German universities are facing a new kind of challenge: a decentralized, self-organized student movement that is mapping institutional complicity in Israeli crimes, rebuilding traditions of academic boycott, and refusing the quietism of a complacent academy. Israeli Apartheid Week 2026 has exposed both the reach of this organizing—and the scale of repression it is already meeting. In her opinion piece, scholar Sabine Broeck argues that what appears marginal today may mark the beginning of a deeper rupture within Germany’s higher education system.
At the end of April, the movement mobilized by activists of various Students for Palestine groups in Germany organized the Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) to promote the ABC DE campaign. This concerted action was the immediate result of a congress in Berlin in January 2026, also organized by these student activists, which brought together about 200 people from various German universities to agree on a resolution to support the international BDS movement: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. During IAW, events such as public readings, seminars, lectures, film screenings, and open debates took place across Germany attracting close to 1,000 students and university personnel to their activities.
The week was marked by intense learning and spirited discussions as to whether and how the state of Israel’s genocide could be stopped; whether and how settler-colonial violence could be ended; what steps civil society could undertake to support the rebuilding of Palestinian life and society, e.g. in the educational sector; how the study of historical examples like the boycott campaign against apartheid South Africa could help present activists find strategies and tactics of resistance; and how important it would be to build broader national and, importantly, international alliances to overcome German isolation in the midst of “bürgerliche Eiseskälte” (“bourgeois cold indifference”, following Kohpeiss and Moses, after Adorno) and unconditional support for the state of Israel—discussions that were entirely peaceful, anti-hierarchically participatory, autodidactic as well as mediated by excellent scholars, and full of gritty determination not to be waylaid by German Staatsräson, even though in some places university administrations and police intervened violently to cancel or hinder events (Broeck, etos.media.
From marginal mobilization to national coordination
Obviously, this movement, at this moment, is entirely marginalized by the silence, lethargy, cowardice, and epistemic and ethical laziness of the liberal-left majority of Germany’s academic circles, particularly its tenured elites. It remains to be seen whether the ABC DE campaign will gain enough ground for some universities to indeed reconsider their vassal fidelity to the state of Israel and their dependency on massively financed third-party research projects installed in cooperation with Israeli universities directly involved in war crimes, unlawful occupation, drone warfare against civilians, and genocidal campaigns against Palestine’s population and infrastructure. The students are as determined as they are tirelessly patient in continuing to educate, agitate, and lobby for a free Palestine. At first sight, though, it looks as if they are too small a band to make an impact.
But, and here comes the alert: no unconcerned academic senate, no university rectorate, no DFG, HRK or Kultusministerkonferenz, no DAAD, or any other power broker in the system of German higher education should remain unaware. This movement is not your average flurry of, however legitimate, student indignation that could be contained or tamed by neoliberal diversity schemes, condescending negotiations with academic “mittelbau” protesters, or the cannibalism of powerless minority claims to recognition.
For one, these students, collectively, in lateral modes of organization and without any financial backing by existing parties or state funding, have made enormous leaps in building a multilingual epistemic base, a political grounding, and a historiographic archive of not only Israel’s settler-colonial history, but also US-American, European, and, more importantly, German investments in and complicity with upholding the status quo. Most vital, they have researched their own institutions and produced informative maps of the intricate web of Israeli-German institutional cooperation in techno-military research. In this way, this campaign also connects these student groups to a slowly growing anti-war movement among Germany’s youth, which must and will insist on universities’ maintenance of the so-called Zivilklausel, the democratically instituted interdiction against academic research partaking in any projects that could be utilized for war and annihilation.
Every one of those student groups in IAW has spent months on research, in endless hours of self-directed, autonomous, and unfunded tracing of respective institutional complicities which, while not exactly secret, were hidden, as it were, underneath bureaucratic restrictions on access to ongoing research production, or difficult to trace through thickets of cooperation partners whose military involvement was not easily visible. They deserve accolades instead of repression and intimidation for this labor, which has actually given us a model of ethical critical inquiry.
A movement the academy chooses not to see
The German academia should take note. For now, it may get away with turning the other way in silence, abstaining from support, hiding in so-called neutrality of academic pursuits, or being actively loyal to the state of Israel, insisting on its wilfully innocent assumption that the ICJ’s verdict against Israel’s violations of international law—which makes complicity or denial a crime as well—would not hold against its own institutions. But it will need to understand that it owes these student activists for the maintenance of ethical codes in university education and for delivering the saving grace of at least some parts of German civil society’s legally and politically appropriate conduct.
These students are, in their majority, no longer hegemonic white, middle-class, pacified subjects who have been trained and accepted to believe in the bourgeois state as provider; to believe that every demand is negotiable because one is willing to stay within the given neoliberal framework; and to trust in their secure exemption from racist, classist, and faith-based discrimination and repression. A large number of this movement’s activists are Germans of Muslim origin and/or belief; many study at German universities as international students from Asia, Latin America, Africa, or southern European countries—they come with embattled work and study biographies and their fair share of struggles against racialization and disrespect. Many of the white student participants are young people whose identities have already brought them into conflict with academia’s promises of self-realization.
Repression is the clearest sign of rupture
All this is to say that this movement signals a fissure within neoliberal business as usual at German universities—something that, even though there is not yet an open debate about it in academic self-administrative bodies at public German universities, is nevertheless registered, as evidenced by universities and state education ministries responding with out-of-proportion repression, surveillance, and preemptive control measures. These measures at times look like the proverbial sledgehammer cracking a nut, but we should take these modes of intimidation seriously: they tell us the lengths to which the bearers of Staatsräson are willing to go in order to maintain “peace” at German universities.
Self-respecting academics who wish to stand by their ethical and epistemic commitments have the great opportunity, in this moment, to learn with and from the students how the freedom to think and study in convivial solidarity against genocide and annihilation can be lived in practice—a practice that reminds some of us of other internationally successful protest movements, from Black abolition against slavery, through the Civil Rights Movement, through the international struggle against the Vietnam War, to the victory over South African apartheid. Against the deafening racist insults and the Staatsräson-able lies and evasions, the students are mustering democratic study and organized struggle. They want to see a free Palestine. They take a principled stance against imperial annihilation. They need us. We need them. The times, they are a-changing.
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