Germany cancelled me for talking about Gaza, so I persisted.

In early June, my colleague Mahmud and I were invited by a professor at the German University of Heidelberg to speak in his class about the manufacturing of consent to genocide in the German media and the repression of the Palestinian perspective. However, after a smear campaign organized first by pro-Israel groups, then picked up by the German media, the university canceled the event.

On October 7, I made a video—which I later deleted for fear that it had been taken out of context—that attempted to contextualize the attack on Israel. It was to explain that such violence does not occur in a vacuum, but is the result of decades of Israeli violence, occupation, and apartheid. The video, discovered by Jewish Student Union Vice President Noam Petri, was posted on Twitter in an attempt to outrage the event.

What happened immediately afterwards was a smear campaign by the German far-right press, such as the Zionist publication Judische Allgemeine, the notoriously xenophobic Bild Zeitung, and even the local newspaper Mannheimer Morgen. I was called a “Hamas fanatic,” a “terrorist sympathizer,” and a “Jew-hater.”

Politicians even joined the campaign against me. Chris Rihm, a Green Party member of the city council where I live, said that Mahmud and I are “not people a university would invite,” because we are just “experienced rhetoricians who can rally large crowds behind us.”

CDU member Manuel Hagel wrote an open letter to the university in which he said: “Supporters of terrorism who reject Israel’s right to exist and call for the destruction of an entire state and the expulsion or murder of people because of their ethnic or religious affiliation must never be given the space or opportunity to spread hatred and incitement.”

Of course, I said none of this. However, I made a personal decision not to apologize, not to clarify my remarks, nor to put myself on the defensive, because I refuse to put myself in a position to give the German press and the Zionist lobbies a false legitimacy or a false moral authority.

Israel killed thirty members of my family. My children’s great-grandmother, who was older than the State of Israel, died in a refugee camp in Khan Yunis due to dehydration and the deteriorating living conditions in the camps. As I wrote for The New Arab A few months ago, Palestinians were told to “refuse to condemn and endure a viciously racist discourse that places our respective communities in a position of suspicion. I refuse to condemn because we are not pawns in political ambitions that aim to shift Germany’s historical responsibility for the Jewish people onto the Palestinian population.”

Rather, I condemn the politics and media of this country, which have trivialized, denigrated and justified the murder of what the British medical journal The Lancet estimates at 186,000 Palestinians, or 8% of Gaza’s population.

It is not the Palestinians, nor I, who support terrorism, but rather this state and its institutions that unconditionally support genocide and state-sanctioned terrorism against 2 million Palestinians trapped in the besieged enclave of Gaza.

The academic event was supposed to be a small, rather insignificant class debate, but it provoked a scandal, major media attention and reactions from political figures. This is probably due to the growing fear that pro-Palestinian sentiments could be present in German academic circles.

Recently, the president of the private German university The Hertie School, Professor Cornelia Woll, was heavily criticized after she spoke about the victims of Gaza at her university’s graduation ceremony. “Our greatest privilege is to be able to focus on education and to see you graduate. Our university is standing. Our city is safe. Germany is not under attack,” Woll said. “Some of you have brought with you signs of solidarity with the terrible plight of the Palestinians, the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, including an unbearable number of children. I congratulate you and would like to invite you to stand in solidarity.”

In the media, Woll was accused of bias and failure to recognize the Israeli victims of October 7. She then apologized on Twitter. The Hertie Foundation’s board of directors then reaffirmed Their position: “Following the massacre of October 7, the Hertie Foundation stands unequivocally on the side of Israel and sympathizes with the victims and their families, particularly the hostages still held by Hamas.” What should have been a moment of mourning for the systematic destruction has turned into a reaffirmation of support for Israel’s genocide.

In other words, there is no room at German universities to express empathy or even to engage in a debate about why this state supports Israel so fervently. But in Germany, it can go even further: claiming that students have the right to demonstrate can be a scandal.

After students at the Free University of Berlin set up a camp in solidarity with the people of Gaza, it was immediately attacked and evacuated by the Berlin police at the request of the university administrators. In response, 1,400 university professors wrote an open letter defending freedom of expression and the ability for their students to protest without being persecuted by the police.

German Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger was outraged. “This statement by professors at Berlin universities is shocking,” she said. “Instead of clearly speaking out against hatred of Israel and Jews, the university occupants are being turned into victims and violence is being trivialized.”

According to leaked emails, Watzinger went beyond criticism to try to investigate whether the department had grounds to cut funding to the open letter signatories and whether they had violated criminal law.

The state is increasingly interfering in even the smallest manifestations of pro-Palestinian sentiment. Professors, presidents, and students are denied the luxury of discussion or debate, and it is actually futile to think that the state will allow change – even if there are sympathies. Instead, it is necessary to reclaim these spaces and demand, through pressure, protest, or occupation, their complicity in manufacturing consent to end the genocide.

The Students for Palestine at the University of Bonn told me about their latest occupation of a lecture hall. Before the occupation, they wanted to hold film screenings, but were refused space. They wrote open letters that went unheeded, and finally decided to take matters into their own hands.

“Since we no longer had a community space, we decided that it was necessary to reclaim our space within the university. Even though the entire building was closed, the police were called, and our actions were called “disgusting,” we managed to educate our students and show them important content. Shouldn’t the university be a place for students, their interests, and their aspirations?

It is not possible to become a good journalist in such an environment, nor to become a good doctor in a place that forbids you from protesting the massacres in hospitals, the destruction of the health system and the attacks on medical personnel. So we will continue to fight. This is about the future, the lives and dignity of the Palestinians, and it is linked to our future and our liberation as well.

Even though today the streets are our classrooms and our universities, and that is where we have introduced the debate about Palestine into the psyche of ordinary people, we must continue to pressure and force our institutions, our educational environments, to reflect the change that we want.

The event I was supposed to attend at Heidelberg University was cancelled. However, students from the university organised a demonstration on behalf of me and my colleague to protest the university’s decision. We decided to give our lectures right in front of the campus. Instead of speaking to 20 students, I spoke to 250.

Hebh Jamal is a Palestinian-American journalist based in Germany.

Follow her on Twitter and Instagram: @key48return

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The views expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.