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    • Tag: solidarity

    • Refusal to cooperate with Israeli institutions

      Refusal to cooperate with Israeli institutions

      Statement “Refusal on grounds of conscience. For human rights and compliance with international law,” https://uppsaladeclaration.se/germany/.

      While the systematic and targeted starvation of the population in Gaza, with Western and especially German support, is making the genocide of the Palestinians an undeniable fact for more and more people, the question of a boycott of Israel is still taboo, especially in Germany. The so-called BDS movement, co-founded by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), was launched in 2004 in response to the failure of Oslo and the question of what nonviolent options for action remained against occupation and disenfranchisement. In Germany, it is indiscriminately considered antisemitic and partly watched by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a “suspected extremist case.” But now even the German government can no longer avoid dealing with sanctions and the suspension of cooperation in certain areas. And an increasing number of international scientists are signing letters calling on their governments and employers to stop ignoring the consequences of the situation in Gaza for scientific work – most prominently the letter from more than 1,000 physicists and scientists to the leadership of CERN.

      In early summer, Swedish scientists, and scientists working in Sweden, published the so-called Uppsala Declaration, in which they commit themselves, on grounds of conscience, to no longer cooperate with Israeli institutions that have made themselves complicit in illegal occupation, apartheid, genocide, and other crimes under international law. This declaration has well over 2,000 signatures.

      The German version has now been published on the same website and is identical to the Swedish version in form and many of its formulations. It explains the decision to boycott Israeli institutions in great detail, citing overwhelming evidence of Israeli universities’ involvement in crimes, and formulates the same principles:

      “1. We will not support cooperation with the State of Israel or with its institutions that bear responsibility.

      2. We will not promote or publicly support institutionalized exchange with Israeli institutions that bear responsibility.

      3. We will not participate in activities organized and/or co-organized by the State of Israel or its complicit institutions.”

      In addition, it also addresses the situation in Germany, citing examples of how German universities are disregarding their obligation to comply with international law, institutional links, and how existing cooperation is even to be expanded. And it clarifies at the end: “We explicitly do not call for severing relations with individual Israeli academics. Rather, we firmly reject cooperation with Israeli institutions involved in illegal occupation, apartheid, genocide, and other violations of international law on grounds of conscience.”

      I myself hesitated for a while before signing the statement: firstly, because I do not wish to cooperate with non-Israeli institutions that are involved in violations of international law, either, and would prefer to adopt a general demand for universities to commit themselves to human rights. Like the Human Rights Policy of Ghent University in the Netherlands: “In a nutshell: Ghent University does not cooperate with organizations involved in serious or systematic human rights violations, nor does it want projects to lead directly or indirectly to human rights violations.” Secondly, I can imagine ethical dilemmas in which it is unavoidable to enter into undesirable cooperation. However, my main concern at this point is to put pressure on German institutions, the German government, and the German public to immediately cease all military and police cooperation with a state led by right-wing extremists, and to save Palestinian lives and the lives of the hostages. That is why I am signing this letter.

      ↗ https://uppsaladeclaration.se/germany/.

      PS: Bar-Ilan University’s website says it all:

      blibli
      screenshot of Bar-Ilan University’s website, https://www.biu.ac.il/en/article/583601

    • “Don’t Woman Life Freedom Us, You Murderers!”

      “Women, Life, Freedom” against the War. A Statement against Genocidal Israel and the Repressive Islamic Republic, 23. Juni 2025, https://de.crimethinc.com/2025/06/23/women-life-freedom-against-the-war-a-statement-against-genocidal-israel-and-the-repressive-islamic-republic.

      It has already been six weeks: In the early hours of June 13, 2025, Israel launched an attack on Tehran in violation of international law. Iran struck back within hours, firing missiles at dozens of military installations in Israel. The Israeli government justified the war by claiming that Iran was on the verge of completing a nuclear bomb – an unsubstantiated claim that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been repeating since 1992. Nine days later, the US officially entered the war on Israel’s side. According to the US-based human rights organization Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRANA), nearly 1,000 people were killed and over 3,500 injured in the Israeli attacks. In Iran’s attacks on Israel, 29 Israelis were killed and 172 injured. After twelve days, the war was temporarily ended with a ceasefire initiated by the US.

      We share here a statement by the collective Roja, which was originally published in Farsi on June 16 and translated into English a week later by the decentralized network CrimethInc. It is now available in many other languages, too. Roja is an independent internationalist collective of Kurdish, Afghan (Hazara), and Iranian feminists, based in Paris, that was founded in 2022 in response to the Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran.

      The statement embeds the events of the war in the context of recent Iranian history, critically assesses the military interventions in the “War on Terror,” such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and insists that there is no such thing as a “just” war or justified bombing. With analytical clarity, Roja takes a stand against attempts at discursive appropriation from all sides. In the discussion about the so-called Twelve-Day War, supporters of the alleged “preemptive strike” who push the narrative of Israel’s self-defense and “regime change” in Iran are pitted against those who stylize the Islamic regime as an anti-imperialist resistance force to protect the Muslim peoples from Western superpowers. While monarchist groups justify civilian casualties as acceptable collateral damage in the fight against the Islamic regime, the regime deliberately exploits the situation to repress political opponents and marginalized groups.

      Roja condemns Israel’s war and the US intervention just as strongly as it condemns the patriarchal-repressive regime of the Islamic Republic: “Genocidal imperialist projects will never liberate us, nor will patriarchal nationalist regimes protect us.” It recognizes that Israel’s war, which was supposedly directed only against Iranian nuclear facilities and regime officials, attacks the entire population of Iran and also and foremost the principles and actors of the women, life, freedom protests. In addition, it criticizes those who cannot differentiate between grassroots resistance movements and the actions of a state power, thereby rendering invisible decades of self-organization of the working class, to give one example.

      The collective does not relativize, but rather offers differentiated criticism of the governments of both countries: the Israeli government, which, according to renowned experts and human rights organizations, is currently committing genocide in Gaza and has been denying Palestinians self-determination for decades; and the Iranian government, which has been oppressing, persecuting, and executing opposition members, ethnic minorities, women, and many others for decades. Iran, Roja demands, must not be turned into a second Libya through external intervention, nor must it become the scene of renewed mass executions by the Islamic regime, as in the summer of 1988.

      By showing solidarity with grassroots resistance movements “from Kabul to Tehran, from Kurdistan to Palestine, from Ahvaz to Tabriz, from Balochistan to Syria and Lebanon,” the collective rejects all attempts to legitimize state warfare and external regime change efforts. Only resistance movements from below can achieve long-term change through political means.

      ↗ „https://de.crimethinc.com/2025/06/23/women-life-freedom-against-the-war-a-statement-against-genocidal-israel-and-the-repressive-islamic-republic.

    • An invisible university for Ukraine and the rest of the world

      Invisible University for Ukraine. Essays on Democracy at War, ed. by Ostap Sereda, Balázs Trencsényi, Tetiana Zemliakova, Guillaume Lancereau, Ithaka/London (Cornell University Press) 2024.

      It is a global phenomenon: Universities around the world are under massive pressure—from defunding, subjugation to market logic, the elimination of entire departments, political interventions, and attacks on academic freedom and freedom of teaching, to the targeted physical destruction of university buildings, the killing of scientists, and “scholasticide” when the aim is to strike at an entire people. Since 2022, the Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU) has been offering online courses for Ukrainian students to help them work through their war experiences and the genocidal threat posed by Russian aggression, using innovative academic methods; almost 1,000 students have benefited from the courses so far. The collection “Invisible University for Ukraine. Essays on Democracy at War,” published just under a year ago, features very moving personal contributions from students and professors at the highest level of reflection in the Ukrainian context, showing what one would wish for in any other context: a new, honest, unreserved way of generating knowledge at the university.

      “The need for uncommon institutional responses to the autocratic pressure on higher education has been a recurring topic of discussion since the late 2000s,” write Ostap Sereda und Balázs Trencsényi in the introduction; as early as that, the “Western” model of university education had already lost credibility in Eastern Europ. “The Invisible University was also a response to this crisis of academia, experimenting, under the pressure of an unprecedented situation of mass dislocation of students and scholars, to relink the educational, research, and civic components in unconventional and innovative ways.” The Invisible University does not see itself as a solitary entity, but rather as part of a cross-temporal and cross-spatial network, connected to other similar initiatives in the 20th and 21st centuries, in a history that is briefly and impressively traced in the introduction.

      These initiatives, whether online or offline, have and always had a few things in common: a transnational, global perspective that combines global and regional perspectives and transcends national boundaries; a radically democratic approach that seeks dialogue rather than hierarchies; and a connection between the academic and the existential dimensions. The Russian war against Ukraine is the immediate catalyst for the Invisible University for Ukraine and the conditioner of its tensions, specifically: Although the IUFU works against Eurocentrism and uses postcolonial tools, it sees itself in a struggle that is, in addition to survival, about insisting on common “European” values. It must endure the fact that its civil engagement can conflict with the survival imperatives of war when it becomes critical of its own government. And it faces the (resolved) dilemma of how to deal with Russian colleagues as its main goal is to work toward a non-Russocentric understanding of the post-Soviet space and as it consistently boycots all Russian state institutions.

      The individual contributions show how the existential and the academic can be integrated and convey different, complementary lessons from the war. It is above all the dramatic changes in the concept of time brought about by the war – the altered temporalities – that have a profound effect on knowledge. The contributions spell out what this means in concrete terms: in the daily struggle for survival with the “sobering absurdity of death” (Denys Tereshchenko), where sacrifices are demanded and one makes them, or one doesn’t; in dealing with the media side of the war, the “digital witnessing” in the face of a volatile global public, and the ignorance of even well-intentioned reactions; but above all in readjusting the relationship between participation and observation in research and teaching. Only through honest dialogue can a future remain conceivable with new ideas – “my war is about creating spaces of dialogue” (Balázs Trencsényi). The feeling of “professional failure,” of “should have known” (Diána Vonnák), “wading through unmetabolized experience and a cacophony of guesswork, motivated speech, misinformation, and rudimentary analysis,” is made fruitful as a lesson in epistomology: “We could call it a fog of war in the epistemic sense, but if we flip this around, this fog is ever-present, the stuff of fieldwork, and navigating it is a predicament of any contemporary empirical research.”

      The anthology ends with an overview of all the courses that IUFU has taught since 2022 and the very moving and sometimes also funny short biographies of the contributors in the shadow of war. Tetiana Zemliakova, for example, who, apart from the IUFU, can only focus on the ontology of time: “She always knew she was living through the last days of historical humankind, but she could never guess these would be so stupid.”

      ↗ https://d119vjm4apzmdm.cloudfront.net/open-access/pdfs/9781501782886.pdf

    • From bystander to accomplice

      Sarah Schulman: The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, New York (Penguin Random House) 2025, 320 pp.

      The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity is the latest book by Sarah Schulman, a US writer, educator, and activist, perhaps best known to the wider public for her monumental oral history of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Part political memoir, part manual, the book offers nuanced reflections on the practice of solidarity and features some highly quotable definitions such as: “Solidarity is the essential human process of recognizing that other people are real and their experiences matter,” and “Solidarity is the action behind the revelation that each of us, individually, are not the only people with dreams.” 

      While the book’s focus is on solidarity Palestine (a cause Schulman has been involved in since 2009), the author also draws on her broader activist, artistic, and teaching work, offering examples of solidarity in action, from clandestine reproductive rights activism to informal support groups formed within the exclusionary spaces of New York’s theater scene. Beyond her own experiences, Schulman finds valuable lessons in the work of Vivian Gornick, Wilmette Brown, and Jean Genet, among others.

      Embracing its inherent messiness, Schulman convincingly argues that ”solidarity is possible without ideological purity, without 100 percent didacticism of motive, and yet despite contradictions, it can still be important, evolve, and have an impact.” But perhaps the most important wisdom Schulman offers — rooted in decades of organizing and heartbreak — is her honest and lucid acknowledgment of the difficulty and necessity of coalition politics in solidarity work: “There is an unease in coalition because we sacrifice the very specific personal politics that none of us can achieve alone, for a more compromised collective. But without that flexibility, no movement building would be able to take place. It is the change, the peace, and the justice we seek that are more important than being right in our living rooms.” 

      ↗ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771411/the-fantasy-and-necessity-of-solidarity-by-sarah-schulman/