, and genocide. Rather than holding Israeli universities accountable or endorsing the growing international calls for boycott, SPR contributes to the normalization and international prestige of a state engaged in settler colonialism and systematic violence. By promoting the work of these institutions without acknowledging their complicity, SPR lends credibility to actors embedded in structures of colonial domination. Refusing to boycott Israeli institutions renders SPR complicit in genocide and occupation of Palestine. SPR’s complicity manifests in several ways, including:

• Creating a regional Israeli group in 2018 to foster psychotherapy research in Israeli universities
• Embedding the Israeli regional group within SPR’s European chapter, and allowing the chapter to be chaired by someone affiliated to an Israeli university – decisions that symbolically and institutionally position Israel as a western, european nation to grant it the cultural and political alliance with the European Union (a main funder and supporter of Israel’s colonial enterprise)
• Hosting the 2016 SPR annual conference in Jerusalem, despite an open letter, endorsed by over 180 SPR members, calling to change the location and explaining how that decision helps normalize Israel’s apartheid and occupation in Jerusalem
• Allowing submissions by and in collaboration with Israeli institutions in its conferences. In its recent 56th annual conference in Krakow, almost 25% of the conference program was done by or in collaboration with an Israeli institution, which is similar to contributions in previous years.
• Remaining silent during the ongoing televised genocide in Palestine directly serves and supports Israel, as silence and “neutrality” has always been an endorsement of the oppressor

A call to boycott SPR until it ends its complicity in Israel’s crimes

Given SPR’s ongoing complicity in Israel’s genocide and colonial domination against Palestinians, we call upon all psychotherapists, mental health workers and researchers worldwide to boycott SPR, by suspending their memberships, and/or by boycotting all forms of webinars, conferences, and activities organized by SPR until the organisation fulfills the following demands: 

• Release a statement condemning the genocide in Palestine, that situates the genocide within Israel’s 77 years system of settler-colonial oppression of Palestinians (for reference check the statement by Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues)
• Release a statement apologizing for hosting the 2016 annual conference in Jerusalem and offer reparations to all Palestinians affected by that decision, especially members and ex-members of SPR. In case the Palestinian member or ex-member was killed by the Israeli occupation forces, SPR must pledge to make a donation to support Palestinian scholars in honor of the martyr’s name.
• End all forms of partnerships with Israeli institutions complicit in Israel’s settler-colonial and apartheid regime, including: 

1. Dissolving the Israeli regional group under the European chapter 
2. Rejecting all conference submissions done by or in collaboration with Israeli institutions

We, the undersigned, call on SPR to take a stand for justice and end its complicity in Israel’s crimes. Until it meets our demands, we urge all psychotherapists, researchers, and practitioners to join our boycott of SPR.

List of signatures [Please note that it will take some time to update the list and see your name up there]