Pressures on universities and scholars to conform to prevailing political orthodoxies appear to be intensifying, often under the guise of safeguarding neutrality or combating alleged bias. This symposium intends to make a small contribution to re-opening the ever more restricted space for academic freedom and seek to continue to push against closing channels.
Few advocates of Palestinian liberation have become as familiar a name as Dr. Hanan Ashrawi. A principled activist and gifted speaker with a formidable academic background, she rose to international prominence during the First Intifada in 1988. Later, with the start of the Madrid Conference in 1991, she caught the world’s attention as the official representative of the Palestinian delegation.
On 10 August 2025, Germany announced it would suspend the export of offensive weapons to Israel, citing the risk of mass civilian casualties during Israel’s planned incursion into Gaza City. Yet Germany’s military trade with Israel is a two-way street. As crucial as Berlin’s arms exports are its growing imports of Israeli weapons, military technology, and security expertise, including training.
On 10 August, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gathered a press conference to explain an earlier cabinet decision “to occupy” Gaza. What he introduced, to the dismay of allied governments in Europe, was a military incursion on Gaza City and “the central camps and Mawasi.” Netanyahu promised a “non-Israeli civilian administration” and, in English, adjusted the earlier framing of the operation, which had by then been embraced and echoed in Israeli media: that plan is “not to occupy Gaza, but to free it.” Such rhetoric invites scrutiny – not only for the legal ramifications of the acts announced, but it also calls into attention the shifting uses of the word occupation in Israeli political discourse.
Fraenkel’s The Dual State (1941) and Neumann’s Behemoth (1942) offer two diverging accounts of the legal reality under National Socialism. The controversy between the two is important not only for the Gaza War, but also for the future of international humanitarian law writ large. The picture, according to which if lawyers had more power post-World War I, democracies in Europe would not have collapsed, affected both constitutional and international law. Yet, the claim that Weimar and the world could have been saved if only the law and lawyers had possessed more power is inaccurate. We are now reliving the consequences of this mistake in the Gaza War.
Since October 2023, a group of eminent Israeli international law scholars has written numerous letters and memos expressing concerns over many aspects of the Gaza war. Given the importance of these documents both in doctrinal terms and in highlighting the work of these colleagues, we have asked to publish them. So far, only one of the letters has been officially published. Readers interested in more detail can access the full text of the respective documents, which are hyperlinked and archived on Verfassungsblog.
A tempting but corrosive thought about Israeli politics – and about many other places – is that we have already embarked on a one-way road to authoritarianism. This “authoritarian determinism”, sometimes presented as a kind of seasoned realism, assumes that political trajectories continue unidirectionally. There is a world of difference between the many political contexts in which authoritarianism seems to be on the rise. And yet, a common question seems to be asked: in the face of authoritarian determinism, what can be saved of the democratic process? Until when does it make sense to hold on?
Last week, the UK High Court decided that the UK can continue to issue licences for F-35 components that go into a pool of spare parts which Israel can use on its existing F-35 jets. The finding by the High Court that the UK cannot exclude Israel as an end user for UK manufactured components because “the only way for the UK to ensure that its components do not reach Israel is for it to suspend all exports into the F-35 programme” raises pertinent questions with regard to the UK's compliance with the Arms Trade Treaty and other key provisions of international law.
The Israeli Supreme Court has recently adopted a highly activist approach in rulings that claim to strengthen the structural foundations of democracy, while neglecting its role in protecting the basic human rights of Palestinians. The stark contrast between the Court’s handling of cases involving Palestinians detained incommunicado and its swift intervention in the dismissal of the Shin Bet Director reflects a deeper pattern in the Court’s recent jurisprudence, one that can be described as “democracy washing”.
Genocidal intent does not necessarily pop, prefabricated, out of the perpetrator’s state’s head. It emerges – gradually, often unevenly – as a product of action, omission, emotion, and political opportunity. A war that once had legal justification as defence can thus harden into something else: the destruction of a group as such. This is as true in the specific conditions of Gaza, as it is as a matter of principle.
13. September 2025
Giovanni Capoccia
12. September 2025
Anne Peters
12. September 2025
Anne Peters