Dear IARPP members,

We are writing to you in regard to the petition recently posted in protest of the 2019 IARPP conference that is being held in Israel.

As we do in considering the location of all IARPP conferences, the Board engaged in an open and deliberative process before deciding to hold the conference in Israel. If we chose our conference locations by judging the political decisions of national governments, we might well have a hard time finding an ideal setting that would fit everyone’s preferences and values. Indeed, some international members have protested our decision to host the 2018 IARPP conference in the United States, given the current political situation in the US. We decided that holding the US conference as planned-while making the political turmoil the theme of the meetings-would make for a meaningful experience that would help us all think through the difficult problems that confront us.

In a narrow sense, we are not a political organization. But we do hold, advocate and stand behind a set of values and principles: Namely, the inclusion, protection, and free expression of a diverse set of views, essentially trusting the political values that do, or should, underlie a democracy. This of course includes the concern for universal human rights . Yet, we feel that to allow our organization to single out one country for a boycott would be to practice the politics of exclusion. Boycotts will not help us fulfill our central mission: promoting values that are integral to the creative development of relational psychoanalysis.

Members of IARPP hold a variety of views about many political issues, including the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. One of the Board’s responsibilities is to honor the right of all members to independently voice their views of history, current events and what would best promote peace in the Middle East and around the world. We are all deeply affected by this. It is not the responsibility of IARPP to side with one view of this complicated history– or to base organizational decisions on it. We are a professional membership organization. Our conference location does not imply a judgment on the policies or politics of any particular location; our conference location reflects our respect for the professional contributions of our international chapters, our effort to support their continued professional development in their part of the world, and our attempts to better understand the difficulties faced by the communities we serve.

Finally, hosting the conference in Tel Aviv will permit us to welcome the diverse voices of our Israeli Jewish and Arab colleagues along with multiple international perspectives. We intend to offer opportunities for conference attendees to travel to the Palestinian West Bank. We will be extending invitations to Palestinian colleagues, and we will work to enable their presence with us. Rather than foreclosing those issues and silencing conversation, we aim to create within our relational psychoanalytic conference an open and safe space in which attendees across the political spectrum can engage and exchange views.

We believe that dialogue, more than ever, is needed across divides.

Respectfully,

Steven Kuchuck, IARPP President and Chana Ullman, IARPP Past President

On behalf of the IARPP Board of Directors