When Gaza student protestors were evicted from Berlin universities, the few scholars who stood up for them were smeared by the right-wing press and threatened with public funding cuts. Can universities be a place for radical politics? Adorno and Marcuse fell out over this question as early as 1969.

German-Israeli reconciliation started as early as the 1950s under Adenauer and Ben-Gurion. They acted out of calculation, and not forgiveness or remorse. Germany’s reason of state today is based on a simple trade off: absolution for Germany; support and reconstruction aid for Israel.

The war in Gaza has produced numbing levels of violence and massive Palestinian casualties. A profoundly unequal assessment of the worth of lives, built over decades of oppression, provides the genealogy of the extreme violence unfolding in Israel and Palestine since 7 October 2023.