November 13, 2025.

The Palestine-Global Mental Health Network and the International Collective of the Palestine Mental Health Networks, representing mental health professionals across 20 countries, condemn the ethical bankruptcy revealed by the 2025 Sigourney Award to Professor Dana Amir of Haifa University. Professor Amir receives international recognition for “pioneering work” on how trauma is conveyed through language, for analyzing victims’ and perpetrators’ testimonies, for identifying “new pathways for therapeutic intervention” in trauma — 25 months into what the United Nations Commission of Inquiry has concluded is genocide against Palestinians.

On September 16, 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded that “Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” and that “Israeli authorities at the highest echelons have orchestrated a genocidal campaign” with “specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza.” This follows months of warnings from UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, Amnesty International, and human rights organizations worldwide using the same term: genocide. Notably, in July 2025, two prominent Israeli human rights organizations–B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel–became the first Israeli organizations to conclude that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, shattering a taboo in Israeli society.

This is not simply poor timing. This is structural hypocrisy that reveals everything broken in Western mental health institutions.

The Obscenity of Expertise Without Application

Professor Amir’s celebrated work examines “how trauma is conveyed in language”, analyzing “word choice, tone, rhythm, and inflection” in testimonies. She studies “the traumatic lacuna,” the gaps and absences in how people speak about unspeakable violence. Her research delves into “both perpetrators’ and victims’ testimonies.”

Meanwhile, in real time:

Over 66,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023, the majority women and children. The UN Commission found Israel has committed “killing and seriously harming unprecedented numbers of Palestinians.”

Gaza’s children face systematic destruction. At least 13,319 children have been confirmed killed, including 786 infants under one year old, likely four times higher when indirect deaths from starvation and disease are included. Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. Ten children lose one or both legs every day. Over 9,200 children have lost limbs. Children undergo amputations without anesthesia, pain relief, or rehabilitation support in bombed hospitals. They are registered as WCNSF: Wounded Child No Surviving Family, a term unique to the Gaza Strip.

Famine is confirmed. As of August 2025, 100% of Gaza’s population experiences “high levels of acute food insecurity.” Famine has been confirmed in Gaza governorate, with 640,000 people facing catastrophic starvation. At least 440 people have died from starvation, including 147 children. Over 65,000 children suffer acute malnutrition. Infants cannot access formula or special milk. Children are “unable to develop speech and meet language milestones” due to malnutrition and face potential long-term cognitive damage. Mothers miscarry on forced displacement journeys. Premature babies discharged from hospitals weigh half what they should.

Systematic sexual torture has been documented. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights released testimonies in November 2025 revealing “an organized and systematic practice of sexual torture, including rape, forced stripping, forced filming, sexual assault using objects and dogs” against Palestinian detainees. Women raped multiple times by soldiers, filmed naked, subjected to threats of posting photos on social media. Men raped with wooden objects, bottles, and trained dogs while soldiers watched and laughed. An 18-year-old boy raped four times with a bottle while soldiers told him and other detainees they were “destroying their spirits and hope for life.” The PCHR concludes this treatment “not only meets the elements of torture under international law, but also rises to the level of genocide.”

Israeli officials provide perpetrators’ testimony openly. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant: “We are fighting human animals.” Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu on using nuclear weapons in Gaza: “That’s one way.” Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: “We’re eliminating ministers, bureaucrats, money handlers—everyone who holds up Hamas’s civilian rule.” This is not ambiguous language requiring scholarly analysis. This is openly declared genocidal intent.

Professor Amir is an internationally recognized expert on trauma testimony, on analyzing how victims speak, on therapeutic intervention for collective trauma. Yet she has published no statement calling this genocide. No call for ceasefire. No demand for accountability from her state or institutions. No public positioning in relation to her government’s actions.

You cannot be celebrated for analyzing victims’ testimonies while Palestinians testify from genocide and you remain silent.

You cannot receive awards for studying “the traumatic lacuna”—the gaps, the absences—while your silence creates absence, while Palestinians are systematically erased.

You cannot claim expertise in “therapeutic intervention” for collective trauma while your state commits genocide and you offer no intervention, no condemnation, no accountability.

This is not scholarship. This is extraction. Palestinian pain becomes raw material for academic prestige while living Palestinians are disposable.

On “Dialogue” as Obfuscation

The award citation mentions Professor Amir’s work has “provided a framework for facilitating dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians.” Though this represents a small part of her recognized contributions, the framing itself requires examination.

There is no “dialogue” between the genocidal state and those experiencing genocide. There is no “dialogue” between the society operating an apartheid regime and those living under it. There is no “dialogue” when one party controls every aspect of the other’s existence—water, electricity, food, movement, life, and death. This language—”Israeli-Palestinian dialogue”—presumes symmetry where there is only colonial domination.

When your state is committing genocide, the framework needed is not “dialogue.” It is immediate ceasefire. It is accountability. It is reparations. It is dismantling of apartheid. It is decolonization. Anything less is collaboration dressed as peacemaking.

The Pattern: Recognizing Israelis, Erasing Palestinians

The Sigourney Award has honored six Israeli recipients since 1996. It has honored zero Palestinians in its 35-year history. Zero recipients from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, or any Middle Eastern country beyond Israel.

This is not coincidence. This is institutional architecture. This is what it looks like when “merit” and “excellence” are defined by proximity to colonial power.

Palestinian mental health professionals have produced extraordinary work—often under military occupation, siege, or bombardment. Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, whose groundbreaking scholarship coined the concept of “unchilding”—the authorized eviction of Palestinian children from childhood through settler-colonial violence that treats them simultaneously as nobodies unworthy of global children’s rights and as dangerous, killable bodies needing to be caged and dismembered. Her work on security theology, surveillance, necropolitics, and the criminalization of Palestinian existence under occupation has been recognized globally with the International Network of Genocide Scholars Impact Award and multiple prizes from the British Journal of Criminology. Professor Rita Giacaman, founder of the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University, whose decades of research document health under occupation and the social determinants of Palestinian wellbeing under colonial violence. Community mental health workers in Gaza who continued serving families while their own were being killed. Psychologists providing trauma care in besieged cities. Researchers documenting genocide in real time.

Where are their Sigourney Awards?

The message is clear: Israeli scholars can study Palestinian trauma and receive international recognition. Palestinians experiencing that trauma—and theorizing it, treating it, documenting it, surviving it—remain invisible to Western institutions.

What “Independence from Political Pressure” Actually Means

The Sigourney Award Trust maintains it is “protected from political pressures” and remains “independent” from institutional politics. The Trust has issued no statement on Gaza. No position on genocide. Studied neutrality.

But there is no neutrality in genocide. Silence is not apolitical—it is permission. The decision to honor an Israeli trauma expert during genocide while never honoring a single Palestinian in 35 years is not “independence from politics.” It is politics. It is a choice about whose trauma merits recognition, whose testimony counts as scholarship, whose work is celebrated and whose is erased.

Mary Sigourney wanted the award to address “human suffering based on sexual and gender identity, race, or religion, and oppression by authoritarian regimes.” The UN has concluded Israel is committing genocide. The PCHR has documented systematic rape and sexual torture as part of that genocide. What suffering is more urgent? What oppression more systematic? The Trust’s silence reveals that its founder’s vision applies selectively—only to suffering that doesn’t implicate Western and Israeli power.

The Global Architecture of Genocide Enablement

This ethical bankruptcy and institutional negligence is not unique to Palestine. This is the same architecture of complicity that has enabled genocide in Sudan, where over 150,000 have been killed in Darfur and again now; in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where millions have died while the world remained silent; against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, where mass killings and sexual violence were met with delayed and inadequate response; in Rwanda, where 800,000 were murdered in 100 days while international institutions watched.

The pattern is consistent: prestigious Western institutions celebrate scholarship that abstracts violence, that studies trauma without naming perpetrators, that maintains “neutrality” while people are annihilated. These institutions honor those proximate to power while erasing those experiencing genocide. They produce “expertise” on suffering while remaining silent about the systems producing that suffering.

When mental health institutions can celebrate trauma expertise during active genocide, when they can honor work on “victims’ testimonies” while victims testify from ongoing atrocities, when they can maintain “independence from politics” while genocide unfolds—they create the conditions for genocide everywhere. Silence is not neutrality. It is the infrastructure that makes mass violence possible.

The Sigourney Award’s decision to honor an Israeli scholar for trauma work during genocide while never recognizing a single Palestinian in 35 years is not an isolated failure. It is part of the global machinery that enables genocide by dignifying proximity to colonial power, by rewarding scholarship that extracts from the colonized, and by maintaining institutional “respectability” through studied silence about state violence.

If we cannot hold institutions accountable for their complicity in Palestine—where the genocide is live-streamed, documented by the UN, named by genocide scholars, and acknowledged even by Israeli human rights organizations—then we cannot hold them accountable anywhere. Palestine has become the test case for whether international institutions mean anything at all.

What We Demand

From the Sigourney Award Trust: Address why in 35 years, zero Palestinians have been recognized despite extraordinary contributions to mental health under conditions of military occupation, apartheid, siege, and now genocide. Acknowledge that “independence from political pressure” during genocide is not neutrality—it is alignment with power. Issue a statement calling for immediate ceasefire and an end to genocide, or admit your “independence” is selective.

From psychoanalytic institutions globally: Recognize that celebrating trauma expertise while ignoring genocide is not scholarship—it is professional malpractice masquerading as academic rigor. Your silence is not complexity or nuance. It is cowardice. Call the genocide in Gaza what it is. Demand immediate ceasefire. Hold your Israeli colleagues accountable for their silence while their state commits genocide.

From all mental health professionals: Refuse awards and platforms that celebrate work on trauma while remaining silent about ongoing genocide. Refuse to participate in institutional structures that honor proximity to colonial power while erasing those resisting it. Use your expertise to name genocide, demand accountability, and build solidarity for Palestinian liberation.

Our Commitment

The Palestine-Global Mental Health Network and the International Collective of the Palestine Mental Health Networks will continue centering Palestinian voices as primary narrators of Palestinian experience—not as case studies, not as testimony to be analyzed, not as objects requiring “dialogue frameworks.” We will continue building solidarity infrastructure for Palestinian liberation, not conflict resolution models that obscure genocide.

We will continue naming genocide. We will continue demanding accountability. And we will continue exposing institutions that celebrate trauma expertise while remaining silent as Palestinians are annihilated.

Palestinian mental health workers do not need their trauma studied. They need the genocide to stop.

Until Western institutions can grasp this simple truth, all their awards and scholarships and frameworks are exercises in extraction and evasion.

For Palestine, for liberation, for an end to genocide,

Palestine-Global Mental Health Network International Collective of the Palestine Mental Health Networks

The post On Professional Silence During Genocide: The 2025 Sigourney Award appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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