1. I can smell her
Watch this prize-winning 4-minute play written and performed by children in Gaza, and explore the work of the Hands Up Project at point 7 below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvisREPoKWg

NEWS

2. The Palestine Global Mental Health Network

The UKPMHN welcomes the formation of the Palestine Global Mental Health Network, which held its inaugural meeting in Ramallah on June 9^th. We look forward to a rich and mutually supportive partnership with the PGMHN… The context for this development is provided in this article by Lama Khouri and Samah Jabr:
https://mondoweiss.net/2019/06/palestinian-international-association/

3. The campaign against normalising apartheid is gaining ground:

The European Network for Mental Health Service Evaluation (ENMESH), has reversed a decision to hold its 2021 annual conference in occupied Jerusalem. In a letter to the Board, Chair of the Executive Committee Mike Slade, said that he had made the decision after receiving complaints from Board members and consulting others, and to avoid embroiling the group in a two-year controversy. The UKPMHN welcomes this decision. While understanding that it does not indicate ENMESH’s support for the boycott campaign, it clearly indicates that many of its members see the inappropriateness of Israel as a location for a conference of this kind. This is consistent with our wider experience, that normalising the apartheid regime is becoming unacceptable to an increasing number of mental health professionals.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190708-academic-association-cancels-conference-in-israel-after-backlash/
and
https://www.timesofisrael.com/european-association-said-to-nix-jerusalem-conference-fearing-bds-pressure/

ANALYSIS

4. In ‘Disavowing Israeli Apartheid’, Lara Sheehi interprets the behaviour of elites within our profession in response to mention of ‘the four letter word’, Palestine. She suggests that the ‘collapse of [psycho]analysable space’ is ‘not surprising when one considers the immense psychic effort expended on retaining structural coherence within a fundamentally ideologically flawed thought process…’https://merip.org/2019/06/disavowing-israeli-apartheid/

5. Deconstructing the confusion of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
An article, written by an Israeli teacher working in the USA, takes as its starting point the fact that some Jewish students felt genuinely aggrieved when faced with the conclusions she had drawn from her personal experiences.
https://tinyurl.com/y2bvsgbm?fbclid=IwAR28ziNbMu_guRwmbNpTB9OKjdDMnJWr7P349DtwESb_GI8O8hDTCB2fS18

EVENT

6. Conference: “Highlight the Invisible: Protection of the Right to Education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories” 
Defence of the Child International is sponsoring this important conference due to take place in Ramallah, 20^th-21^st November, 2019. For further details, email ukpalmhn@gmail.com.

“Education in Palestine suffers from exceptionally harsh conditions due to geopolitical factors associated with the military occupation, which aims to institutionalise racial discrimination in accordance with its policies and procedures on the ground. The military occupation continuously attacks the educational process by obstructing children’s access to their schools through checkpoints and constant threats, repeated incursions into schools, arresting students and their teachers, firing stun grenades, tear gas canisters and live bullets within systematic plans to restrict citizens and ethnic cleansing of their areas to control them.”

Drama Project Working With School Children  In Gaza

7. Drama Therapy as developed by The Hands Up Project

This weekend the Network took part in a Panel at the Palestine Expo in Olympia, along with David Harrold from the Palestine Trauma Centre and Nick Bilbrough from the Hands Up Project. Nick showed the remarkable 4-minute play by elementary school children that heads this mailing (see 1. above). To learn more about the work of the Hands Up Project, and watch more of the children’s plays, go to:https://handsupproject.org/page/1/ 
8. Mental Health Study Tour

There are still places on the March 2020 mental health study tour of Palestine. See
https://ukpalmhn.com/2019/06/08/mental-health-study-delegations-to-palestine/