Table of Contents:

 

I.         Challenging Global Imperialism in our Local University: Is Being told              by Student Parliament to Go Back to ‘Your Countries’ if You Don’t                    like ‘the Way Things are Done Here’

                      I.A. Protests that Challenged Racism and Marginalization with                                     the Refusal to be Silenced

                      I.B. A ‘Contra-BDS’ Motion Choreographed over Three StuPa                                    Sessions by Practitioners of Imperialism and White                                                  Supremacy (Jan, Feb, and July 2021)

                      I.C. Calls for Restorative Justice Punished with Exclusion from                                    University Resource

                      I.D. Conclusion: A Brief History of Palestinian Resistance and                                     Israeli Occupation

II.        UPDATE: A Fourth Protest Demanding Justice for Palestine: Was                    Met with Police Repression from the University of                                                    Muenster’s Student Parliament on the night of November 22nd, 2021

I. Protests that Challenged Racism and

Marginalization with the Refusal to be Silenced:

 

Throughout January and February of 2021, the so-called "Kritische Linke" and the Juso-HSG put a ‘Contra BDS motion’ [1] to vote in the Student Parliament (StuPa) of the University of Münster. With this motion, they intended to push through a resolution that would misrepresent the Palestinian-led ‘Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions’ (BDS) movement as antisemitic, despite its support from BIPoC and Jewish liberation groups around the world. In an effort to prevent this ‘motion,’ or at least to clarify a strong statement against it, Palästina Antikolonial mobilized its allies to cooperate in a reoccupation of the (virtual) space from which StuPa had methodically prepared to marginalize us. Together, we entered the first two Zoom meetings in January/February with visuals that expressed the powerful resistance that has always continued against global imperialism and, therefore, against the projects of settler-colonialism, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing which the State of Israel has visited upon the peoples of Palestine. In all, we expressed that this desire for liberation exists in the polyphony of revolutionary voices around the world that have people move each other into radical empathy, solidarity, and justice. 

 

 

I.B. A ‘Contra-BDS’ Motion Choreographed over Three StuPa Sessions by Practitioners of Imperialism and White Supremacy

(Jan, Feb, and July 2021)

 

“There is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge—if that is what it is—that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation, belligerency,

and outright war.”

 

 ~Edward W. Said (1935-2003)

 

The Contra-BDS motion first proposed in StuPa throughout January and February 2021 undertook to label Palestinian and BIPoC (solidarity) organizations that support effective Palestinian-led resistance movements like BDS as ‘antisemitic,’ thereby seeking to silence them and exclude these anti-imperialistic student movements from crucial university resources. The recent motion is yet another manifestation of apartheidist attitudes in the overall collusion of Israeli and German authorities to dehumanize and therefore sequester from the public sphere any indigenous Palestinians, Palestinian diaspora, and allies of Palestinians who conscientiously resist against the State of Israel’s decades-long projects of settler colonialism and Zionist supremacy. These are ongoing projects which have been embodied in the formation of the State of Israel itself and which have been altogether imposed over the lands, peoples, and narrative understandings of Historic Palestine. Indeed, from the early 20th century onwards these impositions have been consistently backed by the military machines of global powers such as the State of Israel’s favorite sponsors in British, French, and American Empires and, moreover, have been responsible for the systematic ethnic cleansing and systemic abuse of millions of indigenous Palestinians of all faiths and cultural diversities for over seven decades. The recent motion, consequentially, has also been aimed at segregating, if not wholly ‘sanitizing,’ public discourse from the calls to action made by Palestinian organizations (i.e. BDS) and those of other BIPoC human rights movements who together share in an empowering and historic solidarity against these and other injustices. The ‘contra-BDS’ motion therefore mimics the recent decisions made by the University of Münster’s Student Union (AStA) to place organizations like Palästina Antikolonial on their list of “antisemitic” groups and, likewise, by authorities in the City of Münster to summarily exclude Palästina Antikolonial from the City’s now-ironically titled event, “Weeks Against Racism.” These efforts have been motivated by ahistorical presumptions that repress the decades-long intellectual and human rights discussions that together recognize, on the one hand, the State of Israel as a settler-colonialist vassal to imperialistic powers and, on the other, the Palestinian resistance as one of decolonization that is enjoined by the peoples of progressive BIPoC, Jewish, and anti-authoritarian movements around the world.

 

The callous decisions made by the StuPa, AStA, and the City of Münster can be understood for their gravity in the context of such historical omissions and misconceptualizations, a problematic situation overall encouraged (if not architected) by the cadres of tendentious German-Israeli lobbying groups. One such example is of the Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft (DIG), who have engaged in racist dog-whistling and intimidation tactics much like those of the Antideutsche movement, the latter of which often exerting its influence so as to disenfranchise anyone speaking out against the State of Israel (i.e. having people removed from employment based on confused accusations of “antisemitism”). The youth group of the DIG (JuFo), for its part, has non-consensually shared photos on their Instagram of Palästina Antikolonial members participating in the StuPa session, depicting these Palästina Antikolonial members as wearers of the “trademarks of Palestinian terror” (i.e. their racist term for the kufiya) [1]. This broadly orientalist, and perhaps even Islamophobic, language used to pathologize, not least, Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian resistance echoes the discriminatory comments of many StuPa members made directly toward Palästina Antikolonial members during both the initial sessions in January/February 2021. Besides uncritically dismissing every discussion point put forward as “antisemitic”; besides reducing anyone associated with Palestinian resistance movements such as the (strategically decentralized) economic-justice initiative of ‘Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions’ (BDS) as “terrorists”; StuPa members even went as far as to tell University of Münster students in Palästina Antikolonial to go back to their countries if they did not like the way “things are done here.”

 

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The third time that Palästina Antikolonial and their allies attended a StuPa meeting and protested the so-called ‘contra-BDS’ motion via Zoom was on 5 July 2021. After experiencing the first two sessions in January/February 2021, Palästina Antikolonial members had adequate reason to believe that they were entering into an exceptionally hostile environment for students of the University of Münster and, especially, for ethical and intellectual voices addressing the crucial situation of the so-called ‘Israel-Palestine conflict.’ In preparation for the StuPa session, student-activists of Palästina Antikolonial compiled intensive research on the entwined issues and contexts surrounding the situation of Historic Palestine and the Palestinian movement. This intensive research committed itself to the goal of producing a variety of didactic texts that would be read aloud during the StuPa session. The texts cover a variety of aspects, including: (1) information and clarification on BDS and its strategies/goals, (2) the worldwide recognition by human rights organizations/activists of Israel as an Apartheid State, (3) the acute living conditions of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, (4) explanations of the concept of settler colonialism, (5) Palestinian/postcolonial resistance during and since the Nakba, (6) edited writings by a South African Rabbi comparing Apartheid in Israel and South Africa, and (7) the history of Zionism’s systemic anti-blackness against, not least, Jewish peoples of Non-European/Western decent as institutionalized and enshrined by the authorities of the State of Israel [2].

 

The topic of the ‘Contra-BDS’ motion was shoehorned late into the evening of the StuPa session on 5 July. Just as in the previous two sessions in January/February, StuPa abruptly changed the rules that would govern the discussion during the topic of the ‘Contra-BDS’ motion. Firstly, StuPa majority members and moderators prohibited any profile pictures which they deemed to be unacceptably ‘political’ without any transparent process of clarifying their definition of what constituted this violation. Secondly, they restricted the speaking time for all students to two minutes each and only once the ‘Contra-BDS’ motion was introduced. Thirdly, StuPa disabled the cameras of only those participants wearing kufiyas. The reason given by the moderators for this decision was that they considered kufiyas to be a politically inappropriate form of dress, despite the setting of the ‘Contra BDS discussion’ being an explicitly political student forum, which was nevertheless to be affected by this oxymoronic decision.

 

The constrictive rules that were imposed at the outset and throughout the discussion would set the tone for the anti-democratic embarrassment that would thereby unfold. After two members of Palästina Antikolonial were given just two minutes each to read out selections from the prepared texts, StuPa majority members attempted to shut down the discussion completely to hinder any students from speaking again. This silencing was moreover followed by the moderators’ display of patronizing attitudes towards protesting students. They claimed to the protestors that StuPa was not meaning to actively discriminate students whilst, however, refusing their responsibility of intervening into such situations where the balance of power was inappropriately skewed toward exclusion and majoritarianism. The moderators’ promise of ensured speaking time for students at the end of the session was not honored, despite being repeatedly reassured to student members of Palästina Antikolonial via private chat logs throughout the session. This was just one of many indications that the abuses of power displayed by StuPa majority members and complicit moderators throughout the session were frantic acts of discrimination that, however ostensibly ‘unintentional,’ were rather not “all part of the process 😊,” as one StuPa moderator had again claimed in private chats. Finally, perhaps the next detail serves as a fitting analogy for the absurd mishandling of basic democratic processes in this body that claims to be ‘for the students’—a claim which is compounded in its absurdity when recalling that the StuPa body that reigned during this period was ‘elected’ with votes from only 9.7% of the University of Münster’s student body. At a pivotal moment in the voting procedures for the ‘Contra-BDS’ motion, parliamentary members expressed lengthy and significant confusion as to what they were even voting on, which demonstrates (at the very least) that these parliamentary members were not given any adequate chance to get an appropriate grasp on the motion or its crucial contexts so as to responsibly cast their votes.

 

 

I.C. Calls for Restorative Justice Punished with Exclusion from University Resources

 

“As a child of four, I found myself burdened by the adult problems of life and death, right and wrong. I, as a dreamer, living on the bare subsistence provided by a UN blue ration card, in a crowded room, on a side street in Sour, stand as a witness to Zionist inhumanity. I charge the world for its acquiescence in my destruction.”

 

~Leila Khaled (born in 1944)                                                                                             

Palestinian Refugee and Resistance Fighter

 

BDS is a Palestinian-led, grassroots movement of resistance that organizes with economic strategies against the State of Israel’s imperialistically backed project of settler colonialism, the latter of which callously advanced despite generations of popular protest throughout the region of Historic Palestine. Like all projects of settler-colonialism, that of the State of Israel’s is complicit to, and in turn preserved by, such exploitive and authoritarian systemics as the Euro/American-led military industrial complex and, especially, the more recent foray of the US-led ‘War(s) on Terror.’ Indeed, for over seven decades now, the State of Israel’s project of settler colonialism has been advanced by its authorities through seemingly endless military campaigns against, and brutal occupations over, the indigenous peoples of Historic Palestine. Palestinian and other liberationist movements around the world have long recognized from shared historical experience that this kind of ever-advancing military occupation is strategic to the foundationally supremacist aims of imperial-sponsored powers like the State of Israel to impose, and maintain, an ‘Apartheid’ regime by which one group—i.e. Euro-American Zionist settlers—expropriate a region’s resources and exert total domination over all other peoples who have lived together for generations on those lands: the diversity of Palestine’s indigenous communities. In the fight against settler-colonialism and imperialism, Palestinian-led resistance movements like BDS have shared solidarity with veteran members of South Africa’s anti-Apartheidist political party/movement, ‘African National Congress,’ with generations of Black liberationists from the ‘Black Panther Party’ to #blacklivesmatter, as well as with Jewish peoples of color and conscience, such as those working together in organizations like ‘Jewish Voice for Peace.’ Moreover, the Israel-based human rights group ‘B’Tselem’ released a powerful rebuke to the State of Israel in 2021, in which years of research, cooperation, and involvement with Palestinian allies was composed into their report, “This is Apartheid” [3]. Since then, still others have awakened not only to the understanding that the State of Israel has been founded, and maintained, with the atrocities of genocide and apartheid, but also to the absolute necessity of speaking out and acting boldly against imperialism, without exception, and against its systemic elaboration and parasitic delegation into settler-colonial movements, of which Zionism and its resulting Apartheid State of Israel serve as remarkably atrocious examples.

 

In the past year alone, various international rights groups have (finally) heeded the calls from grassroots communities in Palestine, and elsewhere, to begin working sincerely for restorative justice radically, continually, and without exception. The New York-based ‘Human Rights Watch’ and ‘Amnesty International’ (excluding Amnesty International Germany, it seems) are just two examples of international organizations which have made public responses to the intellectual and activist work of intergenerational, Palestinian/BIPoC-led movements with each their own reports that further amplify exposure to the Israeli State’s Apartheid Regime [4][5]. And, if we are to direct attention to local and student-led actions in Germany, (solidarity) groups like Palästina Antikolonial have begun increasing the pressure against institutions complicit to the racism and imperialism that underpins such atrocities as the State of Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian peoples. As such, student-activists of Palästina Antikolonial reiterated their impassioned support for BDS, and exposed the forms of racist-antisemitism that are given hypocritical shelter by the University of Münster’s Administration, by reading aloud the “Open letter of 240 Jewish and Israeli scientists to the German government NOT to equate BDS with Antisemitism” during the fourth of such Palästina Antikolonial protests against StuPa, which took place at the University Schloss on November 22nd, 2021 (see section II of this document).

 

Regardless of Palästina Antikolonial’s many attempts to discuss these understandings, the University of Münster’s StuPa has continued to double down on pathologizing BDS and parroted that it would summarily exclude anyone who associates with the movement or supports even its ultimate aims of Palestinian liberation and worldwide decolonization. The resolved motion now threatens to severely restrict avenues of cooperation between Palästina Antikolonial and other marginalized student groups, including the BIPoC Unit, the Treasury Unit for Financially and Culturally Disadvantaged Students, and Studies with Children (among many others). We expect that StuPa and their cohorts now feel emboldened to expand this exclusionary influence to further harass marginalized students. Unless we as a community challenge this, we could see StuPa expand its practice of the fascist clause that insidiously underlines their ‘Contra-BDS’ and other related motion(s): that all guest speakers, initiatives, or even literary/curricular recommendations need pass a political litmus test before participating or receiving support in the University and student-body context [1]. The litmus test would be designed to ‘uncover’ BDS sympathizers, punish them, and thereby manufacture an illusion of ideological ‘purity’ as a prerequisite for those who are presumed worthy enough to represent the ‘student-body.’ Therefore, those who StuPa’s majority means to include in this body are only, by default, those who allow sycophantic support for Zionist projects: namely apartheid over and occupation of Palestine, ethnic cleansing and silencing of Palestinians, and the glorification of the State of Israel as an entity immune from criticism. All other views will be increasingly excluded.

 

Aside from harming Palestinian students and diaspora in Münster, the motion also restricts BIPoC student efforts against imperialism in our university by barring a crucial context—the ongoing occupation of Palestine through settler-colonialism—from meaningful criticism and interconnection with the other contexts of oppression, which the State of Israel and its (especially) Western allies together reinforce. BIPoC and all historically oppressed, marginalized students and people of Münster are systematically silenced by the recent StuPa resolution(s), starting with the motion championed by the so-called “Kritische Linke” and Juso-HSG throughout 2021. Thus, the “Kritische Linke,” Juso-HSG, and StuPa have gone so far as to disingenuously categorize BDS, as well as any effective resistance against the imperialistic and settler-colonialist projects of the State of Israel, as examples of “antisemitism.” Thus, concepts of antisemitism are once again abused to advance a whitewashing agenda that, among other things, means to cheapen both the diversity of Judaism and Jewish historical experience by associating them monolithically with the State of Israel and its Zionist authorities. This reductive and exclusionary approach, the majoritarian process of its legitimization in bodies like StuPa, and the virulent obsession with ideological purity amongst supporters of the ‘Contra-BDS’ motion(s) show how White Supremacy and imperialistic thinking both persist, insidiously or explicitly, within universities and throughout other institutions in Germany.

 

 

I.D. Conclusion: A Brief History of Palestinian Resistance and Israeli Occupation

 

“When they sing of Jerusalem do you think they mean our own arched streets and cobbled alleys and terraced hills? Never. Christ for the West has become an idea—an abstract idea with a setting, but the setting has lost all geographical significance. For them the Holy Land is a fairyland…But for us the geography is real and inescapable. When they sing of Jerusalem…they do not mean our city.”

 

~From Hunters in a Narrow Street, by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1920-1994)                   

Palestinian-Iraqi Writer, Poet, Artist, and Intellectual.

 

Many have recognized in the dispossession and persecution of Palestinians in Israel and the other occupied territories an ongoing apartheid, with a recent example being the report, “This is Apartheid,” by the Israel-based human rights organization B’Tselem [3]. Whichever term we hear, for the millions of Palestinians who have lived under imposed conditions of occupation, discrimination, and exile, the situation is a century-long “catastrophe”—beginning with the colonialist Balfour Declaration by the British Empire in 1917, and continuing still to this day. In 1948 there was the Nakba, in which the State of Israel expulsed 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, destroyed 530 villages, and massacred 15,000 civilians. In 1967, the State of Israel formally and drastically expanded their occupation of Palestinian territories, namely the West Bank and Gaza, a legacy which continues until the present with the bulldozing of more villages and olive groves, the expulsion of people from their homes, and the colonization of ethnically cleansed land with hundreds of exclusive settlements that are barred to anyone who does not fit the occupier’s definition of ‘Israeli-Jewish.’ Today, Palestinians resist against militarism, police repression, and bigotry, and face dehumanizing violence even when they reclaim their rights to protest the inhumane situation. According to the United Nations, in 2018 the Israeli Defense Forces killed 180 and wounded or maimed 29,000 Palestinian protestors, many of the casualties including also minors, journalists, and first responders.

 

Indeed, historical analysis of the present situation reveals a telling contrast between, on the one hand, the unbroken mutualism of Palestinian and BIPoC movements of resistance and liberation and, on the other, the consistently authoritarian dependencies both of Zionist thought and the State of Israel to colonialist powers and centuries of orientalist discourse, to over a century of militaristic interventions and imperial projects, and to support from a disturbing and ever-growing list of serial human rights abusers and their servile cadres of apologists (i.e. a list including, not least, the Apartheid Government of South Africa and the US-led military-industrial complex).

 

Palestinian, BIPoC, and anti-imperialist student organizations in Münster have been routinely silenced, excluded, or called antisemitic by faux-democratic student, city, or University bodies. Not only are we and our activist allies given little chance to clarify our positions, but the ‘official’ exclusion of organizations like Palästina Antikolonial also enables mostly white student groups to strip opportunities for university funding and resources away from our activities and participations. These resources are meant to support all student learning. This is a clear and racist violation of ethics, our rights, and the vibrant humanity shared conscientiously between Palestinian, Jewish, and BIPoC students. We join the world in the fight against state and police violence, against imperialism and (settler-)colonialism, against systemic racism, and we stand in solidarity with the sweeping protests of #blacklivesmatter and other organizations against White Supremacy. Indeed, it is White Supremacy that has systemically led to the manifestation of Zionism and the oppression of Palestinians, and it is the vassalage of Zionism to White Supremacy, as is the case with such essentialisms, that has distorted the name of Judaism/Jewish experience, in some people’s minds, to become a cowardly excuse for the dehumanizing upkeep of lingering injustice.

 

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[1] To access the downloadable file of the referenced Appendix, please click here.

[2] To access the downloadable file of the referenced ‘Researched Speaking Contents/Texts,’ please click here.

[3] https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid

[4] https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

[5] Access to Downloadable Amnesty International Report in language of choice: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/

      Full Amnesty International Report in English: https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/MDE1551412022ENGLISH.pdf