Dear Ladies and Gentlemen
A lecture will be given at your annual conference: "Thoughts for the Times on Anti-Semitism: Hatred and Destruction, the Past in the Present” by Shmuel Erlich and Mira Erlich-Ginor, the abstract of which can be read on the program. There it is stated that, “Anti-Semitism has been part of Judeo-Christian-Islamic culture for centuries, taking various forms and expressions. After its most horrendous and destructive outburst in the 20th century Holocaust, it gave rise to the collective determination: “Never Again!” Yet recent and current genocidal outcries against Israel and the Jews testify to the enduring power and relentlessness of anti-semitism.“
These statements are presented here as facts requiring no empirical findings: Phenomena which then are to be subsequently researched and interpreted under a psychoanalytical magnifying glass supported through the perspective of group dynamics.Anti-Semitism is a European-Christian phenomenon whose roots are to be found in Christian anti-Judaism. Only later and much less frequently can it be found in Muslim societies. In its most destructive form, it was only present in Europe and culminated in the German genocide of the Jews. While German Christians were enslaving, deporting and murdering millions of Jews, many Jews (and also non-Jews, such as Ernst Reuter, the former mayor of Berlin, where this conference is being held) were able to flee to Turkey and survive. In Albania, a Muslim state, Jews were protected from the Nazi horror by the government. Jews from Libya and Morocco were sent to concentration camps only after these countries were occupied by the Germans. To claim that anti-Semitism has been a part of Islamic culture "for centuries" is a tendentious rewriting of history that serves to relativize the German-European Christian's share of responsibility for the extermination of Jews by projecting its anti-Semitic motives onto the Muslim world. The DPG thus adopts the revisionist view held by far-right parties such as the AfD or Front National.
Further on in the abstract it is written: "recent and current genocidal outcries against Israel and the Jews". This statement is as well made without any empirical evidence to support it. While Israel is before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where an overwhelming majority of judges speak of genocide against the Palestinians, here the opposite is claimed. The genocide of the Jews was committed by Germany and ended in 1945. The DPG was a participant in the ethnic cleansing of Jewish analysts during the National Socialist era. And today, even if Jews in different part of the world suffer from anti-Semitism and their lives are threatened, such as in Pittsburgh or Halle (both attacks were carried out by White Christians), they are nonetheless not currently suffering from genocide.
The Hamas attack on October 7 and its terrible consequences for the people living there are placed by the authors in the context of anti-Semitism. The fact, however, is that people living in Israel-Palestine were massacred, including Buddhists from Thailand, Muslims from Palestine, Bedouins, Jews - because they were in Israel. Even though the majority of those killed were innocent civilians, murdered in violation of international law, this was neither genocide nor an anti-semitically motivated act. Anti-Semitism is directed against the identity and existence of a Jew and not against his or her actions.
Jews in Israel-Palestine are killed and injured by Palestinian people in the context of displacement (numerous massacres of the Palestinian civilian population since 1948), occupation, oppression and the apartheid system. In South Africa, white people were killed in ANC terror attacks because they were part of the apartheid system. Their killing was not an "anti-white" action.
The fact that the DPG, as a German society, undertakes such a rewriting of history in its program is one aspect of the problematic nature of this lecture. In addition, the scientific standards that are necessary for psychoanalysis are ignored. In order to propagate a political agenda, an untrue assertion is made and this assertion, presented as fact, then becomes the subject of investigation. This analogous with the claim - and this is what psychoanalysis has done - that homosexuality is pathological and based on this assumption, this supposed pathology has been investigated.
Then we see the Past in the Present in action: Trans-generational traumas are not separate from current traumas. This has led to a distortion of history in which the past genocide of Jews is perpetuated as a permanently present threat and has thus led to a distorted perception of reality. This is being done while Israel is waging a war of extermination in the Gaza Strip. In this way, annihilating violence is denied through perpetrator-victim reversal.
Israel has "created" more than 19,000 orphans in the Gaza Strip because it has killed more than 6,000 Palestinian mothers in its genocidal actions. Palestinians live in a permanent state of traumatization. Many Israelis suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their participation in this genocide. News reports and visual images of ongoing physical and psychological violence (including the murder of more than 14,000 children, destruction of more than 70% of homes, targeted execution of medical personnel in order to destroy the health system, disruption of all food supply deliveries, numerous mass graves....) can lead to the loss of the viewer's ability to mentalize, so that the crimes of ethnic cleansing are broadcast live viansocial media without subsequent action.
We are extremely concerned about the development of the psychoanalytical discourse, which risks failing to recognize the immeasurable suffering caused by the current genocide of the Palestinian people, trivializing the devastating violence to which Palestinians are exposed and at the same time relativizing German anti-Semitism. Many people in Germany are directly or indirectly affected and traumatized by this genocide.
We expect that you, as a German psychoanalytical society, to fulfill your historical obligation and immediately end your intellectual and emotional support for the genocide of Palestinians and instead promote a differentiated view of the political situation. We therefore urge you to fundamentally rethink this and future programs and political positions. As a psychoanalytical society, it is your duty to call for an immediate end to the genocide!
Signed by
the Steering Committees of:
Palestine-Global Mental Health Network
Australia-Palestine Mental Health Network
Canada-Palestine Mental Health Network
France-Palestine Mental Health Network
Ireland-Palestine Mental Health Network
Germany-Palestine Mental Health Network
Netherlands-Palestine Mental Health Network
South-Africa-Palestine Mental Health Network
United Kingdom-Palestine Mental Health Network
United States-Palestine Mental Health Network.