The Palestine-Global Mental Health Network, which jointly launched the IPA resignation campaign with our international sister networks, publishes this statement to mark our stand and to add two more letters to the public record.
We open with thanks.
Since our networks issued the call to resign from the International Psychoanalytic Association in February 2026, 616 colleagues have signed in support. Resignation letters have come from across the world. We are grateful to every signatory and to every colleague who has chosen this path. The decision carries professional cost. We do not take any of these resignations lightly, and we will not forget that you made them.
We are especially grateful to those who have made their resignations public, who put their names, their professional standing, and their reasoning on the record so that others would know they were not alone. Among them: the members of the Germany-Palestine Mental Health Network (Ferisde Eksi, Michals Kaiser-Livne, Iris Hefets, and Shirin Atili), whose November 2023 letter set the tone for what was to come; Mary Adams in the United Kingdom; Avgi Saketopoulou in New York; and Denise Cullington in the United Kingdom. Their letters can be read in full here.
Today we add two more.
Molly Merson, LMFT (Berkeley, California) and Danny Gellersen, LICSW (Seattle, Washington) have resigned from the IPA and have given us permission to publish their letters. Their full letters now join the others at the link above.
We thank Molly and Danny, and every colleague on the list. We thank those whose letters are public, those whose signatures stand alongside ours, and those who have written privately to the IPA without a public statement. Each of you has done the thing the moment requires.
Palestine-Global Mental Health Network speaks here, alongside our sister networks, to remind colleagues of what this call is about and why we are making it. We address those still inside the IPA, those weighing their position, and those watching from neighboring institutions.
What the Call Is About
This is a call in support of the Palestinian-led, non-violent resistance movement: the movement articulated since 2005 through PACBI and BDS, and endorsed by the absolute majority of Palestinian civil society. It is not a call against psychoanalysis, nor against our colleagues. It is a call to honor a non-violent strategy, designed by the people most affected, as the ethical path forward for institutions like ours.
This matters because the question of what one's membership means is sometimes treated as private, as ambiguous, as a matter of personal conscience. It is not. The IPA has been silent across more than two years and over 73,000 deaths. It has framed the genocide as "light against darkness." It has spoken of "non-terrorist Palestinians." It has condemned Russia's war on Ukraine within days while leaving Gaza unnamed. To hold membership in such an institution, while extending it legitimacy, dues, presence, and one's professional name, is to take a position. It is to participate in the cover the institution provides. The Palestinian-led movement asks us to recognize this clearly: the institution's silence is its complicity, and our continued membership is our share in it.
This is why resignation is the act we ask of you. It is not a gesture; it is the withdrawal of cover.
We Are Mental Health Professionals
We make this call as mental health professionals. Our work begins from the obligation to do no harm and to refuse complicity with harm. The ethic we hold in the consulting room is the refusal to be instrumentalized, the refusal to participate in a structure that injures the person before us. We hold this same ethic toward our institutions. We cannot lend our names to a body that uses them as cover for harm at this scale.
This is not in tension with our professional life; it is the precondition for it.
What the Guidelines Name as Complicity
The PACBI Guidelines are explicit about which institutions fall within the scope of the boycott, and on what grounds. The Guidelines call on:
"academics, academic associations/unions, and academic — as well as other — institutions around the world, where possible and as relevant, to boycott and/or work towards the cancellation or annulment of events, activities, agreements, or projects involving Israeli academic institutions or that otherwise promote the normalization of Israel in the global academy, whitewash Israel's violations of international law and Palestinian rights, or violate the BDS guidelines." (PACBI, Guidelines for the International Academic Boycott of Israel, Revised July 2014)
The phrase "or that otherwise" is the operative pivot. It separates two distinct grounds for boycott. The first concerns involvement with Israeli academic institutions. The second, beginning at "or that otherwise," applies to activities and projects that promote normalization, whitewash Israel's violations, or violate BDS guidelines, whether or not an Israeli academic institution is involved. The clause is addressed explicitly to "academic associations/unions, and academic — as well as other — institutions around the world." International professional bodies are within the frame, on their own conduct, by the Guidelines' own terms.
The same Guidelines name the diagnostic categories of complicity. Institutions are complicit through silence, through actual involvement in justifying, whitewashing, or otherwise deliberately diverting attention from Israel's violations of international law and human rights.
By the standard the Guidelines themselves articulate, in language addressed explicitly to international bodies, the IPA's own conduct has placed it within the scope of the boycott.
Why Normalization Is Refused
The guidelines are equally precise about why normalization itself is refused, and this clarity matters for us as mental health professionals.
The PACBI framework defines normalization as any project that brings Palestinians and Israelis onto the same platform without meeting two specific conditions.
First, the Israeli party in the joint project is required to publicly recognize the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as set out in the 2005 BDS Call. These are: ending the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall; recognizing the fundamental rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and respecting, protecting, and promoting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194. Recognition of these three rights is the first precondition. The recognition must be public and unequivocal, not private or implied. Without it, joint participation is normalization.
Second, the joint activity itself must constitute a form of co-resistance. The framework names exactly what resistance addresses. Co-resistance is resistance against the Israeli regime of occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid. It is not a softened version or an abstraction. These are the three pillars of the regime, named together as the object of joint struggle.
These two conditions are not aspirational. They are the operative test. A project that fails either is, by the framework's own definition, normalization. This holds regardless of how heartfelt the encounter, how moving the conversation, or how decent the participants.
The reasoning behind the test is ethical, not strategic. Dialogue, healing, and reconciliation that do not aim to end oppression privilege oppressive coexistence at the cost of co-resistance, because they presume the possibility of coexistence before the realization of justice and do not aim to disrupt the usual operations of institutional power. They tell the oppressed they can live with apartheid. They present the relationship between colonizer and colonized as symmetrical at the moment of greatest asymmetry. They function, in the framework's own language, as a colonization of the mind.
This is why the framework refuses coexistence and demands co-resistance. The only welcome relationship between those from the oppressor community and those from the oppressed is one that recognizes the basic rights of the oppressed and involves a common struggle against oppression.
We hold to this distinction without compromise. What we work toward is co-resistance against occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid, not the staging of equivalence while the bombs fall. The framework is not ours; it belongs to the Palestinian-led movement, and we accept it on its own terms.
The full articulation is published in the PACBI Anti-Normalization Guidelines and the 2005 BDS Call.
Palestine-Global Mental Health Network