Humboldt University Berlin sends student council members to pro-Palestinian student meeting

We, the members of NotInOurName HU, booked a room on campus through the student council RefRat (Referent*innenrat, legally AstA) for an open meeting on Wednesday, February 14. Two days before the meeting, we received a booking confirmation from a HU staff member. The confirmation included a request to stick to the wording in our room application, which was supposedly “much more neutral” than our Instagram post promoting the event. Later on, we received an email from RefRat, in which they asked us to ensure that there was no room for anti-Semitic statements, specifically those that “relativise the attack on Lahav Shapira” or “trivialize the Shoa”. They later informed us that two of their members would join the meeting.

We arrived in the room and were confronted with the following situation:
Four members of RefRat were waiting for us, stating that the university required them to be present in order for the meeting to take place. They said they would only stay in the background. Also, a staff member monitored those who entered. Later, a security person arrived, and started turning people away at the door saying it was a closed meeting, which was not the case.

When the meeting began, we asked the members of RefRat to introduce themselves and join the discussion actively, which they did. It was revealed that the Praesidium had told the RefRat members that they are responsible for “the entire content and the execution” of the meeting. They had also required the RefRat to attend the meeting due to “security concerns”. Both of these orders are unprecedented. The RefRat members expressed their discomfort and criticized the approach and demands of the Praesidium.

Due to the multiple layers of surveillance at the meeting, we were unable to facilitate a safer space for students and academics in solidarity with Palestine. Despite the free speech the university supposedly fosters, we were faced with a hostile environment, and attempts at censorship. Our meeting was put under general suspicion of inciting anti-Semitism and violence. Although the climate of suspicion and criminalisation was primarily created by the university administration, the members of the RefRat went along with their unreasonable requests and failed to acknowledge how their own statements and presence at our meeting enforced the university’s repressive censorship mechanisms.

We denounce the university’s weaponization of a student body against us to censor and police our meeting. The HU Praesidium’s threat to hold RefRat accountable for the content and execution of our meeting hindered the creation of a safer space on our terms and pushed the members of RefRat into the inappropriate position of judging and censoring a topic they are not expert in. We strongly refute the narrative that security was called ‘for our protection’. We instead affirm that the university’s policing does not keep us safe from racist attacks, but rather acts as a tool to intimidate voices in solidarity with Palestine, as well as obstruct our reclamation of space on campus.

As a group, the RefRat is positioned explicitly to represent and support students, and not the university administration. Instead of choosing to align themselves with a rhetoric that puts Palestinian solidarity under general suspicion of anti-Semitism, we would have expected them to inform us transparently of the university’s surveillance strategy from the beginning.

Update: After we've called RefRat out on this on our Instagram, they scheduled a meeting with our members, in which they apologized and emphasized their role in advocating for students’ rights and freedom of speech.