Juliane Prade-Weiss: Open letters by academics on the Israel–Gaza conflict: pitfalls of urgent appeals, in: Critical Studies on Terrorism (2026)1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2026.2677270
The Gaza conflict is also being played out in open letters: actors, international law experts, university professors in solidarity with Israel, Israeli intellectuals, ordinary citizens—they all bring their specialized expertise on the one hand, and their personal identity and reputation on the other, to bear in an effort to change the discourse and, perhaps, the facts. But are they successful in doing so? Juliane Prade-Weiss, a comparative literature scholar at LMU Munich, believes not, and seeks the reasons for this in the letters themselves. She analyzed 23 open letters written in the first months of the Gaza War—regardless of their content and intended purpose—focusing on their rhetoric and as speech acts, and found in them elements of analysis, judgment, appeal, and commitment which, she concludes, in their combination, undermine the letters’ effectiveness. Ultimately, Prade-Weiss argues, the subjectivity of open letters undermines their claim to insight as well as the authority of the signatories as experts. Furthermore, she contends that the open letters have intensified the very polarization they often sought to overcome.
This is worth considering but it is also telling what Prade-Weiss explicitly excludes from the analysis: the factual, moral, and legal correctness of the letters and their demands; the positionality and ideology of the signatories; the power asymmetry not only between the warring parties but also among the writers; and foremost their substantive positions on the Gaza War. (At least we learn that, in the broadest sense, twelve of the letters were pro-Palestinian, four pro-Israeli, and the rest somewhere in between.) This almost complete decontextualization comes at a price. When, for example, Prade-Weiss suggests that the use of the term “genocide” in many of the letters served to emotionalize and politicize the issue, she not only overlooks the fact that this emotionalization often appears as an external attribution. She also fails to consider that today’s widespread recognition of the genocide accusation—which she acknowledges—may in fact be a result of precisely the open letters written, for example, by the genocide researchers. The claim that open letters are ineffective is not entirely plausible anyway. The open letter from May 2024, in which hundreds of Berlin-based and other faculty members protested the police eviction of a Palestine camp at the Free University of Berlin, led after all to the dismissal of a state secretary and the resignation of a minister; it significantly influenced reflection on the responsibility of university administrations and faculty, as well as politicians and the press. (And the founding of KriSol can also be traced back to this letter.)
With its decontextualized focus on isolated texts, speech act analysis cannot explain discursive and political processes. Only in this way can Prade-Weiss ultimately lump pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli letters together. Nevertheless, there are some practical insights to be gained. Prade-Weiss’s skepticism toward statements that focus more on the signatories’ feelings than on the political situation itself is justified. (Of course, one should also ask to what extent the very accusation that the writers are concerned exclusively with their conscience and not with impact—the “do-gooder accusation”—is a speech act by the opposing side aimed at demotivation.) In fact, as the text encourages, open letters can be powerful when they plausibly translate the signatories’ expertise, position, and concern into concrete, concise, and precise demands directed at specifically named addressees. The number and diversity of the signatories (which Prade-Weiss does not address) demonstrate not only a letter’s ability to foster consensus. They also enable the collective assumption of responsibility on the one hand, and the creation of solidarity on the other. The fact that the “Staatsräson” fears precisely this is perhaps the best proof of the potential of this form of intervention.