26/08/2025
On behalf of the Greek Institute for Relational and Group Psychotherapy, regarding Israel Palestine drama , reference to illegally occupied Cyprus by Turkish regime
Athens, August 26, 2025
On behalf of the Institute for Relational and Group Psychotherapy (IRGP)
Dear colleagues and friends,
As Director of the Institute for Relational and Group Psychotherapy and Representative of the Greek community within it, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the members of the two Israeli psychoanalytic institutes—the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Israeli Institute of Group Analysis—for their courageous, clear, and humane public statements regarding the war in Gaza.
Your explicit acknowledgements are not only moving, but profoundly necessary in a historical moment when the voice of ethical thought is in danger of being silenced. You have spoken bravely for the sanctity of human life, for the urgent need to end the violence, and for the pain that penetrates both sides of this tragic conflict.
As Greeks and Greek Cypriots, we know all too well what genocide and mass violence mean. We have endured repeated traumatic national experiences—from the Asia Minor Catastrophe to the Turkish invasion and occupation of Cyprus. The genocide currently unfolding in Palestine has taken on dramatic and undeniable proportions, while the international community remains either unable—or unwilling—to act effectively.
At the same time, we unequivocally condemn the calculated tactics of the Hamas terrorists, who continue to hold Israeli civilians—both dead and alive—as hostages, thus contributing to the very machinery of destruction that harms their own people. The dehumanization of the Other and the use of suffering as a political weapon can never be justified—not even in the name of resistance.
As psychoanalysts and group psychotherapists, and as democratic citizens, we also firmly oppose any form of antisemitism or Islamophobia that exploits this human tragedy. In particular, the BDS movement in its current form dangerously conflates the authoritarian Israeli government with the broader Israeli and Jewish people, thereby isolating those clear-thinking individuals—within and beyond Israel—who bravely protest state violence.
Moreover, this movement deliberately spreads misinformation about the historical and political spectrum of Zionism, flattening and distorting its meaning by equating it entirely with the authoritarianism and brutality of the current Israeli regime. This kind of historical revisionism does not promote dialogue—it undermines it, and sabotages every possibility for coexistence.
At the same time, we call upon the international community to show equal moral concern for another long-standing injustice: the ongoing illegal occupation of Northern Cyprus by the Turkish military since 1974. This occupation, with its thousands of victims, rapes, cultural destruction, and systematic violations of human rights, remains inexplicably absent from the global moral and political agenda.
Psychoanalytic and group-oriented thinking cannot and must not remain neutral in the face of the collapse of human dignity. We thank you for speaking out—and we join our voices with yours.
Sincerely,
Stavros Charalambides
Director of the Institute for Relational and Group Psychotherapy
Representative of the Greek community of the Institute
