Last week, my students were brutally dragged out of the University building by the Berlin police for the third time because they had chosen it as the site of their protest. The protest was primarily directed against Israel’s widespread bombing of the civilian population of Gaza, which they rightly insist should be classified as genocide, but they were also protesting the curtailing of their own rights through the introduction of new public order provisions at Berlin universities. This time, they occupied the Institute for Social Sciences, renamed the Jabalia Institute in reference to one of the largest refugee camps in Gaza. Paragraph 4 of the Berlin State Higher Education Act states that universities have a «special responsibility for the development of solutions to social challenges and for the development of society» including in ways that lie outside of conventional research and teaching. When my students were forcibly removed from the building, they were deprived of the opportunity to participate in precisely that process.

The eviction coincided with the 75th anniversary of the German Constitution and was carried out by police officers, some of whom had secured the celebration events earlier that morning. It took place within the same week that the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court applied for arrest warrants for the three Hamas leaders, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri and Ismail Haniyeh, as well as for Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Foreign Minister Yoav Gallant. A week in which the public debate about Israeli war crimes in Gaza and protests in Germany seemed to finally shift, with various media outlets starting to urge for dialogue, not least in view of the disruptions caused by the university occupiers.

During the eviction, journalists were attacked by police, a lawyer was arrested, and there was an alleged sexual assault on a student by a police officer. The many levels on which state violence is currently being unleashed in Germany against those standing up for their sense of justice — a sense of justice which, according to Statista Research Department, is shared by two thirds of the population — puts a strain on the nation’s democratic conscience. Various elements of Germany’s self-image have been debated for weeks: the right of assembly, the freedom of opinion, academic freedom, the autonomy of universities, the police’s rights of intervention, the interpretability of political slogans. For all these issues expert panels are convened and yet their expertise is routinely ignored. Instead, journalistic framing always places the danger of antisemitism at the centre of reporting.

Amid these debates, there is hardly any focus on the actual cause: it is hardly ever about Gaza. That’s why we need the student encampments; we need them because, by pointing to the repressed, neglected and denied violations of international law in Gaza, they declare the universities to be the public spaces that they purport to be. Although the students’ demands are much more radical in substance, their form can easily be derived and justified from within the liberal political tradition. The «light of the public sphere», without which, according to Hannah Arendt, there cannot be any change to the political order, shines in the encampments.