“We Accuse”: Repression of Palestine Solidarity in Heidelberg and the Struggle for Academic Freedom
In December 2024, a group of scholars and educators across the World signed the open letter “Against the Weaponisation of Antisemitism to Impose Censorship in Education” in order to oppose a then-planned parliamentary resolution at the German Bundestag that would likely increase already severe/excessive state repression and surveillance in the Educational Institutions in Germany. In the name of fighting against antisemitism, the planned resolution, expected to be voted on at the end of January1 by the Bundestag, calls for the securitization of the universities by implementing, among other things, “the expansion of legal measures and repressive instruments”, the exclusion of students “who express undesirable views”, and a commitment to release federal funds through monitoring statements and views of academics.
The open letter, endorsed by significant organizations such as Jewish Solidarity Collective and Jüdische Stimme, emerges as a call for action against the repression of student movements in solidarity with Palestine, scholars, and activists as they addressed the academic censorship on the war waged against Gaza, supported by the majority of western politicians, media, intellectuals and institutions. Amidst this authoritarian climate looming over German academia, the University of Heidelberg issued a statement on 24th November emphasizing its unconditional support for the victims of “Hamas terrorism” of October 7th, while neglecting the Palestinian lives lost in the Gaza Strip due to Israeli aggression, which at the time of the statement's issue amounted to well over 15.000. Since then, the University has repeatedly censored, instead of promoting, attempts to engage in critical discussions with the students. After censoring a seminar hosting two locally based Palestinian activists in June 2024, a move virtually conceding to a series of ungrounded press attacks from German conservative media platforms and tabloid magazines, such as BILD using terms such as “terror scandal”, and a blatant interference from a local politician, Manuel Hagel, the head of Baden-Württemberg branch of CDU, the University surveilled the growing student movement, limited its access to academic spaces to gather and engage in critical discussions, and ignored the two Open Letters sent by Students for Palestine Heidelberg. In one of these, the group requested the university to adopt concrete measures against its complicity in the unfolding genocide, among which an immediate termination of “cooperation between all Heidelberg educational and research institutions and Israeli academic institutions that are complicit in the genocide and the occupation of Palestine”.
Over the last 16 months, German universities have adopted different forms of surveillance, repression, and censorship, singling out individuals with the charge of antisemitism for upholding “extremist positions” and constituting a threat to security or by attempting to declare political engagement as alien to academic spaces. One of the last and most shameful episode occurred at TUM (Technische Universität München) where, on the 20th of January, pro-Palestinian students were locked in a room for three hours and then inspected by the police, who had been unlawfully called by the University itself after agreeing to discuss the demands advanced by the students in a safe academic space.
Antisemitism has been widely and openly weaponized to suppress pro-Palestinian speech and protests, to such a paradoxical extent that Berlin police, notorious for its brutality, were stated to be the first victim of antisemitism at the hands of the demonstrators. As Jewish Professor Alana Lentin has pointed out, “anti-antisemitism” has been globally used “as a tool for the implementation of racialized control, discipline and punishment that targets those who are already most vulnerable to the state’s maneuvers against them”: often racialized communities, Arabs and other non-white minorities. The problematic IHRA definition of antisemitism, which equates it with any criticism of or accusation against “Israel as a State”, has been the main argument used in Germany to silence dissent against Israel, its ongoing occupation, and its apartheid society, of which the education system is an important pillar2.
According to Dr. Lentin, the instrumentalization of antisemitism has facilitated “not only the genocide of Palestinians but a return of open, prideful white, western supremacism”. Antisemitism, she argues, cannot be understood without taking into account what Israel stands for the West and its racial policies, and how the figure of the Jew has come to “stand for westerness, Europeanness and whiteness at a time when it was no longer politically possible to openly stake a claim to white/western/European supremacy”3 (Lentin 2025).
Pro-Palestinian students have also been identified as a threat to public security and order, labeled as “terror sympathizers” and accused of holding “extremist positions”. This framework emerged within a well-established decades-long process that has been dehumanizing Palestinians as a racialized dangerous “other” and subjects of terror, a vision now reinforced by explicit islamophobia backed by the growing right-wing extremism. This dehumanization is rooted in the earliest formulation of Zionism as a European settler-colonial ideology and racist project within the broader political imperial landscape of the late 19th century. Theodor Herzl, who formulated the idea of the State of Israel in his “The Jewish State” (1896), explicitly framed it as such: “We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism”. The dehumanizing rhetoric of the founder of Zionism is echoed today by current State of Israel’s spokespersons, most notably by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who framed the struggle of Israel as that of the “children of light” against “the law of the jungle” in a Tweet that was later deleted. Likewise, former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described Israel’s siege of Palestinian people as a fight against “human animals”.
As United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese pointed out in her latest work, echoing Émile Zola’s famous “J’accuse” (2023), it is important to situate the insistence on “extremism” as a legacy of G.W. Bush’s War on Terror, a war impacted the way the western discourse framed the Palestinian struggle for self-determination as a form of “Islamic militancy”. It was during those years that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon openly labeled the Palestinian resistance against the military occupation as an explicit act of terrorism against Israel (page 29). Dr. Albanese, a lawyer specializing in International Law and Human Rights, has argued against the political weaponization of “terror” as a moral category deployed to dehumanize people. Besides preventing a deep understanding of the complexity of the conflict, she maintains that positing Palestinians as terrorists shifts both the people and their struggle from the humanitarian international law (globally used to understand the nature of conflicts) to a political framework that is easily and widely manipulated to justify the dehumanization of the Palestinians and refute the reasons behind their struggle (page 26).
This consolidated dehumanization has had severe consequences in shaping the media discourse, in the way the current Genocide of Palestinians was framed, and lastly, in the way racialized people in Europe were attacked. On one side, it allowed journalists like Susanne Glass to equate Palestinian women and children to terrorists without facing any legal consequences. On the other side, activists have increasingly been subjected to state surveillance and disinformation campaigns, as in the example of Palestinian journalist Hebh Jamal, or have been affected by police house raids, as recently happened to activists in the state of Hesse4. Last month, unfounded accusations of “extremism” were advanced in Karlsruhe by the ultra-Zionist media Jüdische Allgemeine, leading the Rector of the State Academy of Arts to ban a panel discussion organized by a student initiative, in which Palestinian activist Mahmoud O. had been invited to speak. Mahmoud’s presence was considered a security threat, and the whole Academy was abruptly shut down for “security reasons”. In February 2025, despite her UN mandate, Dr. Albanese was forbidden to speak first at LMU Munich (the university refused to offer a platform to a “general political event”), and then at the Free University of Berlin, when a coalition of political and civil actors, among which the Mayor of Berlin Kai Wegner, called for the immediate cancellation of the event in order to “send a clear signal against anti-Semitism”. German academia is setting a dangerous precedent in how narratives on anti-semitism are fabricated and employed to bar the development of critical discussions on our campus.
To actively silence the voices of pro-Palestinian scholars, students, and activists means to reproduce a domination mechanism inherent in the process of knowledge production, what theorist Gayatri Spivak has referred to as “epistemic violence”. Our universities are sites of control in terms of epistemic and material practices, where domination is accomplished “through the construction of epistemic frameworks that legitimize and enshrine those practices of domination”(Galván-Álvarez 2010). This has become manifested in the way Palestinians’ possibility to articulate their analysis is surveilled and delegitimized. Their experience is turned into what Spivak, referring to Foucault’s concept of “subjugated knowledge” (1980) – articulated as “a whole set of knowledge that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: (...) beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity” (1988). In this regard, Heidelberg University has been complicit in the production of frameworks that, in the name of “academic freedom and democracy”, reinforce the dominance of Zionist public and academic discourse while subjugating Palestinian voices.
In June 2024, after indefinitely “postponing” the seminar "Palestinian Activism and (German) Media” with Palestinian journalist and activists Hebh Jamal and Mahoud O., supposed to be held at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS), the University of Heidelberg promised to readdress its topics within a “different format”, that took the shape of a lecture series on Academic Freedom (“Freiheit? Die Universitat als Diskursraum”) which occurred the following semester. Unsurprisingly, not only were Palestinian voices excluded from taking part as speakers in the cycle of seminars, but the opening session took place at the Alte Aula, next to Universitätsplatz, where Heidelberg’s Student for Palestine’s “Rasha’s Camp” was occurring to protest against the academic silencing (Read More). After having censored the activists under the charge of turning the university into a “platform for political agitation”, Heidelberg University, in partnership with the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien (HfJS), offered a few months later the same academic platform to the Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor. In his speech “The New Middle East”, he accused universities of becoming “breeding grounds for anti-Semitism, hate, and misinformation”, which are “taking root, threatening Jewish students and spreading dark ideologies across campuses”. Some weeks later, the controversial public figure Ahmad Mansour was welcomed at the HCTS, again co-hosted by the HfJS, for a discussion entitled “Preventing extremism”. His racist, anti-muslim views, coupled with the spreading of misinformation about the nature of antisemitism in Germany, were probably regarded as enough “scientific” to grant him an invitation to the Centre or to fit the narrative upheld by the University. This took place on the 4th of December, just a few days after he tweeted against the ICC, calling its charge on Netanyahu “not convincing” and accusing it of giving Hamas a “propaganda point” against Israel, the new “global scapegoat”.
Charges of antisemitism and extremism, as well as attempts to define what constitutes academic knowledge and what political engagement, have been weaponized by Heidelberg and other universities across Germany to repress academic freedom and to expand a particular discourse while preventing the formulation of critical instances and counter-discourses inside our campuses.
In the midst of this pervasive censorship, the Conference “Talking about (the Silencing of) Palestine”, organized by a brave group of students of the Goethe University in Frankfurt, successfully defied the last-minute attempt to cancel it5. One of the panel discussions, entitled “Legal Perspectives” and chaired by Dr. Nahed Samour from Radboud University Nijmegen and lawyer Alexander Gorski, pointed at how the law has been weaponized against pro-Palestine students and activists, and more generally, how we are witnessing an ontological shift in the nature of the existing law. This is evident when we look at how extra-juridical and political argumentations upheld by governments or parties, such as “Staatsräson”6, are acquiring a legal significance and are often evoked in the Court litigations, at the same time demeaning the importance of International Law to which Germany is legally bound, and ending up charging pro-Palestine voices in an unprecedented way.
The Conference constituted a necessary step towards articulating an academic engagement with Palestine. At the same time, it reinforced the need to acknowledge that our academic work is not separate from our ethical sensitivity and political consciousness. For this reason, knowledge production should be seen as an emancipatory process that is transformative and aims to change all the existing structures of oppression. When Edward Said wrote “there is no such thing as a private intellectual” (Said 1996), he emphasized how, as scholars, we inevitably enter the public discourse with our “histories, values, writings, and positions” which derive from our experiences as well as “how these enter into the social world where people debate and make decisions about war and freedom and justice” (p.12). Therefore, as scholars, intellectuals, professors, and students, our work has to be engaged in a politico-epistemic project within a decolonial framework. This project should be, drawing from critical theorists Quijano and Mignolo, aimed at “breaking hierarchies of difference that dehumanize subjects and communities”, while committing to “the production of counter-discourses, counter-knowledges, counter-creative acts, and counter-practices that seek to dismantle coloniality and to open up multiple other forms of being in the world” (Quijano 2007).
Editorial note: some linked articles are behind a paywall. If you have no access, please contact us; we are happy to help.
Further readings:
Jewish Voice for Peace (2017), On Antisemitism. New York.
Lentin, A., (forthcoming, May 2025), The New Racial Regime. Recalibrations of White Supremacy. Pluto Press.
Moses, D. (2021) The German Catechism. ()
Said, E. W. (1996), Representations of the Intellectual. New York.
Wind, M. (2024), Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. Verso.
Younes A-E., (2020), Fighting Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Germany. Islamophobia Studies Journal , Fall 2020, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall 2020), pp. 249-266.
The first resolution “Never Again is now: Protect, Preserve and Strengthen Jewish Life in Germany’, was passed by the Bundestag and supported by the majority of political parties in November 2024. Following this, the second resolution “‘Steadfastly Opposing Antisemitism and Israelphobia in Schools and Tertiary Education While Securing Free Space for Discourse” allegedly/purportedly aimed at fighting antisemitism in education facilities, was expected to be voted on the 29th of January 2025. Text available at the following sites:
To read more on the academy, see the important publication by Maya Wind “Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom”, addressing the structural historical and current role of Israeli universities in perpetrating crimes against Palestinians. Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom | Verso Books
See also the article by Palestinian scholar Anna-Esther Younes (2020) "Fighting Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Germany", which explores how the figure of “the Jew” is weaponized in German politics of race, migration, and racialization while constructing the “Muslim/Arab other” as the anti-Semite.
On the 22nd January, the flats of nine Palestine solidarity activists in and around Frankfurt were searched with the allegation of being connected to the association Palestina e.V (previously dissolved by its own members in November 2024). Over the last year, several solidarity movements have been criminalized and banned in Germany, such as Samidoun and Palestine Solidarity Duisburg.
The Conference took place on the 16th and 17th of January in Frankfurt, after that Goethe University revoked at the last minute its availability to host it. Its relocation to non-academic spaces reduced its capacity to welcome a large number of people who had registered, and, on the other side, showed the constant intolerance and non-availability on behalf of German universities to engage with an academic discourse centered on Palestine.
Staatsräson”, or “the Reason of State”, was a term used in 2008 by Angela Merkel and recently by Chancellor Scholz after the 7th of October to express unconditional support to the State of Israel: “Die Sicherheit Israels ist Teil der Staatsräson unseres Landes” (Israel’s security is part of Germany’s reason of state). For a critical perspective on it, see the work of Palestinian journalist Hebh Jamal: