Note: This opinion piece reflects my personal views and not those of any group with which I am affiliated.
Update (August 14, 2026): It has now become apparent that Gesher Community Care has misrepresented organizations listed as endorsers of its letter. Among the most prominent examples are Bristol Myers Squibb (yes, the global Fortune 100 biopharmaceutical company), the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and the California Psychological Association. In fact, following letters of inquiry from concerned parties sent to several of the listed organizations, almost three-dozen organizations have now been removed from the GCC endorsement list. I don’t know the extent to which negligence, untrustworthiness, arrogance or some other factor explain these misrepresentations, and I don’t know whether all have now been corrected. I’ll leave it to the reader to judge the extent to which these misrepresentations further call into question the credibility of other claims made by GCC in its letter to the American Psychological Association.
Sometimes the mask comes off. That seems to be what happened last week, just before the American Psychological Association (APA) held its annual convention in Washington, DC. A group called Gesher Community Care (GCC) published an online open letter to APA leaders demanding that they do more to ensure the “safety” of Jewish attendees. The letter was introduced with this photo:
To be clear, that is not the “Jewish flag,” as some want you to believe. No, it’s something very different: the official flag of the state of Israel which, according to leading human rights organizations and scholars, is engaged in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people.
Overall, there’s a distorting hall-of-mirrors quality to the GCC letter’s elevation of concerns about the “psychological safety” of Israel-defending convention attendees. Despite the fact that over 20,000 Palestinian children have been slaughtered in Gaza (with several times that number injured or orphaned), APA is told that expressions of distress and outrage over Israel’s documented war crimes must be suppressed. Why? Because otherwise some Jewish conference-goers may feel uncomfortable. Consider too that the open letter promotes the importance of “viewpoint diversity” while simultaneously calling for the APA to silence voices of opposition to Israel’s actions. This all sounds a lot like traumatic invalidation to me.
It’s worth noting as well that several members of GCC’s advisory board are among those who’ve contributed in various ways to weaponizing antisemitism charges against the APA, leading to unwarranted government investigations of the Association. Antisemitism is indeed a very serious problem, but support for Palestinian rights and freedom is not antisemitic.
GCC is also aggrieved that its supporters might experience discomfort from Palestine-focused convention events, from the sight of keffiyehs, and from hearing a land acknowledgment that includes this truth:
We must also recognize — with sorrow and outrage — that this presentation takes place amid the ongoing violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands across the globe, particularly the genocide in Palestine that is actively supported by the United States government. As psychologists, we have a responsibility to speak out and actively resist systemic oppression and violence wherever they occur, both here and globally.
But despite the GCC letter’s alarmist language, there was no silencing of Jewish voices at the APA convention. There was no assignment of “collective guilt to Jews.” And there were no “ideological tests on Jewish participation.” That misleading narrative may play well within the Israel-supporting echo chamber, but it’s quite simply false.
I am among the many Jewish psychologists who are thankful for the growing and broadening awareness that Palestinian liberation is a matter of urgent justice, long denied and long overdue. And we recognize that the rights, dignity, and freedom of the Palestinian people are ultimately essential for the safety and well-being of Jews worldwide. In contrast, it seems the foremost priority for advocacy groups like Gesher Community Care is defending the state of Israel rather than protecting the Jewish people — and they apparently hope none of us will notice the difference. But the photo they’ve chosen for this latest misguided attack on the APA certainly lifts the veil, and that should dispel any lingering doubts.