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In the Spring of 2014, several members of our Psychoanalytic Work Group for Peace in Palestine/Israel traveled to the West Bank and Israel to witness directly the conditions obtaining on the ground in the military occupation of Palestine1. While in Israel and Palestine, we met and worked with both Israeli and Palestinian mental health professionals and with Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals. We also visited villages and areas of cities in the West Bank in which settlers, often with the support of the Israeli military, are actively encroaching on or threatening to encroach on Palestinian homes, land, and/or essential resources, such as sources of water.
To witness the workings of a military occupation directly is a disturbing experience, for inherent to the structure and process of military occupation is a profound asymmetry of power relations obtaining between the Occupier and the Occupied—a structure of social relations characterized by ongoing dehumanization processes of the (designated) enemy Other. This succinctly describes the background context we witnessed while in the West Bank that led to the development and publication of this special issue.
Each of the papers selected for publication in this special issue has been chosen, in part, to not only illuminate the frequently unseen consequences of the military occupation of Palestine, but also to illustrate to our readers how crucial it is to end the Occupation and to move to establishing and implementing a just peace in Israel/Palestine for all concerned—Israelis and Palestinians alike. For, we believe, to not end the Occupation and resolve the tragedy of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict will lead not only to increased violence in an already tense West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, but also will contribute to the spreading and intensifying de-stabilization and war occurring in the larger region of the middle east, thereby deepening the jeopardy to international peace and security.
Psychoanalyst Martin Kemp, who trav