Springer Nature publishes a psychiatry textbook that includes insane anti-Israel lies

Did you know that Israel is the world's leading exporter of Islamophobia?

Springer Nature has published a second edition of Islamophobia and Psychiatry, billing it as an expert clinical resource for physicians, counselors, and social workers. Chapter 24, authored by Samah Jabr (George Washington University School of Medicine), Sarah Mohr (Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley), and Elizabeth Berger (Alkaram Institute, Chicago), is titled “Islamophobia, Genocide, and Mental Health: A Palestinian Perspective on Collective Trauma.”

A reader opening a psychiatry textbook expecting clinical analysis will find something rather different: a political manifesto that treats its most contested claims as established baselines, then builds a mental health framework on top of them.

The authors say at the outset:

[T]he state of Israel has from its outset regarded the Palestinian people as a group—as Muslim people—with an overall aim of assigning to them a disenfranchised and disempowered position relative to Jewish people. This political position is known by its supporters as well as by its opponents as Zionism.

They are saying that this is how Zionists define themselves - as having a primary aim of Jewish superiority over Palestinians. The fact that no Zionist actually thinks this way isn’t important. It’s only a chapter published by a respected science imprint, why bother checking facts?

The chapter’s fundamental thesis is that Palestinian mental health suffers because Israel inflicts deliberate, genocidal harm. Every psychiatric symptom, every dimension of Palestinian psychological distress, traces back to Israeli policy. This is not presented as a hypothesis to be tested — it is declared as the premise from which clinical analysis proceeds.

There is a simple empirical test for this thesis: see if Palestinians outside the territories also have mental health issues that cannot be attributed to Israel.

There are in fact plenty of studies about that. Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan — far from Israeli military operations, outside Israeli jurisdiction, living under the governance of Arab host states — suffer severe and well-documented mental health crises. In Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Médecins Sans Frontières found that depression affects nearly one-third of patients, with others presenting with anxiety (22%), psychosis (14%), and bipolar disorders (10%). A Royal College of Psychiatrists essay examining Palestinian refugees in Jordan’s Baqa’a camp — the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world, home to 104,000 people — found that all 16 medical professionals interviewed acknowledged high prevalence of mental illness in the refugee population, with estimates ranging from 20 to 50%, and some participants placing it as high as 75%. The drivers identified were poverty, overcrowding, stigma, gender-based violence, and the grinding hopelessness of camp life without prospect of legal integration into Jordanian society. Israel does not appear in the causal chain, because Israel is not present in Jordan.

Do the authors care about the source of mental health problems for all Palestinians, or just the ones that they can claim are suffering from “apartheid”? We have the answer.

The chapter’s inventory of claims accepted as clinical fact is worth laying out directly, because the academic packaging obscures how unargued they are.

The authors declare “the genocidal conduct of Israel” as their working premise, citing Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s March 2024 report as the evidentiary foundation. Albanese is a political appointee of the UN Human Rights Council — the same body that has never once condemned Hamas — and her document is advocacy, not peer-reviewed research. From there, Israel’s “overall epistemic of Western European colonialism, racism, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism” is offered as description rather than contested theory. Zionism, they write, induced Jewish communities “to form a kind of fifth column within the Middle East.” The Holocaust “lent surface credibility to the Zionist political position” — six million murdered Jews are reframed as useful propaganda for Jewish nationalism.

On territorial ambitions, the authors assert that Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Law reflects “political ambitions of Israel for sovereignty over the whole of former Mandatory Palestine.” Israel’s 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza — evacuating every settlement and soldier from territory the authors claim Israel seeks to hold forever — goes unmentioned. So is the withdrawal from Area A to give Palestinians, for the first time in their history, self-rule. Seems strange for the rapacious ever-expanding state they describe.

On apartheid, the chapter describes “the massive Israeli apartheid system which denied basic human rights to Palestinians.” Arab citizens of Israel vote, serve in the Knesset, sit on the Supreme Court, and practice medicine in Israeli hospitals. The comparison to South African apartheid is asserted; it is not argued.

The Islamophobia claim is the most structurally bizarre. The authors declare that “Islamophobia is both a weaponized major export of the state of Israel and a plank in the larger longstanding defense of the dehumanization and violence which typically characterize dominating oppressive systems.” Israel — nine million people, a country smaller than New Jersey — is the primary global engine of anti-Muslim prejudice. The mechanism by which it exports this prejudice to Hindu nationalists in India, Serbian paramilitaries in the 1990s, or the architects of the Spanish Inquisition is never explained, because no such mechanism exists. Islamophobia long predates Israel and flourishes in regions with zero Israeli cultural footprint.

Then there is the pre-Israel history, where the revisionism becomes almost comedic. The authors describe Israel as having “rejected the previous model of religious and ethnic pluralism which had operated there for centuries.” Yes, Israel defining itself as a Jewish state that gives equal rights to non-Jews is a Jewish supremacist state, while the Ottoman Empire - whose sultan was also the caliph, and which used separate legal systems for Muslims and Jews and Christians, was the model of pluralism.

Springer Nature’s imprint on this chapter tells every clinician, librarian, and medical student who encounters it that what they’re reading is science. The damage from that signal is harder to undo than anything in the text itself.