The first day of a new semester can be a thrill. I have adrenaline pumping through my entire body and, despite knowing better, I still consume more coffee than I should while my fingers shake visibly from all the nervous energy.
This past semester brought a new set of anxieties. I was, for the second time in my six years of teaching, bringing a class on Palestinian Literature to the University of Vienna. But this time, it’s in a context where the tensions after October 7 are noticeably high. The University of Vienna is, of course, Theodor Herzl’s alma mater and an institution with a troubling history under fascism, but also, more recently, it’s a place where few dare to sound out the word genocide while harrowing images of one in Gaza are beamed into our phones every minute.
By any reasonable metric, the lead-up to this semester was far from normal. The university had already carried out a series of high– and low-profile cancellations and violations of academic freedom. These actions put the University of Vienna on watch from plenty of scholars and observers around the world, but hardly any staff from within the university seemed to notice at all, let alone care.
The nerves I felt on the first day didn’t come from the usual worry that my students might not like me. I was worried instead about proving everyone right who told me I was neither prepared for, nor aware of, the consequences of teaching Palestinian literature in a context that lives with the traumatic legacy of antisemitism. Putting aside the built-in implication that I’m inept at my job and derelict in my engagement with history (a loaded accusation that I’m quite used to), there’s also the uglier assumption that writing or teaching on Palestine automatically entails anti-Jewish racism. I guess it’s easy to assume that when you regard Palestinian life as intrinsically hateful.
Throughout this year, I’ve had to contend with a specific form of ostracism, arising from what Steve Salaita calls the “customs of obedience” in academe. It’s not one where I fear losing my job (for now). It’s one that translates to a profound alienation that makes the day-to-day isolation even more demoralizing. For my part, I found myself in the awkward position of being looked upon with a new brand of suspicion among colleagues with whom I’ve spent the last six years acting as an otherwise decent co-worker: available for committees, generous with my time, and only occasionally given to complaining.
The system of labor discipline looks (only slightly) different in the context of an ostensibly public university. This is a context where the regulatory apparatus is less about courting support from a donor class and more about neutralizing tensions among students and staff, lest they get any ideas in their heads about how universities should actually operate (God forbid they’re held democratically accountable). But the same culture of tone-policing and flattering bourgeois sensibilities is alive and thriving.
For those of us who write about or teach on Palestine, our teaching and scholarship are often considered “too political” (and, therefore, intellectually unrigorous). For whatever pedigrees I achieve, I’m still marked as someone who doesn’t conform to the expectations of professional decorum or respectability.
My encounter with the students, however, tells a different story altogether. They were nothing close to how those who occupy the citadels of government, authority, and administrative power see them—castigating them as a rabble of thoughtless, politically immature bandwagoners. Perhaps when you already arrive with deep-seated contempt and hostility toward students, that’s how they might appear to you.
The students who attended my class, by contrast, were among the most thoughtful, eager, and perceptive minds I’ve come across in years. They treated the topic with intellectual seriousness, avoiding the clichés and platitudes that distract them from analyzing and understanding history, power, war, and occupation. Their commitment to Palestine was rooted in a genuine engagement with history and an abiding interest in critical thought. I had the pleasure of teaching the works of Hala Alyan, Susan Abulhawa, Mohammed El-Kurd, and Atef Abu Shaif, among others, and they did most of the heavy lifting in offering insight and clarity.
Students in the Struggle for Palestine
Before this year, no one before had ever seen this level of effervescent activism around Palestine at the University of Vienna. This fact alone is a disgrace; that it has taken a mass slaughter for there to even be an active student organization for Palestine is nothing to be proud of, knowing that the Palestine tragedy did not begin in October 2023. The first three months of 2023 alone were among the deadliest in the West Bank since the Second Intifada.
Nevertheless, the students learned quickly that their university leadership was never going to provide them a chance to engage with Palestine’s history, to understand the martyrdom of Gaza, and the broad political structure that enables their ethnic cleansing. Even faculty-led efforts to offer teach-ins, workshops, and lecture series (some of which I was involved in) were met with egregious forms of censorship. As a result, some of the most intrepid and passionate people I’ve ever known took matters into their own hands, creating a new space for Palestinian solidarity where it never existed before.
This dynamic is emblematic of what has always undergirded political, discursive struggle, especially when it happens at a university, which is why administrators and overseers are panicking. Universities have historically been sites of political struggle. Students are challenging the status quo, putting the Zionist consensus on trial, and rejecting the university’s campaign to obscure its own complicity in propping up apartheid.
The encampment on our campus, inspired by those in the United States, United Kingdom, and around the world, lasted only two days. The Vienna police summarily (and violently) evicted them on the spurious basis that they were promoting terrorism.
To say that these accusations and other smears were not only false, but also offensive, is far too obvious a statement to make. The short two hours that I spent at the Students for the Palestine Cause encampment—where I had the honor of leading a teach-in on the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and its attending literary context—taught me something special. I discovered the electrifying power of solidarity, generated from those whose commitment to Palestinian liberation extends from the humanistic concern for everyone, no matter who they are. The integrity and camaraderie I witnessed put the university’s purported concerns for safety to shame. The students wanted safety and care; it was instead the university and the powers that be who sought to discipline them through terror and intimidation.
Absolution for the Crimes of their Ancestors
The immediate response from colleagues when I mention my Palestinian Literature course is to ask how I handle antisemitism. After all, you can’t walk down any street in Vienna for more than five minutes without coming across reminders of the Nazi Anschluss and the horrors of fascist deportations. The anxiety and impact of antisemitism permeate the entire cityscape.
This ambient sense of guilt fits into the larger structure of memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) throughout Germany and Austria. Historian Samuel Clowes Huneke documents the historic process whereby this Erinnerungskultur in Germany eventually “calcified,” producing “a set of rituals progressively hollowed of the critical edge they were originally intended to wield.” Huneke stresses how this was especially the case when it came to Israel, where the “country’s recognition of its historic responsibility to prevent genocide slowly hardened into Merkel’s 2008 formula that ‘the security of Israel’ is the German ‘Staatsräson,’ the reason for the state of Germany to exist.”
In Austria, this commitment to memory culture contains similar traits, including the memorials, exhibitions, and Stolpersteine that are installed throughout major cities. As my colleague Birgit Englert points out, only one year after Germany passed anti-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions resolutions, Austria followed suit, producing the very same instruments for undermining solidarity with and public discussion of Palestine. Unsurprisingly, this has led to an environment where scholars who teach about and research Palestine are pushed to the margins.
The differences are, however, striking, given Austria’s rather late arrival at acknowledging its shared responsibility for the Holocaust. Once positioned as “the first victim of Nazi aggression,” Austria has since proceeded to recognize its distinct role in enabling that aggression. This shift crystallized after the so-called Waldheim Affair, in which then-candidate for president in 1986, Kurt Waldheim, was exposed for having been a Wehrmacht officer during the Second World War. Then, in the early 1990s, Chancellor Franz Vranitzky acknowledged Austria’s part in the war, once in front of Parliament and once again in Jerusalem. After this moment, as Noga Sagi notes, “the new official Austrian narrative of co-responsibility was warmly welcomed by Israel.” The bilateral, diplomatic relations between Austria and Israel required that Austria acknowledge its past and help secure “the memory discourse between the two countries.”
The belated acknowledgment of its Nazi past and its sought-after diplomatic alliance with Israel turbo-charged its investment in and panic around memory culture. As a result, Austrian society took on the incoherent image of a place that at once seeks to emulate Germany, while also simultaneously distinguishing itself through its supposedly “neutral” (read: opportunistic) stance in times of war. This facile (and ultimately unconvincing) impartiality becomes a miniature farce of itself when the University of Vienna justifies the censorship of its own researchers and staff.
No serious thinking person believes that this traumatic history and memory of antisemitism should deter us from showing concern for the Palestinian struggle. But we’re not talking about serious thinkers. We’re talking about those who care more about seeking absolution for the crimes of their ancestors than they do about recognizing a large-scale genocide as it’s happening at this very moment. We should refuse to offer them absolution on this basis, just as we should refuse to accept that the people of Gaza should die for them to achieve it. The breathless support for Israel’s scorched-earth campaign has shattered any image the Austrian establishment has conjured of peace or justice, and permanently damaged any claim to atonement for a genocidal past.
Furthermore, the university and the wider ecosystem of Zionist apologists routinely compromise the safety of Jewish activists who put their bodies and lives on the line for the Palestinian cause. They dismiss the Jewish anti-Zionists who fervently reject the effort to instrumentalize their pain, memory, and identity in support of a genocide. If we’re looking for a better way to assuage our guilt and correct past crimes, then we needn’t look any further than the materialist struggle against class rule and the forces of dispossession—an insight we inherit from one of the greatest Palestinian novelists, Ghassan Kanafani.
At the same time, the fact that this context once produced Herzl and still by and large embraces the modern Zionist tradition tells us something even more sinister than the pathological need for guilt-alleviation. It tells us that Aimé Césaire was more correct than he could have known: that the collective shame felt among Europeans doesn’t stem from the fact that the Holocaust happened; it’s that, to them, its cruelty was supposed to be reserved for the wretched beyond their borders, not brought home to their own backyard. Right now, the vicious tools of genocidal racism, perfected since before the Age of Empire, are being put to use against the already-besieged population of Gaza with the permission and complicity of the European establishment. Here in Austria, many are happy to act and speak in the service of an explicitly imperial project, so long as they can ignore its horrific effects from a distance.
Lessons Learned
I worry for students who aren’t accustomed to these conditions. While I’m used to people rolling their eyes at me, the students probably feel insane. They spend only ninety minutes per week reading about Palestine and the rest of their week hearing from politicians, journalists, and other teachers that everything I’m teaching them is actually “too complicated and too complex” to have an opinion on. This pattern of nuance-mongering and placatory “both-sides”-isms is deployed to the shameful discredit of universities everywhere, but especially in the German-speaking world.
If you listen to the university’s leadership, you’d hear them express concern that a lecture or event on Palestine might create a hostile educational environment. I’ve learned to interpret this canard as a fear that students might actually demand better from their institution and its instructors. It’s a fear that students could be led to believe that those entrusted with knowledge-production should also model moral courage and critical thinking. But lest they get any ideas of that sort in their heads, the university ensures instead that an environment of distrust and paranoia keeps them expecting and hoping for less and less.