The Association of Palestinian and Jewish Academics (PJA) represents Jewish and Palestinian scholars in German-speaking countries.
On May 7 and 31, 2024, between 60 and 100 students staged sit-ins at ETH Zurich to protest the university’s complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza through its financial and institutional ties to Israeli institutions, which are instrumental to the oppression of Palestinians. Their protest was carried out peacefully, reflecting a long tradition of nonviolent student activism. In response, the Executive Board of ETH chose to refer the matter for criminal prosecution, charging several protesters with trespassing. Seventeen students and staff have chosen to fight the charges pressed by ETH Zurich and the Zurich prosecutor’s office.
PJA expresses deep concern over the upcoming criminal trials of students and staff which represents not only a violation of their democratic right to peaceful protest, but also sets a dangerous precedent for academic freedom and freedom of expression and assembly on campus. These developments also appear to reflect a wider international trend that scholars have described as the “Palestine exception” to freedom of speech and academic freedom.
In the current climate of repression, student protests concerning Palestine have been fundamental to defending academic freedom and to breaking the wall of silence and censorship at universities on the topic of Palestine and the ongoing genocide. When students are criminalized for peaceful protest or when scholars are denied a platform for rigorous debate on matters of global significance, democratic safeguards are not just weakened—they are imperiled. In fighting the criminal charges for a peaceful protest against a genocide, the students show that nothing less than democracy itself is at stake.
This criminalization of peaceful protest is not an isolated incident, but is indicative of a broader trend of exceptionalizing all matters related to Palestine/Israel in Switzerland by reducing them to a binary of ‘Jews’ and ‘Palestinians’ as mutually opposed others. Other examples include ETH Zurich’s censorship of a public talk on Palestine by Leopold Lambert; the withdrawal of the space for a public discussion featuring UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese by the University of Bern; and numerous other cases of silencing and (self)censorship. Together, these instances have a chilling effect and demonstrate a systematic narrowing of the space for open debate on Palestine/Israel and a broader erosion of academic freedom across Swiss universities.
PJA calls on ETH Zurich and the Zurich prosecutor’s office to drop all charges against the students and uphold international, democratic standards of academic freedom and freedom of expression and assembly. Additionally, PJA calls on the ETH administration to commit to the transparent review of institutional complicity in human rights violations.
Association of Palestinian and Jewish Academics 