‘Heinous’: Bloodstained Palms Protest at Top Berlin University Over Gaza War Fuels Antisemitism Fears

A group of pro-Hamas students at one of Germany’s top universities have staged several protests throughout the month of November, turning their campus into an ideological battlefield that has left Jewish students feeling under siege.

On Wednesday, around 30 students at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) — widely recognized as one of the leading art colleges in the world — called a “Strike for Palestine.” After the university administration prevented the group from assembling outside the main entrance, stating that the protest had not been properly registered, the students moved to the university’s cafe where they issued a call for a boycott of Israeli universities.

A statement from the group shared with the Berliner Zeitung attacked the UdK for its alleged “complicity with this genocide” — a reference to Israel’s military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza. They demanded the severing of the UdK’s ties with two Israeli institutions, the Bezalel College of Art and Shenkar College, “in view of their active support for the Israeli occupation forces (also known as IDF).” The statement also called on UdK faculty to cancel their lectures as a gesture of solidarity with the protesters. Posts on Instagram encouraging attendance at the protest denounced Israel for “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing.”

Wednesday’s action came a fortnight after around 100 students at the university gathered for another pro-Hamas protest. Carrying banners declaring “Stop Genocide,” “End Colonialism,” and “Free Palestine,” the students sat around a table with their palms facing outwards painted in red ink to symbolize blood.

While the gesture was apparently intended to condemn the German government’s support for Israel’s defensive military operation, several observers noted a striking similarity with the notorious lynching of two IDF reservists, Vadim Nurzhitz and Yosef Avrahami, in the West Bank city of Ramallah in Oct. 2000.

“Every Jewish student, actually anyone who has studied Israel’s recent history, will interpret the red hands differently: In October 2000, near Ramallah, two Israeli reservists were arrested for making a wrong turn and detained in a police station,” wrote Claudius Seidl of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in a lengthy article on the Nov. 13 protest at UdK. In an outburst of intense violence reminiscent of the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel, Nurzhitz and Avrahami were brutally murdered and their bodies mutilated by a Palestinian mob while both were in the custody of Palestinian Authority (PA) police officers.

One of their assailants, Aziz Salha, appeared at the window of the police station following the murder of the two Israelis, delightedly displaying his blood-stained palms to the appreciative crowd gathered outside. A photograph of Salha’s gesture quickly went viral and has kept its place as one of the most unsettling images captured during the conflict between Israel and Palestinian terrorist organizations.

While the Nov. 13 protest was underway, Norbert Palz — the president of the UdK who had earlier issued a statement condemning the Hamas pogrom — attempted to reason with the group but was shouted down. According to Seidl’s account of the protest, the barracking of Palz was orchestrated by Tirdad Zolghadr, an Iranian-born arts curator who has been a visiting professor at UdK since 2022.

Following that protest, Jewish students at UdK began reporting incidents of harassment. A music student from Israel was spat on by an Arab man in the street outside the university after he was overheard speaking in Hebrew; the student later said that he was advised by the police officers to whom he reported the incident not to speak Hebrew “too loudly.” Meanwhile, in another incident, a female Israeli student was reduced to tears after pro-Hamas students told her she was to blame for the Oct. 7 atrocities as she had served in the Israeli army.

Neither student has ventured to the UdK campus since these incidents. Josefine von der Ahé, an art student at UdK, meanwhile told Seidl that she attributed “the receptivity of so many students to the stories of ‘evil Israel’ to profound ignorance of the State of Israel and its history.”

Several Berlin politicians condemned the protests at UdK. Adrian Grasse, who sits in the Berlin parliament for the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), told the BZ news outlet that the “heinous events at the UdK are part of a development at the Berlin universities that I am following with increasing concern. With aggressiveness, hatred, defamation, and even the demand for the destruction of Israel, such actions make no contribution to peace and mutual understanding.”

Laura Neugebauer, an MP from the left-wing Green Party, similarly condemned the protests.

“Berlin universities must be places where Israelis and Jews can study safely and freely,” she said. “There can be no ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’ here.”

The UdK’s origins stretch back to the foundation of the Prussian Academy of Arts in the latter part of the 17th century. The present school was formed through the merger of a music college and a fine arts college in 1975.

The post ‘Heinous’: Bloodstained Palms Protest at Top Berlin University Over Gaza War Fuels Antisemitism Fears first appeared on Algemeiner.com.