Global Courant
We, a diverse group of employees of the Max Planck Society (MPS), Germany’s premier research institute, are writing this letter to express our disapproval of the position our employer has taken regarding Israel-Palestine and to call for a serious change in the discourse, both within the MPS and in Germany as a whole, about Israel-Palestine.
On October 11, MPS published a “statement on the terrorist attacks against Israel,” which began by condemning “Hamas’ heinous attacks on Israel in the strongest possible terms.”
It went on to express solidarity with Israel, grief for Israeli and other lives lost, and sympathy for affected families, friends and loved ones. It regretted that students, young academics and other employees of universities and research institutions would be “called up as reservists” and reaffirmed its commitment to maintain “close scientific and personal ties” with research institutions in Israel, and to use these connections to “support the where possible.”
The only sentence that mentioned Palestinians was one that attributed responsibility for their “unspeakable suffering” not to Israel or the Israeli army, but to Hamas.
The statement was not well received by many MPS employees, nor have the subsequent statements and actions of the MPS in the past six months.
In November, MPS President Patrick Cramer visited Israel and the Weizmann Institute of Science and expressed support for Israeli researchers but did not criticize the actions of the Israeli army in Gaza. In December, the MPS announced it would allocate one million euros ($1.1 million) for German-Israeli research cooperation. The program aims to “help stabilize Israel’s leading scientific community during the current crisis.”
The way the program was presented to the public reflects the perception of the MPS leadership that there is only one victim in need of support – the Israeli research community, which is reportedly suffering severely as a result of “the Hamas attack on Israel” – with which only the The Israeli research community suffers from the brutal war that Israel is waging against Gaza. Why German taxpayers’ money should be spent to stabilize a research community influenced by the actions of its own government remains inexplicable to us.
On the other hand, not a single euro, or even a word, has been spent on providing any kind of assistance to the scientific communities in Gaza and the West Bank, who are the main victims of Israel’s war and its policy of violent occupation . According to a statement from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, “the Israeli army has killed 94 university professors, along with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students, as part of its genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
In February, an article appeared in the German newspaper Die Welt attacking leading Lebanese-Australian scholar Ghassan Hage, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, which is part of the MPS. Within days, the MP announced it would dismiss him for “expressing views that are incompatible with the core values of the Max Planck Society.” Hage was critical of Israel in his online posts.
A open letter of Max Planck researchers was distributed in protest against Hage’s dismissal, calling for this decision to be reversed. We support the letter and also support an earlier letter rack published by colleagues on December 17, criticizing the MP’s position on Israel-Palestine and asking him to reconsider his position of unconditional support for Israel and its academic institutions as a whole.
The events of recent months have fully confirmed that such a reconsideration is absolutely necessary. In particular, we as members of the MPS must not support arbitrary killings of civilians, massive destruction of civilian infrastructure and a near-comprehensive denial of humanitarian conditions for Palestinians in Gaza.
In its statement of January 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) imposed on Israel the obligation to take all possible measures to protect civilian life in Gaza, to ensure the delivery of basic services and adequate humanitarian assistance, and to take all measures to protect the lives of civilians in Gaza. to prevent incitement to and acts of genocide. None of this has happened yet. On the contrary, Israel shamelessly continues its inhumane campaign of destruction in Gaza.
The participation in the Holocaust of scientists from the predecessor of the MPS, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, obliges us to stand together against all crimes against humanity and the possibility of genocide: “Never again” must be “Never again now” are. As heirs to this legacy, we have four clear demands for a rapid change in the MP’s position on Israel-Palestine:
To uphold the International Court of Justice’s determination to do everything possible to protect civilians in Gaza, we demand that parliamentarians call for a complete, unconditional and immediate ceasefire.
We demand that parliamentarians take a clear public stand against the long-standing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the violence against the Palestinian people.
We demand that parliament spend the same amount on the Israel program, on the reconstruction of scientific institutions in Gaza. This is all the more important because all the universities in Gaza have now been completely destroyed.
Finally, we demand a public statement from the MPS as to whether – and if so, how – it is and will continue to be involved in dual-use research, that is, research that can be used for both peaceful and military purposes. with its academic partners in Israel.
Any continuation of the MPS’s unilateral and unconditional support of Israeli academic institutions risks making the MPS and all its members complicit in the crimes committed by Israel in Gaza. We categorically reject this.
In addition to these immediate issues of morality, law and justice, we, as scholars of the MPS, would like to raise a number of pertinent and long overdue questions of political and academic relevance:
What are the consequences of excluding Palestinians from the way the MPS articulates its historical relationship with the State of Israel?
How has collaboration with scientists in Israel, but not Palestine, shaped the content and contours of the scientific knowledge produced?
How is this cooperation entangled in the formation of structural violence against Palestinians, both within Israel, in Gaza, and in the West Bank and East Jerusalem?
In an environment of public censorship and vilification of dissenting voices on this issue in Germany – which motivated us not to sign this letter with our individual names – the MP does not feel the obligation to promote an open and critical dialogue on Palestine and to actively call? -Israel, within the organization and, more importantly, in the broader German public sphere?
How can we, a large group of internationally diverse researchers living in Germany, help build bridges not only between Germany and the State of Israel, but also with Palestine, and thereby foster a more peaceful and just future?
These and other questions urgently need to be discussed objectively and critically, both within the MPS and the entire academic community in Germany and around the world, if further horrific outbreaks of violence, and our complicity in them, are to be prevented in the future.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
