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The four articles published in this issue were first presented at the Psychoanalysis and Public Sphere Conference held in September 2020. These four articles are: COVID 19: Bringing the unimaginable realities of Gaza to the world by Yasser Abu Jamei, Mental Health Organisations as Moral Agents: Professional Responsibility in a Settler Colonial Context by Martin Kemp, Projecting Israel's settler-colonial racist aggression onto Labour Party ‘antisemitism’ by Les Levidow, and Sabby Sagall contributes A Marxist-Psychoanalytic Appraisal of the ‘Jewish Question.’ All four articles contest commonplace understandings and knowledge, provide pertinent information, provoke reflection on the question of moral action, values and dominant ideological belief systems. In short, all the articles challenge the reader not to turn away from the damage wrought on human beings, specifically Palestinians. For those reading these contributions there is no hiding place, and no recourse to supposed ‘neutrality.’
Yasser Abu Jamei's lucid and matter-of-fact presentation of the realities of living in Gaza hits hard as there is no hyperbole nor any resort to exaggeration. Abu Jamei outlines in detail the grave difficulties of living in Gaza under Israeli occupation: the struggle to gain a permit to travel whether for health or education that has led to absolute restrictions of movement, the unimaginable reality that all that makes up living a life has been taken away and nothing that sustains and nurtures us as human beings can be taken for granted. The strength of Abu Jamei's contribution is the focus on one temporality - the present - and one place - Gaza.
Sabby Sagall takes a wide historical sweep to present a different historical understanding of the history of the Jewish people. This presentation of an atypical history challenges two powerful myths: the first is that there has always been a profound division between Jews and anti-Semites. This myth has strong resonances with another dominant