Dear members of the executive board of TU Berlin,
We are writing to express our profound disappointment at the statement issued on 8 August 2025 regarding the open letter from five Israeli university presidents.
For almost two years, since the beginning of Israel’s genocide, the facts have been widely available, reported by the Palestinian Ministry of Education, UN experts, and international media. They have been there for anyone to see—for those who care, that is.
University presidents in Gaza have been murdered: Prof. Sufyan Tayeh, President of the Islamic University of Gaza, killed in an Israeli airstrike on 2 December 2023 with his family; Dr. Said Al-Zubda, President of the University College of Applied Sciences, killed in an Israeli airstrike on 31 December 2023 with his family; and Prof. Muhammad Eid Shabir, former President of the Islamic University of Gaza, killed in an Israeli airstrike on 14 November 2023 with family members. At least seven deans have also been killed, among them Dr. Ibrahim Al-Astal, Dr. Omar Farwana, Dr. Taysir K. Ibrahim, Dr. Ahmad Abo Absa, Dr. Nasser Abu Al-Nour and others—all targeted in their homes. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, 1,256 university students and 16,721 pre-university students have been killed in Gaza and in the West Bank, along with 222 university staff and 736 pre-university. All universities have been destroyed in Gaza.
Despite all this, In May 2024, Palestinian academics issued a Unified Emergency Statement from Gaza and exile. Explicitly affirming their existence and collective determination to remain on their land and to resume teaching, studying, and researching in Gaza, at their own Palestinian universities. “The Israeli occupation forces have demolished our buildings but our universities live on”, they wrote, resisting all attempts that sought to erase Palestinian educational life. They described issuing this call “from beneath the bombs… as the Israeli occupation continues to wage its genocidal campaign against [their] people daily”, while their families, colleagues, and students were being targeted.
If any moment deserved your recognition, it was this—a direct message from Palestinian scholars asserting their right to survive, teach, and learn. But you ignored it. As much as you might want to claim you “see” Palestinians, you only seem to see them when their killers are the ones speaking.
Instead of finally centering these victims and their own calls to action, you issued a statement praising the “courage” of Israeli university presidents—leaders of institutions deeply embedded within the Israeli military apparatus, which has for decades enforced occupation, apartheid and for the last two years, supported an ongoing genocide in Gaza. The Israeli letter you cite does not acknowledge Israel’s responsibility for the famine in Gaza. It speaks only of “intensifying efforts” to “address” hunger without ending the blockade that causes it. It restricts references to international law violations to future proposals, ignoring two years of massacres, sieges, and targeted destruction of civilian infrastructure, including universities, and 77 years of violent illegal occupation.
By portraying this letter as moral courage worthy of praise, you are not showing solidarity, you are providing cover for complicit institutions. You are appropriating Palestinian suffering to perform a false balance and to shield yourself and zionist institutions from criticism for two years of deliberate silence.
The message to Palestinian students, scholars, and staff at TU Berlin could not be clearer: Their lives, their families, their murdered colleagues do not matter enough to be named. Only when Israeli individuals speak up do you say something—and even then, it is to praise their courage. A courage, by the way, you did not dare to show. Even those complicit in genocide have managed to speak, albeit through a weak and evasive statement, before you—an institution “equally committed to the well-being of all its employees and students”, where “freedom from discrimination, morals and ethics, as well as human rights, apply to all [their] members”—ever did.
You write, “At TU Berlin, we listen and offer space for discussion. However, much as talking can be beneficial, it is clear that listening alone is not enough when it comes to some of the stories related between colleagues and at consultations”. Yet you have done nothing to help Palestinians. You have refused to cut ties with institutions directly involved in the genocide. You have refused to condemn the scholasticide. You have refused to answer the call from Gaza’s educational system, which was sent to you on 12.11.2024. That call was not abstract. It laid out concrete priorities: Public pledges to rebuild Gaza’s universities—immediate support to continue teaching through their own institutions with volunteer lecturers—online platforms and essential IT equipment—scholarships and debt relief—partnerships and fellowships to keep faculty and students within their universities rather than hollowing them out in exile—and research cooperation to aid recovery and long-term rebuilding. These were practical, urgent steps that any university serious about solidarity could have taken. You chose to do none of them. Instead, you continue in your active complicity in the genocide and other forms of oppression of the Palestinian people. And we will not stop until we expose all of it.
