Solidarity with Hertie Student Representatives (HSR) adopting a resolution endorsing the BDS campaign 

A Statement of encouragement and support by AStA FU

13 March 2026

We congratulate Hertie’s student government on their decision to support both the global BDS movement and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). The students have used their constitutionally guaranteed rights to autonomous students’ self-representation and academic freedom with the highest integrity: to implement the BDS resolution which is the legal (!) campaign for Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions towards Israel, taking a step towards justice. Contrary to common belief, prohibiting BDS is illegal (!).

Implementing the campaign is in our opinion the bare minimum of material abstain from colonial regimes like Apartheid South Africa and contemporary settler-colonial Israel. BDS is protected by freedom of speech, and various anti-BDS resolutions in Germany are merely (racist) opinions and not legally binding (!). BDS is often mis-characterized as antisemitic, whereas what is really antisemitic is making this claim!

Why? Because suggesting that Jewishness equates to the zionist fascist regime excludes anti-zionist jews from their own Jewishness as we have tragically witnessed oftentimes in the misguided repression of Germany towards anti-zionist Jews, falsely calling them antisemitic. Israel’s ongoing settler-colonial violence towards Palestinians by means of genocide, apartheid and land annexation in Palestine, ethnic cleansing, scholasticide and ecocide in Palestine and Lebanon, as well as the current illegal imperial war of aggression on Iran by Israel and the US must be condemned in the sharpest terms. These actions are immoral, illegal and destroying the planet, whereas HSR’s commitment towards ending academic and material complicity shows us the way towards a more just academy that centers the voices of the colonized and the oppressed instead of cowering to violent regimes, state repression, intimidation through zionist media and accepting obedience to a genocidal entity as the reason of state. The latter isn’t legally binding either so people in this country truly need to grow a backbone, resist this abuse of power and protect frankly our own dignity instead. Being complicit with a genocidal regime is not dignified at all and weaponizing antisemitism for it isn’t either. 

Unfortunately, we are witnessing that instead of supporting their students, the leadership of Hertie school and Hertie foundation have chosen to align themselves with the not-legally-binding (!) Staatsräson.

The president of HS has made a recommendation to Hertie students to withdraw trust from HSR in an election of no confidence which she was only supposed to send to the students administatively, clearly overstepping her contractually given powers. We hope that she will be held accountable for this by the students.

The Hertie foundation has been threatening the school with consequences, possibly the withdrawing of funding, unless the BDS resolution will be withdrawn, also clearly violating their role as the funder of an academic institution based on freedom of education, expression and a guaranteed right to autonomous student’s self-governance.

We are concerned about these authoritarian attacks on student’s rights, which are inacceptable, although in the context of the larger German repressive climate of anti-Palestinian racism, antisemitism and militarization by the German state sadly not surprising.

Decolonization is not a metaphor, it must be material, including via an institutional academic boycott and divestments as called for by the Palestinian-led BDS movement.

Free Germany from its colonial continuities and free Palestine from German complicity!

The students united will never be defeated!

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Signatures of groups on campus in solidarity:

BDS FU