URGENT CALL FOR TU BERLIN TO UPHOLD ITS ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY
Press Statement
The Palestine Chronicles on Campus
As a new semester begins at TU Berlin, we commence The Palestine Chronicles: Four weeks of events from 14.10. until 06.11.
Through The Palestine Chronicles we aim to highlight of the brutal reality of the Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide of the Palestinian people through diverse events at the Technical University of Berlin. This includes the Picturing Scholasticide exhibition, and panel events covering talks with Palestinian scholars and students, as well as TU Berlin’s direct complicity in helping maintain the occupation featuring legal and academic experts. The Palestine Chronicles also aims to honour Palestinian culture and heritage through cultural workshops and artistic activities, such as kite-making, Tatreez and Dabke.
While we are preparing for the semester to begin, our fellow students in Palestine are facing a very different reality. Palestinian students in Gaza have been deprived of their fundamental right to education amid Israel’s genocidal campaign, the destruction of universities and schools, and the ongoing displacement and killing of the Palestinian people. Meanwhile the Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank, which TU Berlin has researched alongside, was raided by the Israeli military on its first day of classes. Soldiers broke down doors and bulldozed a memorial dedicated to students and alumni killed by Israel, terrorizing the university’s members. Starting a semester while our fellow students are being brutalized is not neutral and should never be.
Scholasticide is only one part of the continuity of Israel’s crimes against humanity. We are entering our 7th semester of the ongoing genocide on Gaza, while there are regular pogroms in the West Bank and illegal settlements continue expanding. Israel is still enforcing its system of apartheid in every aspect of life, and continues to find new ways to make life as hard as possible for Palestinians — going so far as to explicitly threaten to retaliate against children flying kites. Beyond Palestine, Israel is further enacting its genocidal, expansionist and destabilizing ambitions in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.
During The Palestine Chronicles we also aim to highlight that Israel is not committing these crimes alone. German Universities are complicit in supporting these systems, and TU Berlin, for instance, is helping Israel sustain the water apartheid system, while also legitimizing the illegal occupation by collaborating in projects with Ariel University — located in the illegal settlement Ariel — and allowing student exchange with the Hebrew University of Jeruaslem, whose Mount Scopus campus is located in the occupied East Jerusalem.
Over the years, we have compiled reports on several such instances of complicity. To date, our university has failed to act upon a single one of them. From student exchanges to continued cooperation projects, rewriting mass displacement as remarkable architecture history, and developing dual-use modular autonomous submarines with companies closely tied to the Israeli military. These are not only our demands, but those of the majority of TU Berlin’s student body, who in the general student assemblies of 12th December 2024 and 3rd June 2026 expressed overwhelming support for the suspension of ties with Israeli institutions that are involved or complicit in the genocide and occupation of Palestinians, in accordance with international law.
At a university with so many Palestinian students, in the city with the largest Palestinian community in Europe, it is our right to take up space and make the Palestinian struggle visible. With The Palestine Chronicles, we are doing precisely that: claiming this space and centering Palestinian narratives at our university, directly countering the attempts of German institutions like TU Berlin to marginalize and erase us from public life.
In light of our university’s unwavering stance with its Israeli partner institutions, all the while continuously sidelining, ignoring, and silencing Palestinian narratives, it is only appropriate that we — as students and staff — are loud about these issues right here on campus to put a halt in the complicity we are all, ultimately, responsible for.
As long as our university chooses to stay complicit, we have no plans of backing down.
Free Palestine.
14.October 2026, Berlin
SIGN OUR MAIN DEMAND
If you are signing as a group, initiative or individual, please fill in your name and city and further relevant information, such as your field of activism, occupation, etc.
If you are signing as member of university, please fill in your name, city, university, position (student, prof, employe, etc.), field of study/institute/faculty and other relevant information about you
All information (except email) will be made public*
*For students and student employees in Germany:
Due to safety concerns, we will not be publishing your names online. Instead we will list your field of study/faculty/institute and your university, alongside a count of the number of student signatories.
Contact:
demands@notinourname-tu.org