⚲ 9:00 | Amtsgericht Tiergarten, Turmstr.91, 10559 Berlin
On 19.12, a fellow FU student and Jewish Palestine solidarity activist, Udi, will stand trial against FU president Günter Ziegler.
Ziegler had been told that he is engaging in racist, antisemitic, and genocide-supporting conduct.
Now, he is taking his own student to court, accusing her of “insult” for stating obvious facts.
The crackdown on student rights is notorious at
FU, where, for protesting for Palestinian rights and opposing the University’s complicity in genocide, the university leadership has unleashed massive repression involving German political parties, media, the legal system, and the police.
Countless students were physically injured, smeared, and doxxed, and now face legal and residency-related issues in the wake of this ongoing wave of repression.
Join us on 19.12 at Amtsgericht Tiergarten, where we will stand in solidarity with Udi and protest against FU’s complicity in genocide.
Statement by Udi Raz
On Friday, I will be in court facing six different criminal charges:
Two cases concern the use of the slogan “From the River to the Sea” on Instagram. Just yesterday, there was a conviction for this slogan at the Administrative Court in Berlin, and we are seeing how the state wants to create more and more precedents in order to persecute people, in particular those with precarious residence status. How the state works overtime to destroy and depoliticize our movement here in Germany, by censoring our political chants.
We know that the demand for a free Palestine cannot work without acknowledging the geographical reality in which Palestinians are oppressed and persecuted from the river to the sea. This exterminating violence must therefore be stopped from the river to the sea. As a comrade said yesterday at court after the verdict was announced: “We are just asking for a free Palestine where people can live without an apartheid state, without a terrorist state. This is what we are asking for.”
In another case, a police officer reported me because, during the unlawful eviction of the Palestine Congress in April 2024,1 told him that his behaviour was not only racist, but also anti-Semitic. According to a comrade he hade pointed at my kippah and laughed. The police officer felt so offended that I spoke up that he reported me for insulting him. Apparently, it was not enough to illegally exploit the police’s monopoly on violence – as was recently confirmed by the court – and to use it at will to forcibly silence witnesses to genocide such as Ghassan and Salman Abu Sittah.
In three cases, the Free University of Berlin reported me because I confronted FU President Gunther Ziegler with his support for genocide and racist practices at the university and called them out – both online and at demonstrations. The university wants to portray me, like many other students, as a perpetrator of violence and intimidate me – but of course we are not the root of the violence when we act for the simple reason of fighting genocide in Palestine and thus fulfilling our duty to comply with the Genocide Convention, which is being violated by our institutions.
It is also clear that German institutions do not care how Jews are treated as long as they can exploit our identity for maintaining their power, for the brutal persecution of their own students, and for their vehement support of genocide. But when we resist and reclaim our Jewish identity, the institutions will want to punish us and force us to be compliant with this weaponization.
I am the grandson of Holocaust survivors, I am alive despite German institutions working to systematically destroy my family, and I will most certainly not allow a German institution and its representatives like Ziegler to order me to remain silent about their complicity in the genocide in Palestine.
My grandmother had taught me: Germany loves Jews silent. Germany loves Jews compliant. Germany loves Jews who do not disrupt the racial order.
So I will keep on disrupting and if that takes me to court, which is only logical for this German order, so be it. Please come and accompany the trial on Friday. I am being charged not just as me, Udi, but as part of a movement, and I will appear in court as part of a movement.
