Zurich Academics vs Germany’s pro-Israel stance? (2)

A conference in Zurich, Switzerland, on December 5, 2025, argues against German pro-Israel policies and the very term “reason of state”. It aims at one of the most pro-Israel countries in the West, despite the fact that recent developments have shown that Germany even did stop the delivery of some weaponry due to the Gaza War. We need to distinguish between a Zionist critique of Israeli and IDF policies on the one hand, and the anti-Zionist attack by mainstream academia on the other side.

This article consists of three parts. This is part two. Part one was published on Nov 30, 2025.

Disclaimer

This article deals with disturbing tendencies in academia. Be aware of this, when reading the article. It is not about the individuals quoted in this study, as they stand pars pro toto, they aren’t but examples of a worldwide trend in the humanities and social sciences.

4) ETH Zurich and Architecture

The ETH Zurich event can be seen as a culmination of two years of mainstreaming of anti-Zionist ideology and the defamation of the very term reason of state in Germany.

Let us contextualize the event. Read the following quote:

During the ongoing genocidal Zionist aggression in Gaza since October 2023, both the need and potential of a broad anti-imperialist revolutionary movement have become clear for Palestinians.

This confuses perpetrator and victim. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Palestinians did launch genocidal massacres on October 7, 2023. They killed 1200 Jews and non-Jews. The way they raped, gang-raped and tortured Jewish women is unspeakable. The way they tortured men, children and the elderly is equally horrific. Men were eyes gouged out in front of their wives and children. Children were burned alive, entire families were burned alive.

The genocidal ideology is a core element of the Muslim Brotherhood’s and Hamas‘ ideology. As said, many Marxist and other left-wing activists, though, did celebrate these anti-Jewish massacres worldwide or kept silent. The victims were Jewish women, men, Holocaust survivors and Jewish babies. As soon as Palestinians became victims, as planned and anticipated by Hamas, which does not care at all about Palestinian lives, there was an outcry by the very same leftist people.

One would expect such a quote like the one from above – “During the ongoing genocidal Zionist aggression in Gaza since October 2023…” to be part of such an agitation flyer from an activist group, for example.

But where is the quote from? Let us look at another quote from the very same source:

„I am also thankful to the comrades in the Palestine solidarity movement in Switzerland, particularly the Palestine Committee Zurich, for they have, since October 2023, given new meanings to this place and made me feel at home.“

Who is grateful for that kind of activism? And why feels someone at home in Zurich, Switzerland, particularly after October 2023?

Well these two quotes are from the doctoral dissertation of Faiq Mari (Masha’ Of The Periphery: Collective Labor And Property in Palestinian Liberation Struggle). The doctoral dissertation was accepted in Zurich at the ETH in Zurich in 2024.  Among the four professors who accepted the dissertation was the co-organizer of the ETH event on Dec. 5/6, 2025, Philip Ursprung.

The “Palestine Committee Zurich” is well-known. It did organize rallies with the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”. Among their icons is a painting of Israel, the Gaza Strip and the Westbank without borders. Obviously that means “Palestine from the River to the Sea”. That is antisemitism, plain and simple.

This is from their Instagram account:

On the right side of that icon it reads:

For the Freedom of Palestine. Together against Settler Colonialim and Apartheid. Against Zionism, Imperialism … (translated from the German by the author)

This is not criticism of Israel. This is not criticism of warfare. This is not criticism of the occupation of the Westbank. That is pure hatred of Zionism and therefore the very existence of the one and only Jewish State of Israel.

For a rally in January 2024, they put this slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” in Arabic, which made it more difficult for their non-Arab speaking supporters to understand. But for their inner circle it is a dog whistle. And their icon says it all, too.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), the best known mainstream Swiss daily, wrote about the planned event in January 2024. The NZZ spoke to Jonathan Kreutner, Secretary General of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG):

“The organizers are obviously aware of the problem, otherwise they wouldn’t have written the slogan [From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free, CH] in Arabic and thus concealed it from laypeople,” says Kreutner. As a result, many people probably have seen the event on Instagram without realizing that it contained an antisemitic statement. If it had been written in German or English, it would have deterred some people, says Kreutner. “The organizers are trying to garner support from people who are quick to like something and believe they are supporting a supposed peace demonstration.” (all translations from German language sources in this essay sources are made by the author)

Already on October 19, 2023, the Swiss daily Tagesanzeiger reported about an announced rally by the Palestine Committee Zurich entitled “Stop the Genocide in Palestine”.

At that time, there was not even a ground-offensive of the IDF, let alone a “Genocide”.

Just a few days after Oct. 7, these people from the Palestine Committee Zurich accused and defamed the victims – Jews and Israel.

The inflationary talk about an allegedly “Genocide” against Palestinians started not in October 2023, it can be found long before. But is particularly striking to use the very term genocide mid October 2023.

Many anti-Israel activists in general do not aim at the occupation of 1967 until today, which indeed is very troubling and must end. No, many activists mean 1948 and the very existence of a Jewish and democratic state of Israel. Many obfuscate the Holocaust and equate the expulsion of Arabs in 1948 to the Shoah. That is distorting the Shoah – in the “Nakba” almost all Arabs have been expelled, not killed. In the Shoah, six million Jews have been gassed, shot and murdered in an industrial mode not seen on this planet.

Then, most activists also ignore the fact that an equally large number of Jews – some 800,000 – have been expulsed from Arab countries after 1948.

Still, this is not to deny that Israel committed crimes during the 1948 war, a topic many Zionists are well aware of.

But this has nothing to do with the aggression of the Arabs and the rejection of the Arabs of the 1947 UN Partition Plan to establish two states for two people.

Like many anti-Zionist activists and academics today, Mari sees the struggle for Palestine and against the Jewish state of Israel as almost a kind of redemption for all of mankind in a world of ecologic crisis, wars and social disruption. He writes in his doctoral dissertation (ETH Zurich, 2024):

This is one reason that mobilizations around the liberation of Palestine, around ending the current genocidal episode, have resonated with so many. The liberation of Palestine is intertwined with the struggles of the exploited around the world. The totality of this struggle maps onto the totality of capitalism, in its breadth and in its scale, as a social metabolic system that has come to increasingly encroach on every facet of life and every space. The case studies of this dissertation are one component of this totality, a vantage point through which to read it, and an example of attemps to deal with its complexity. I hope that this work will be useful to many.

No wonder, then, that Eyal Weizman from the controversial group “forensic Architecture” is among the speakers at the event. On January 3, 2024, the German left-wing daily tageszeitung (taz) analyzed the shortcomings of “forensic architecture”:

“In order to create evidence and establish counter-narratives that will attract public attention, the group refrains from formulating its own criticism of its sources. In the US magazine Art in America, critic Emily Watlington wrote in March that the group was thus bordering on fake news and half-truths.

At the rally “We still still still still need to talk” on November 10 [2023] in Berlin, Weizman spoke of a genocide that has been committed against Palestinians since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. In an interview with Granta, he emphasizes that Palestinians have a right to Palestine. He leaves open the question of Palestine’s borders—as well as that of “the rights of Jews in Palestine,” with which the interview ends, leaving room for speculation.”

Other speakers include historian Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, head of the controversial Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at Technical University Berlin. She is among the signatories of a Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which attacks the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Definition on Antisemitism. Criticism of Israel is even mentioned in the IHRA declaration, as criticism of every single country is a core element of democracy.

Schüler-Springorum is also a supporter of an “Expert Paper” on the Middle East from October 2025, which aims at destroying the special relationship between Germany and Israel and attacks the very term “Staatsräson” or reason of state. In that paper, they write:

“Recognise that both the creation of the State of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust and subsequent German support have had severe secondary effects on the Palestinian people, as well as neighbouring Arab and other native populations across the region, including Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa.”

Arabs are portrayed as victims, while in fact many were complicit with Nazi Germany, including the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, a close ally of Hitler himself. Then, the rejection of the Arabs of the UN Partition Plan from November 29, 1947 (Resolution 181), is at the core of the entire conflict. If the Arabs had accepted the plan, there would be two states for two people since that time. But they rejected the plan and then attacked the Jewish state, where thousands of Holocaust survivors had found refuge, too.

No surprise, then, that Jewish students at Technical University Berlin are alarmed. Most recently, they protested against antisemitism and Jewish students and their allies have occupied for a few days a room belonging to the General Student Committee or AStA. Anti-Israel activists then threatened the Jewish students and awaited them in front of that room.

On November 10, 2025, the Jüdische Allgemeine, the weekly published by the Central Council of Jews in Germany, published a report about the event:

Among other things, the students demanded that no antisemitic groups be supported by the AStA. They also called for the creation of a separate room for Jewish students and students critical of antisemitism, and for the position of antisemitism commissioner to be filled.

Ironically or not, this position of antisemitism commissioner is actually hold by a close ally and colleague of Schüler-Springorum, historian Uffa Jensen, who also supports the above quoted expert paper on attacking the German Staatsräson (reason of state) and special relationship of Germany and Israel.

In May 2024, when Jensen was elected antisemitism commissioner at TU Berlin, the Central Council of Jews in Germany was alarmed and published as statement, as the Berlin Tagesspiegel reported:

According to the Central Council, Jensen has not demonstrated in the past that he understands the situation of Jewish people. “In the dramatic situation following October 7, 2023, Prof. Jensen failed to credibly identify the dangers of Muslim-influenced antisemitism.” The decision “rolls out the red carpet for left-wing extremists and Hamas sympathizers.”

The Jerusalem Declaration rejects to frame boycotts of Israel as antisemitic, including the BDS movement, which also pleads for a right of return of the fantasy number of more than five million Palestinians, almost all of them were born after 1948. This resembles the right-wing extremist, Nazi and neo-Nazi ideology of German activists since the 1950s who wanted to go back to territories lost during World War Two, including parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia.

5) Edward Said and Joseph Beuys

In his book “Die Kunst der Gegenwart” (“Contemporary Art”), published in 2010 and revised in 2025, Philip Ursprung refers to Edward Said, who “laid the foundations for an analysis of the connection between colonial policy and culture in his book Orientalism (1978).” That is all he writes about Said. Ursprung does not mention that this book by Said is the bible for academic anti-Zionists worldwide. For the study “Orientalism” culminates in a fundamental attack on the Jewish and democratic state of Israel, which is interpreted and defamed as the ultimate expression of Western Orientalism and imperialism.

I wrote about Said in my study Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon from 2013 (check the footnotes in the original):

Edward Said (1935–2003) was the leading academic anti-Zionist voice in the last decades, achieving global fame. He portrayed Arabs as the ‘new Jews’ as early as 1969. He equated Israel with South-African apartheid in 1979 and denounced Israel as the leading Orientalist, imperialist and racist power in his bestselling book Orientalism in 1978. The chapter on Israel is the last and longest chapter in this anti-Western and antisemitic book. In an interview in 1987, Said remarked that Israelis had not learned the lessons from their own suffering under Nazi Germany. In his view, Jews have become perpetrators now in the same way the Nazis were perpetrators against the Jews. In 1999, Said mentioned that, if he could choose, he would opt for a kind of renewed Ottoman Empire. Jews could become an accepted minority, but Israel would be destroyed.

Ursprung for sure is against antisemitism. However, as a scholar in art history and architecture he might perhaps not be aware of all aspects of Edward Said’s anti-Zionism and the scholarly debates about Said in the field of research in antisemitism.

However, what about Ursprung’s ignorance or downplaying of the antisemitism, Holocaust universalization, and right-wing extremist activism of the artist Joseph Beuys? Ursprung has written a thick biography about Beuys, but central points of criticism of Beuys, such as his analogy of Auschwitz and US policies or the War in Vietnam, his lifelong playing with his involvement in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, where he was famously wounded and rescued by Tatars with fat and felt after a plane crash, are being downplayed.

Ursprung merely mentions Albert Markert’s and Frank Gieseke’s groundbreaking 1996 study of Beuys and his New Right activities since the 1970s, such as with the Action Group of Independent Germans (AUD, Aktionsgemeinschaft Unabhängiger Deutscher). He dismisses this criticism as not really relevant and does not want to see that Beuys, with his kind of “third way” beyond capitalism and communism in the 1970s and 1980s, played right into the hands of the New Right’s extremism and was part of it.

Ursprung does not mention that it was no coincidence that Beuys appeared on the cover of the national revolutionary pamphlet “Wir Selbst” (Ourselves) in 1982 and that his pamphlet “Die Alternative,” which had appeared in the Christmas edition of the left-liberal daily FRG’s (Federal Republic of Germany) Frankfurter Rundschau in December 1979, was reprinted.

In a review of a book on Beuys by Ron Manheim, German left-wing weekly jungle world writes on Dec. 9, 2021:

The fact that Beuys placed a dead rat alongside his typical materials, such as a lump of fat, in “Auschwitz Demonstration,” a display case containing all kinds of disparate objects, shows how insidiously Nazi thinking continued to influence him. Rats, as vermin, were synonymous with Jews in National Socialism. Manheim interprets the rat in Beuys’ work as “blunt abomination.” Only Beuys’ relativizations of the Shoah in interviews are more clumsy. People “in today’s prosperity” are worse off “than the Nazi victims in concentration camps,” Dieter Koepplin paraphrased him in a 1976 interview. In a conversation in 1982, he said of Western capitalism and social life: “Auschwitz still exists, only in a different form.”
This blatant trivialization of the industrial mass murder of European Jews is in line with Beuys’ decades-long adoption of Nazi vocabulary and modes of thought.

Part three of this essay will deal with the possibility of woke Zionism, Germany’s reason of state and former scholarship on Zionism and Architecture at ETH Zurich