Palestinian Counseling Center (PCC)

Activities

• The Palestinian Counseling Center (PCC) has accused Israel of waging “psychological warfare” against the Palestinians. According to PCC, “one can say that this bloody war, which is waged by the occupation’s authorities against the Palestinian people, is waging psychological as much as it is physical, political and economic. It might be that the psychological elements of this war are…a goal in itself, cunningly planned by the Israelis, especially since we know that psychology is the Jews’ strongest weapon and their preferred battle field” (emphasis added).
• In November 2022, PCC was a signatory on a letter to the ICC Prosecutor to “Urgently expedite his investigation into the Situation of Palestine, including the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.” 
• In October 2021, PCC was a signatory on a joint statement condemning the decision by Israel to designate six Palestinian NGOs as terrorist organizations. The statement called for “the international community, especially the European Union and its member states who are key supporters of and donors to Palestinian civil society, [to] ensure that banks and financial institutions in their jurisdiction are notified Israel’s designation of Palestinian organizations is unfounded and inapplicable.”
• In May 2021, PCC was a signatory on a statement calling on the United Nations to “condemn the Israeli fueling of the conflict and its apartheid policies in the region and to take practical and genuine action for accountability and to stop the allowance of impunity.”
• In January 2021, PCC, alongside a number of Palestinian organizations, issued a declaration that the “Vaccine Roll-Out Exposes Israel’s Inhumane Acts of Apartheid.” The NGOs falsely claim that Israel has “legal obligations” to “ensure that quality vaccines be provided to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and control,” while altogether ignoring that Palestinians residing in Jerusalem are part of the Israeli health care system; that under the Oslo Accords the PA is responsible for health care of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; and that the PA has adopted its own vaccine policy for its population.
• In July 2020, PCC was a signatory on an appeal to the United Nations referring to Israel’s alleged “shoot-to-kill policy” as “contributing to the maintenance of Israel’s apartheid regime of systematic racial oppression and domination over the Palestinian people as a whole, which, embedded in a system of impunity, prevents Palestinians from effectively challenging Israel’s apartheid policies and practices.”
• In July 2020, PCC was a signatory on a statement calling for “Immediate targeted sanctions to stop Israel’s annexation and apartheid.” The statement further called for “A ban on arms trade and military-security cooperation with Israel,” “Suspension of trade and cooperation agreements with Israel,” and “Investigation and prosecution of individuals and corporate actors responsible for war crimes/crimes against humanity in the context of Israel’s regime of illegal occupation and apartheid.”
• In February 2017, PCC published a joint statement that “demanded to quickly act to stop normalization under the veil of mental health and humanitarian issues, which the Israeli occupation state tries to use in order to achieve some kind of breakthrough…”  According to the statement, the signatories “emphasized their total rejection of these kinds of [normalization] programs, which they described as a dangerous descent into the normalization swamp.” The statement argued that Israel is carrying out “policies of settlement, racial cleansing, Judaization of Jerusalem in the goal of emptying it from its original residents, and field executions” (emphases added).
• PCC is a signatory to the 2005 Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS.

Staff

• Rana Nashashibi serves as the director general of PCC.
  • Since 2013, Nashashibi’s Facebook picture has been the Israeli flag represented as bloody barbed wires with a child and the Palestinian flag inside the star.
  • In 2017, Nashashibi’s Facebook profile picture  was a poster calling to free Khalida Jarrar. Jarrar, a senior member of the PFLP, was arrested in 2015 due to her “incitement and involvement in terror” and for violating an injunction restricting her movement in the West Bank. Jarrar was sentenced on March 1, 2021, by the Judea Military Court to two years in prison for holding office in the PFLP.
  • In 2013, Nashashibi’s Facebook profile picture was a poster calling to support the hunger strike of Samer Issawi and Ayman Sharawna.
    • Issawi, a PFLP member, was sentenced for 26 years for shooting attacks on Israeli vehicles and was later held again in administrative arrest.
    • Sharawna is a Hamas member who was arrested in 2002 and sentenced to 38 years in prison after being convicted for laying the explosives in a Beersheba terror attack in which 18 people were wounded. He was also convicted for the attempted abduction and shooting of soldiers.