Thursday, 14 August 2025

Adam Shatz in Berlin - from the London Review of Books

On my first day as a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, in the middle of January, one of the other new arrivals, a German woman who’s lived in the States for three decades, remarked that the view of Lake Wannsee was stunning from the dining room of the villa where the fellows stay, and would only be more beautiful in the spring. ‘As a Jew,’ another fellow replied, ‘I simply can’t look at the view without remembering that this house was occupied by a Nazi who was tried at Nuremburg, or that we’re only a short walk from the villa where the Wannsee Conference took place.’ ‘As a Jew’ – the phrase has always made me feel uneasy, though I might well have used it myself. Too many sentences in defence of the indefensible have begun with it, especially since 7 October. It evokes a distant memory of collective persecution while underwriting present persecution. There was something sinister about the lake, though, particularly when the sun came out and you found yourself thinking about the parties Walther Funk hosted in the villa, where Goebbels was apparently a frequent guest. 

A few weeks later, we trudged through the rain and the cold to the villa where the Wannsee Conference was held. The guide, well-informed and energetic, told us that some industrial magnates who thought they could control Hitler had attended the conference, at which the implementation of the Final Solution was discussed. Whether or not the regime in the US is best described as ‘fascist’, it was hard not to think about Trump, Musk, Stephen Miller and their new friends Zuckerberg and Bezos. The basic governing coalition hasn’t changed all that much: thugs, zealots, careerists, entrepreneurs and grifters. As we left, we were told that there was a café. Run by an Israeli woman, it was advertised by a sign reading: ‘Enjoy Jewlicious babka.’ 

I kept meeting scholars of ‘German-Jewish studies’ or ‘memory culture’ in Berlin. The word ‘memory’ usually seemed to mean ‘memory of the Jews’. In one sense, it couldn’t be otherwise. That Germany has a responsibility to remember the Holocaust is beyond question. But it’s striking how little concern there is for other populations that have experienced racial discrimination or violence at the hands of the Germans: Turkish guest workers and their descendants, Syrian refugees and Palestinians, to say nothing of the Namibians whose ancestors were the victims of an earlier German genocidal campaign, or the Roma who perished alongside Jews in the camps. ‘Memory culture’ is used to refer almost exclusively to German-Jewish relations between 1933 and 1945. And under the policy of Staatsräson, which has made the defence of Israel a central pillar of the German state, the lesson of the Holocaust seems to be that Jews must remain eternally protected so that Germany can expiate its guilt, even if the state that now claims to speak in the name of the Jews is carrying out war crimes – even genocide – against another people. 

To assimilate into German society, the children of Muslim immigrants are discouraged from identifying with the country’s Jewish victims and instructed instead to think of themselves as potential perpetrators of genocide against Jews. As the anthropologist Esra Özyürek argued in Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany (2023), the Holocaust education programmes designed for Muslim students imply that their ancestors also bear responsibility for the Judeocide, and give highly exaggerated accounts of Muslim antisemitism and collaboration (the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, figures prominently here, as he does in Netanyahu’s speeches). While immigration has provoked widespread anger in Germany and helped foster the rise of the far-right AfD, the presence of an increasingly large Muslim population has also helped relieve German society of the burden of memory, allowing it to shift the blame for antisemitism to people of Middle Eastern origin, and thereby reaffirm Germany’s vigilance in facing up to its past. It’s the flip side of ‘memory culture’. As both the AfD and the Christian Democrats have learned, so long as you condemn Muslim antisemitism, you can continue to attack the ‘ills’ of immigration, as if xenophobia and racism had no connection to the German past. 

‘Foreign words in German are the Jews of language,’ Adorno writes in Minima Moralia. There is a babble of languages to be heard in Berlin, particularly in neighbourhoods like Neukölln, and much of the graffiti is in English. But there are places where foreign words are prohibited. The use of Arabic is banned at demonstrations. So is Hebrew. A German intellectual I’ve known for a long time told me he had been shocked to hear expressions of antisemitism at a Gaza protest. When I asked him what he’d heard, all he came up with was ‘from the river to the sea’, and ‘globalise the intifada.’ 

His anxieties are typical of left-wing intellectuals of his generation. A protégé of Habermas, he grew up in the 1960s and is old enough to remember the attempted bombing of the Jewish community centre in West Berlin in 1969, as well as the radical left’s participation in airline hijackings by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. For a small but influential current of the German left, known as the ‘anti-Deutsch’, only by embracing a militant Zionism can Germany kill the Nazi hiding in every German soul. My friend despises Netanyahu and all that he represents, but in every pro-Palestinian chant he hears the echoes of Red Brigade terrorism and behind that the Hitler Youth. This leaves little to no room for Palestinians in Germany – the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe – to express their anger over the destruction of Gaza. 

‘The German inability to reckon with Israel’s war on Gaza grows out of a pathology,’ an academic who is German on his mother’s side and Palestinian on his father’s said to me. He meant that the German preoccupation with Jews is so consuming that Palestinians like himself are rendered invisible – or, worse, seen as an irremediable threat to German-Jewish reconciliation. Unable to land a secure job in Germany, he has spent much of the last decade teaching abroad, mostly in the Arab world, where he is seen as what he never quite manages to be back home: a German. 

Artists and intellectuals – not infrequently left-wing Jews – are another focus of German anxiety about antisemitism. I soon lost count of the people I met who had lost funding or jobs, or hadn’t been hired, because they had been seen at a demonstration or had signed a petition on behalf of Palestine, and were deemed to have violated Staatsräson. Several academics I met had taken to communicating on Signal to ensure their conversations were secure and gathered at their apartments rather than at their universities, where public events on Palestine are all but banned. 

A single tweet by Volker Beck, a Green Party politician and now a crusader against antisemitism (or, more accurately, anti-Zionism), seemed to be enough to get an event cancelled. When the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, the director of Forensic Architecture, and Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, arrived in Berlin in February to speak at the Free University, Beck fulminated against them on X, and their talk was quickly moved off campus. The audience at the rearranged event was, by German standards, unusually mixed: young people of various ethnicities, many of them wearing keffiyehs. In the Q&A, some spoke of being ‘traumatised’ by the violence of the rhetoric against them – and the violence of the police, who often beat up protesters at pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Kreuzberg and Neukölln, areas with large Muslim populations. Outside the venue the police were waiting in their vehicles, as if expecting a riot. 

One way dissent on Palestine is often expressed is through graffiti. One morning, on a walk through Kreuzberg, I saw an unusual recommendation from a graffiti artist: ‘Read Nahum Goldmann’s Jewish Paradox.’ In that book, published in 1978, Goldmann, a Zionist leader of heterodox inclinations, warned against Zionism’s ‘worship of the state’. This earned him the wrath of Israel’s supporters, who were particularly angry with him for quoting David Ben-Gurion as saying: 

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does it matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? 

The veracity of this quote has been disputed, but other Israeli leaders have said similar things. 

‘I can’t tell you how many Germans I know have gone to Israel and had themselves photographed wearing a kippah,’ someone who has lived in Berlin for several years said to me. ‘It’s as if they want to feel like victims, while feeling superior. Defence of the Israeli state is one of the foundational principles of the Axel Springer publishing house!’ – one of the largest media companies in the world. ‘But with the starvation campaign,’ she went on, ‘you’re beginning to see cracks – even the Germans are finding it difficult to defend.’ 

A German historian I know spoke to me about the role of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which insists that anti-Zionism is intrinsically antisemitic. He said that when the historian Uffa Jensen of the Technical University in Berlin backed adopting the Jerusalem definition of antisemitism, not the IHRA definition, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany accused him of ‘rolling out the red carpet for left-wing extremists and Hamas sympathisers’.   

After an event at Humboldt University, a young journalist at Taz, a left-wing newspaper, asked me what Frantz Fanon would have made of 7 October. I said that whether or not he would have condoned the killing of civilians, he would have understood the anger and despair that gave rise to the attack; I also noted his observation that colonial repression often acquires the ‘aura of an authentic genocide’, with Gaza being a textbook example of revenge turning into annihilation. As soon as the question of Palestine was mentioned, an almost tangible silence spread across the room. 

In early May, the Egyptian journalist Mona El-Naggar delivered a haunting lecture at the American Academy on her film about two Palestinians fleeing the destruction of Gaza. At the end of her talk, there was, again, almost complete silence. The director Volker Schlöndorff got up to speak, because ‘someone has to ask a question.’ Then El-Naggar was asked if she was afraid that the hatred caused by the war would lead young people in Gaza to join Islamic State. There was no acknowledgment of the hatred that has enabled Israelis to murder Palestinians en masse and celebrate the destruction in Instagram posts. A fellow at the Academy asked El-Naggar why she had chosen such attractive, well-connected Palestinians as her subjects (‘little Monas’ was the way he described them to me later). Did she want her subjects to be ‘relatable’ for Western viewers? Even if that were the case, who can blame her? Anne Frank wasn’t typical of the victims of the Shoah, most of whom were poor Eastern European Jews, widely seen as ‘foreign’ and backward – the internal ‘others’ of the West.   

I was interviewed about Fanon at a gallery in Moritzplatz by Emilia Roig, a Berlin-based French political scientist who’s become a social media celebrity for her books and posts about race and intersectionality. Her ancestors are a microcosm of French imperial history: French settlers in Algeria, including OAS terrorists; Algerian Jews who became French in the late 19th century after the Crémieux Decree; blacks from Martinique; whites from the metropole. She arrived carrying a tiny dog. It can’t bear to be alone, she said; it growled when I tried to pet it. It soon became clear that she’d come not only with her dog, but with a small army of supporters, who clicked their fingers loudly after every remark she made. ‘I will get in trouble for saying this in Germany,’ she declared, before describing the Holocaust as little more than European colonial violence inflicted on fellow Europeans, a symptom of the ‘boomerang’ effect evoked by Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism. I said that neither Césaire nor Fanon had minimised the horror of the Nazi genocide. 

The last question was from a young black German man who asked what Fanon would have said about the rise of authoritarian governments in the post-colonial world and the failure of violence, his chosen remedy, to produce more liberating outcomes. I responded by observing that Fanon was painfully aware that the revolutions he supported might result in repressive rule by a ‘national bourgeoisie’, but that, because he died in 1961, we can’t find answers to this dilemma in his writing. What’s more, Fanon, who asked of his body that it ‘make of me always a man who questions’, would have been perplexed that some readers, more than half a century after his death, see his writings as sacred texts. He believed in the ‘leap of invention’ as an expression of human freedom. Our task as readers, I suggested, was to remain faithful to his questioning, radical spirit even as we went beyond Fanon. ‘Beyond to what?’ a woman in the audience shouted. More finger clicking. Later I was told that Roig’s supporters had come to the event to heckle me because in not applauding the Al-Aqsa Flood I was trying to ‘recuperate Zionism’. 

I was asked at an event in Potsdam a few days later what Fanon would say about the world as it is now. I replied that I could imagine him being horrified by Israel’s destruction of Gaza, by the persecution of refugees and by the brutal resource wars in Congo. A journalist for Taz, summing up the exchange, wrote: 

Adam Shatz’s answer is altogether more flowery, saying – typically for this milieu – that today Fanon would be on the side of ‘the Palestinians’. At least he mentions China’s imperial exploitation of natural resources in the Congo, but he remains silent about the war in Sudan! Unfortunately, nothing is revealed about Russian belligerent colonialism in Ukraine either. If shame is a revolutionary sentiment, as Karl Marx apostrophised, then one could feel shame.  

A researcher from the Middle East working in Berlin told me about a conversation she had with her German supervisor after 7 October. (Her university’s leadership had promptly announced absolute solidarity with Israel and its dedication to the safety of its Jewish students, in observation of Staatsräson.) She had just returned from a trip to Beirut and told her supervisor she was finding it difficult to be an Arab in Germany, where there was so little understanding of, much less sympathy for, the Palestinian plight. ‘I can imagine that all this feels very different to you because of our different positionalities,’ her supervisor replied sternly. ‘But I regard Hamas as a terrorist organisation.’ ‘It was surreal,’ the researcher said. Her supervisor ‘spoke to me as if she assumed that I supported what had happened on 7 October’. Eighteen months later, the supervisor admitted that it was ‘beginning to look like genocide in Gaza’. 

Throughout my stay in Berlin, I kept hearing from Germans quietly critical of Israel that ‘cracks’ had begun to appear in Staatsräson. These cracks sometimes assumed unsettling forms, notably a relief at shedding the burden of Holocaust memory, as if Palestine was an invitation to bury the Holocaust, at last, rather than to apply its lessons to the destruction of Gaza. A woman I know told me that a friend, an American Jew, had broken up with her German boyfriend after he told her that he found the Holocaust too painful to engage with, and therefore didn’t. When she suggested that they visit a site of Holocaust remembrance in Berlin, he started talking about Gaza, angrily telling her that he no longer supported Israel’s war, and that most Germans agreed with him. When she challenged him over his refusal to engage with difficult subjects like the Holocaust, he burst into tears and ran off. 

In mid-May, just as my residency was coming to an end, the New York Times reported that even Israeli generals now admitted that Gaza was ‘on the brink of starvation’. The German government’s tone, too, was beginning to shift. Chancellor Merz, a Christian Democrat and a hardliner on Israel, said he found the continuing airstrikes against Gaza ‘no longer comprehensible’; the foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, said that Germany should no longer export weapons used to break humanitarian law in Gaza and described the suffering of Palestinians as ‘unbearable’. Felix Klein, Germany’s antisemitism tsar, said that starving people in Gaza and deliberately worsening the humanitarian situation there had nothing to do with defending Israel’s right to exist, and called for a debate on Staatsräson. On 8 August, a couple of months after I left Berlin, Merz announced that the German government was halting exports of ‘military equipment that could be used in the Gaza Strip’. Between 7 October 2023 and 13 May this year, according to Reuters, Germany had granted export licences for military equipment worth €485 million. Will anyone be left in Gaza to benefit from the supposed turning of the tide? 

Wednesday, 6 August 2025

Rescind the proscription of Palestine Action! Please share this post and if you're an academic, sign it



From the Verso Books website:


'We Support Palestine Action In Their Campaign Against Proscription'.

An open letter from some of the world's leading thinkers calling on the UK government to drop the charges against Palestine Action.


Academics Against the Proscription of Palestine Action 6 August 2025





As scholars dedicated to questions of justice and ethics, we are astonished and dismayed by the current priorities of Keir Starmer and his ministers. 

On the one hand they continue to offer material, military and diplomatic support to their close ally Israel and its rampaging war machine; on the other hand they are taking dramatically punitive steps to persecute some of the most direct and effective domestic critics of that machine. 

On the one hand they are sworn to uphold a Convention that obliges them to “prevent and to punish” genocide, a crime the UN defines as “deliberately inflicting” upon a nationally or ethnically defined group “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”; on the other hand they remain directly complicit in precisely this ongoing crime, and refuse to consider the sorts of measures (notably a full arms embargo and consequential and far-reaching sanctions) that alone might not only slow it down but actually put a stop to it. 

I 

Even as the dire consequences of Israel’s assault on Palestine grow more obvious by the day, the UK government adamantly refuses to characterise this assault as a violation of international law, let alone as genocidal. In July 2025 as in September 2024, while the Israeli military continues to demolish the whole of the Gaza Strip and to eliminate its inhabitants, Starmer’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy is prepared only to acknowledge that there may now be a “risk” of war crimes. There is now a “possibility,” Lammy says, that violations of humanitarian law may occur, perhaps at some indeterminate point in the future. According to Lammy no such crimes have actually yet been committed. Starmer himself tells us that since he is “well aware of the definition of genocide,” therefore he has “never described this as or referred to it as genocide.” 

Incredibly, when it comes to its most crucial decisions over arms supplies or diplomatic support, Starmer’s government is still reluctant even to acknowledge the risk or possibility of crimes against humanity. Starmer’s lawyers continue to justify the ongoing provision of essential UK-made F-35 fighter-bomber components to the Israeli air force, for instance, not only because “the evidence available does not support a finding of genocide” but also because the government’s own assessment somehow managed to conclude that “there was no serious risk of genocide occurring.” Since everyone can see what Israel is doing with the military equipment it receives from the UK, it is unconscionable that the UK continues to flout the formal conditions of the Arms Trade Treaty that it signed in 2014, notably its prohibition (in article 6:3) of any transfer of weapons made in the knowledge that they might be “used in the commission of genocide or crimes against humanity.” 

No matter how many people are actually starved, bombed or shot to death by the Israeli military, no matter how many UN officials or human rights groups or genocide scholars name this genocide for what it is, to this day Starmer and his ministers still decline to characterise Israeli actions as actually criminal or genocidal. They decline to do this, presumably, because it might amount to tacit admission of their own complicity in Israel’s flagrant war crimes. 

The present UK government, like the present governments of the US and of Israel, has a profoundly vested interest in preserving all forms of established impunity. These governments are especially invested in such impunity now that Israel’s long war of colonial conquest in Palestine, even as it expressly threatens the entire West Bank with imminent annexation, has in Gaza itself morphed from anything we might recognise as a “war” into genocidal ethnic cleansing pure and simple. Today Israel is not so much waging war in Gaza as eliminating the population and demolishing their homes. 

Like so many other critics of Starmer and Lammy, we take this opportunity to remind them once again that the UK, like the US and Israel, is formally obligated not merely to deplore but actively to prevent and to punish genocide. We believe that this moral and legal obligation takes precedence over all others, and we maintain the UK government now owes its people – to say nothing of the people of Palestine and indeed of the entire world – a full explanation of why it has so abjectly failed to meet it. 

II 

Rather than adopt measures that might prevent Israeli forces from starving or shooting people in Gaza, rather than halt their systematic demolition of towns and villages across the Strip, rather than stop their ongoing conquest and settlement of the West Bank, we note that Starmer and his Home Secretary Yvette Cooper have instead chosen to go after a different and rather softer target: domestic critics of Israel’s assault. 

Like analysts and observers all over the world, we were astonished to learn, earlier this month, that after taking draconian steps over the preceding months to harass student protestors and the organisers of mass pro-Palestine demonstrations, Cooper has now taken the entirely unparalleled step of banning the non-violent protest group Palestine Action as a supposedly “terrorist” organisation. A couple of days before it came into effect, Amnesty International (echoing many hundreds of lawyershuman right activistsUN officialswritersartists, activists of all stripes) rightly characterised Cooper’s “decision to ban Palestine Action, under anti-terror laws, as an unprecedented legal overreach.”  

In solidarity with our colleagues across the UK and across the full spectrum of groups engaged in the Palestine solidarity movement, we believe that Cooper’s proscription of Palestine Action represents an attack both on the entire movement and on basic freedoms of expression, association, assembly, and protest. 

We are encouraged to see that London’s High Court has now agreed to consider a legal challenge to Cooper’s ban, but we deplore the repressive consequences that this ban has already had on public debate and the rights of dissent. We deplore the fact that over the past several weeks more than two hundred people have already been arrested merely for expressing either support for Palestine Action or opposition to Israel’s genocide. We are amazed to see that British police are prepared to arrest people as “terrorists” merely for holding signs that call for the liberation of Gaza or for “action” against genocide, i.e. for exercising their rights of free expression. 

As people who work in or adjacent to universities, we are especially concerned about the impact that the proscription of Palestine Action is sure to have on campuses across the UK, not least because it establishes a horrific precedent that could very well be cited by administrators on campuses in other countries as well. The University of Cambridge has already referenced the ban in arguments made to the High Court to justify surveillance of student activism and the further criminalisation of protest. Many other universities, for example CardiffLeicesterNewcastle and London, can now also draw on Cooper’s proscription to intensify their ongoing efforts to crack down on pro-Palestine protests. 

As university staff working in many different places we write in full solidarity with embattled student encampments and other campaigning organisations in support of Palestine, in the UK, in the US and in countries all over the world, including Students for Justice in PalestineJewish Voice for PeaceUniversity and College Workers for PalestinePalestine Solidarity CampaignBRICUP, and many other groups too numerous to mention. 

III 

We therefore applaud the growing campaign of collective defiance that aims to overturn Cooper’s ban. We commend, in particular, the courageous stand taken by activists associated with Defend our Juries, who for several weeks running have been arrested for participating in demonstrations that express opposition to genocide and support for Palestine Action. We applaud the exemplary recent motion adopted by Derry Council that demands the reversal of proscription, that “supports all those who have protested the ban on Palestine Action, and [that] calls for charges against them to be immediately dropped.” We join our voices with the many tens of thousands of people who continue to demonstrate against genocide and against proscription. 

In alliance with thousands of trade unionists and teachers across the UK, we affirm our own solidarity with Palestine Action in their campaign against proscription. We fully share both their goal of ending the flow of weapons from Britain to Israel and their belief that all participants in the pro-Palestine movement should be free to make our own decisions about how best to achieve that goal, without having to face down the threat of state repression and violence. 

As the organisers of massive national demonstrations face prosecution, as hundreds of people again risk arrest by joining street protests on 9 August, and as students and teachers prepare for the start of another turbulent academic year, we express our full solidarity with those mobilising on their campuses or in their workplaces and communities to prevent genocide and to end UK complicity with Israel’s crimes. We share and affirm the insightful slogans and just demands that now reverberate across the country: protest is not terrorism; drop the charges; lift the ban; stop starving Gaza; stop arming Israel; stop the genocide and bring those responsible for it to justice; full equality in rights, including full participation in political self-determination, for all inhabitants of Palestine. There is no time to wait. 

 

Signed:  

Gilbert Achcar, Emeritus Professor of Development Studies and International Relations, SOAS, University of London. 

Umberto Albarella, Professor of Zooarchaeology, University of Sheffield. 

Anne Alexander, Senior Research Associate, Cambridge Digital Humanities, University of Cambridge. 

Tariq Ali, Writer and historian. 

Sandra Babcock, Clinical Professor of Law, Cornell University Law School. 

Etienne Balibar, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Paris X – Nanterre. 

Chetan Bhatt, Anthony Giddens Professor of Social Theory, London School of Economics. 

Marion Birch, editor of Medicine, Conflict & Survival (Taylor & Francis). 

Sarah Bracke, Professor of Sociology, University of Amsterdam. 

Nathan Brown, Professor of English, Concordia University, Montréal. 

Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation Chair, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. 

Susan Buck-Morss, Distinguished Professor, CUNY Graduate Centre, NYC. 

Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School, Department of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley. 

Alex Callinicos, Emeritus Professor of European Studies, King’s College London. 

John Chalcraft, Professor of Middle East History and Politics, London School of Economics. 

Emilios Christodoulidis, Chair of Jurisprudence, University of Glasgow. 

Justin Clemens, Associate Professor in Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne. 

Rebecca Comay, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto. 

David Cunningham, Professor of Modern Literature and Culture, University of Westminster 

Angela Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, UC Santa Cruz. 

Alex de Waal, Executive Director, World Peace Foundation. 

Jodi Dean, Professor of Politics, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY. 

Elsa Dorlin, Professor of Contemporary Political Philosophy, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès. 

Jennifer Doyle, Professor of English, UC Riverside. 

Haidar Eid, Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature, Al-Aqsa University, Gaza, Palestine. 

Roberto Esposito, Professor of Philosophy, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa. 

David Ewing, Lecturer in French, Queen’s College, University of Oxford. 

Patrick ffrench, Professor of French, King’s College London. 

John Bellamy Foster, Professor Emeritus, Sociology, University of Oregon. 

Verónica Gago, Professor of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires. 

Neve Gordon, Professor of International Law, Queen Mary University of London. 

Ian Gough FAcSS FBA, Visiting Professor, London School of Economics. 

Greg Grandin, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, Yale University. 

Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation, Queen Mary University of London. 

Amy Hagopian, Professor Emeritus, Health Systems and Population Health, University of Washington 

Peter Hallward, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, CRMEP, Kingston University. 

Michael Hardt, Professor of Literature, Duke University. 

Amber Jacobs, Head of School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck College University of London. 

Robin D.G. Kelley, Professor of History, UCLA. 

Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies, Columbia University. 

Darryl Li, Associate Professor of Anthropology & Associate Member of the Law School, University of Chicago. 

Elena Loizidou, Professor in Law and Political Theory, Birkbeck College. 

Frédéric Lordon, Research Director, CNRS, France. 

James Martel, Professor of Political Science, San Francisco State University. 

Tracy McNulty, Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies, Cornell University. 

Angela McRobbie FBA, Professor Emeritus, Goldsmiths University of London. 

Mandy Merck, Professor Emerita of Media Arts, Royal Holloway University of London. 

Lina Meruane, Distinguished Writer in Residence, NYU – Chile. 

Sandro Mezzadra, Professor of Political Theory, University of Bologna. 

China Miéville FRSL, Salvage. 

Vittorio Morfino, Professor of the History of Philosophy, University of Milan-Bicocca. 

Nick Nesbitt, Professor of French, Princeton University. 

Abdaljawad Omar, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Birzeit University, Palestine. 

Ilan Pappé, Professor of History and Middle Eastern Studies, Director of the Centre of Palestine Studies, University of Exeter. 

Paul Patton, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of New South Wales, Australia. 

Rahul Rao, Reader in Reader in International Political Thought, University of St Andrews, Scotland. 

Matthieu Renault, Professor of Philosophy, Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès, France. 

Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University. 

William I. Robinson, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara. 

Jacqueline Rose, Professor of Humanities and Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London. 

Lynne Segal, Professor Emerita of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London. 

Tanya Serisier, Professor in Feminist Theory, Birkbeck, University of London 

Richard Seymour, Salvage. 

Avi Shlaim FBA, Emeritus Professor of International Relations, St Antony's College, Oxford. 

Ludi Simpson, Honorary Professor of Population Studies, University of Manchester. 

Nikhil Pal Singh, Chair, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University. 

Panagiotis Sotiris, Editor and writer. 

Elettra Stimilli, Professor of Philosophy, Sapienza Università di Roma. 

Rei Terada, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature, UC Irvine. 

Alberto Toscano, Emeritus Professor of Critical Theory, Goldsmiths, University of London. 

Enzo Traverso, Professor in the Humanities, Cornell University. 

Elena Tzelepis, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Thessaly. 

Françoise Vergès, Senior Research Fellow Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialization, UCL. 

Mara Viveros Vigoya, Professor in the Faculty of Human Sciences at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and Simón Bolívar Professor, University of Cambridge, 2024-25. 

Jeffery R. Webber, Professor of Politics, York University, Toronto. 

Eyal Weizman, Founding Director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London. 

Lynn Welchman, Professor of Law, SOAS University of London. 

Jessica Whyte, Scientia Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of New South Wales, Australia. 

Jim Wolfreys, Reader in French and European Politics, King’s College London. 
 

If you are employed by a university and would like to add your signature to the abbreviated version there is a sign-up form posted here 

An abbreviated version of this statement was published in the Guardian on Wednesday 6 August 2025, along with an additional story about it. If you are employed by a university and would like to add your signature to the abbreviated version there is a sign-up form posted here.