Photo: Benjamin Rückert
In November last year, a group of students, researchers, lecturers and activists published a 50-page report on two German universities’ collaborations with Israeli institutions.
In January they wanted to arrange a dialogue meeting with the leadership of Technical University of Munich (TUM). They ended up being locked up in a room by the police.
In the report, the Munich-based group lists collaborations that Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich (LMU) and Technical University of Munich (TUM) have in occupied Palestine.
Sara*, one of the students who were part of publishing the report, meets Kollektivist in a quiet corner of the university in February.
“We just wanted to talk about international law and find a solution together and just have an open dialogue. And the university has shown that even just requesting a dialogue about international law is treated as a completely criminal act,” Sara told Kollektivist.
*The participants are anonymous in this article due to the consequences students can face in Germany if they criticize the Israeli occupation.
A video posted on Instagram shows that a representative of the administration is letting students go into a lecture hall while a TUM security guard is guiding the participants. Once the students and employees are inside the hall, they are locked into the room for three hours.
TUM accused them of trespassing and called the police. All of the participants were searched and they had to show their IDs.
“The only thing we did was compile information that is public, put it in a report and request a meeting to talk. That is all we did. I really feel like I am some underground activist doing insane stuff, but really we are doing basic things that should be part of the public discourse,” Sara told Kollektivist.
One of the organizers of the dialogue meeting also said how they peacefully had tried to present the information in the report.
“We had already presented the central values of our movement in May last year: transparency and divesting from military institutions. This was during the student encampment outside LMU, which lasted from May-November last year,” Aisha* told xxx via phone.
Aisha is from Palestine and came to Germany a few years ago to study.
“The climate in Germany surrounding this topic is very bad. The media in Munich also do not hesitate to call us antisemites,” she said during the interview.
She referred to a piece published by Süddeutsche Zeitung, where the dialogue meeting is described as a “pro-palestine action”:
“It was not a demonstration, and we had made that clear for the administration of the university. We just wanted a dialogue meeting.”
In the article, a press spokesperson for the university is cited saying that persons or groups “(...) who represent anti-semitic and anti-Israeli positions are not interlocutors at the university.”
“The media plays a huge role in how people think here, they are animalizing us and people are believing it. Journalists are just reckless and they do not understand the length of what they are doing,” Aisha said.
Aisha grew up in the Palestinian areas that were occupied in 1948, and studied at an Israeli university that was highly militarized:
“There, it was logical that I would be suppressed and that I did not have freedom of speech and that I should be scared of standing up against injustices and so on. When coming to Germany, I always thought that I would not be complicit in this injustice happening, and that I would be able to say my opinions.”
To Aisha's surprise, Germany was not better than growing up under the occupation:
“I have been faced with the exact opposite of what I expected: here repression is just as hard and the society is just as restricted about this topic, and the university is just as complicit,” she said.
On January 30, the LMU cancelled the lecture by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese.
Albaneses talk was set to take place on February 16 at the university, but the LMU cancelled the room reservation. They explained the cancellation in a letter, saying that the event would be likely to provoke a “battle of opinions”, and that the university could not ensure adequate security.
Despite this, the students managed to arrange her talk somewhere else. During a press conference the same day in Munich, Albanese talked about the German government, and said that:
“Your government has legal obligations, and what it is doing is against international law. So when I hear your chancellor denying that it is genocide, and saying that it finds the assessment inaccurate or inopportune, he is wrong. The chancellor is wrong when he says that it's not the time yet to talk about it. The crime of genocide is not somthing you have to punish only, you have to prevent and to stop.
Germany has been, and still is, sending weapons to Israel. On the question of whether states and individuals will be punished for partaking in the genocide, Albanese stressed that there will be consequences.
“There shall be consequences for the politicians who have taken decisions not to comply with international law. There should be consequences, because many of the conducts that have been taken violate international law, some of them also lead to criminal responsibility,” she said.
She also mentioned how businesses, banks, pension funds, charities, individuals, dual nationals, who have been fighting in the army “should all demonstrate they have nothing to do with the crimes that have been committed against the Palestinians. If they have profited from the legality of the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory, they should be held accountable. And also the individuals, settlers and soldiers.”
Francesca Albanese has been travelling around Europe this year to talk about the genocide in Palestine. But she emphasized that:
“I cannot be portrayed as the one who is speaking on behalf of the Palestinians, I am not. I am someone who speaks the language of the law.”
This is far from the first time that a university in Germany is repressing students and employees for their speaking up for Palestine. At universities all over the country, students have been mobilising in support of Palestine and have been protesting and organizing lectures. During several peaceful demonstrations, the students have been met by police violence.
Despite the repression and the risks that their work entails, the students are determined to keep on holding Germany and the universities responsible:
“We will continue to do more research, community building, and growing the network. It is important that we keep exposing what these institutions that pride themselves with excellence and good international reputation are actually about, what really is beneath all of this prestige. I think the university doesn't care about breaking international law, but I believe they care about international reputation,” Sara said.
