Is there an architectural and urbanism agenda behind the policies of today’s right-wing populist, far-right, extreme-right and (neo‑)fascist forces? This is the central question informing the ‘Right-Wing Spaces’ research project, the results of which appear in a guest-curated issue of ARCH+ magazine titled ‘Rechte Räume: Bericht einer Europareise’ (Right-Wing Spaces: Report on a Journey Through Europe, 2019),[1] edited by the IGmA Institute for Principles of Modern Architecture (Design and Theory) at the University of Stuttgart, and in the book Rechte Räume published in German in 2020.[2] The answer to the question posed by the project is cautiously emphatic: “Architecture – or more precisely, architectural reconstruction – seems to have become a key medium of the authoritarian, völkisch, historically revisionist right.”[3]

Rechte Räume was brought out in autumn 2020 – six months, that is, after the start of the Covid pandemic. It was associated with a gateway for far-reaching changes to the political order in many countries whose governments were already latently or overtly authoritarian, and in more liberal societies – as stated in the introduction – the far right and extreme right hoped that Covid-19 would be the “ultimate catalyst to precipitate the downfall” of the political status quo.[4] Even if a different view might be taken of some of the material now, Covid delineated a pattern that persists to this day. For the people who, back in the period that began in 2020, interpreted ‘freedom’ as a lack of consideration for others (manifesting as a refusal to be vaccinated or even to wear a mask) and even fantasised – with encouragement from media platforms that spread disinformation – about a conspiracy run by Bill Gates or Davos tended to find themselves on the side of Putin when Russia launched its war of aggression against Ukraine or expressing understanding for Hamas after the events of 7 October 2023 (or 10/7). The implicit or explicit endorsement of a multipolar world – and thus also the acceptance or defence of an authoritarian Russia-Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas axis – occurs on both the right and the left and is usually bound together by antisemitism. This was already the connecting element of a left-right Querfront (akin to the ‘Third Position’) in the diagram of political positions printed in Rechte Räume [fig. 1] – a political movement that became even more evident after 10/7 – also in the work of Slavoj Žižek, whose theories gave rise to the diagram, and who, in his opening speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair, peddled the historically inaccurate line that Reinhard Heydrich was a closet Zionist.[5] In doing so, he dealt, as Detlef zum Winkel puts it, a “serious blow” to his own philosophy. We will be returning to this anti-Israeli Querfront which, in a particularly disturbing way, has also manifested itself in the field of architecture after 7 October 2023 as a virulent wave of implicit, and sometimes explicit, support for Hamas.

fig. 1: Diagram of political positions.

In this way, the narrow review of ‘Right-Wing Spaces’ is expanded into a more general critique of ‘authoritarian (meta‑)politics in architecture and urbanism’. This is also the subtitle of the rechteraeume.net video platform [fig. 2], which was developed together with Philipp Krüpe; it is based on documentary films of walks with a critical take on antisemitism and racism, which the IGmA ran in cooperation with various theatres, museums and other cultural institutions in Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Mannheim, Munich, Nuremberg, Frankfurt am Main and, most recently, Stuttgart in 2024.[6] The potential for discrimination – as should also become clear in what follows – is not confined to the right but also has its place on the left. In order to bring the two sides back into dialogue, people need to be constantly on the alert internally to guard against not only “structural racism”[7] but also ‘structural antisemitism’. What binds these two forms of observation together is the question of power. While racism is based on a clear ranking system between the poles of oppressor and oppressed, antisemitism is more complex in nature: here, discrimination is enacted as a paranoid construct in which the collective that is discriminated against – Jews, the Jewish state – is characterised as inferior and at the same time all-powerful.

fig. 2: Screenshot of rechteraeume.net video platform.

Erosion of Left-Wing Solidarity with Jews in a Jewish State: The Wave of Support for Hamas post 7 October

Even though the ‘Right-Wing Spaces’ research, which takes a critical view of both antisemitism and racism, has always been clear about the difficulties posed by fair-weather concepts like ‘multidirectional memory’, the impact that the events of 7 October 2023 have had on universities and exhibition settings has provoked a veritable crisis:[8] working relationships were reviewed and, in extreme cases, cooperations were ended. The Hamas attack on Israel that day – the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – has also brought down untold suffering on the heads of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip in the wake of the Israeli counterattack: a terrible price that Hamas factored into their cold-blooded calculations. Their strategy of escalation has prompted distressingly one-sided responses in some sections of the cultural milieu, as well as in the world of architecture. While empathy for the Palestinian victims has become prevalent around the world, there is remarkably little talk of the suffering experienced by the Israelis and foreigners who were murdered or abducted. On the first anniversary of the event, the IGmA therefore organised a conference titled ‘Antisemitism in the Cultural Field? A Conference on the Post-10/7 Situation in Architecture, Art, Film, Music, Theater, and Theory’ [fig. 3] at the University of Stuttgart.[9] One of the topics covered there was Israel-related antisemitism, manifesting in the field of planning and construction, represented in all its breadth at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Lesley Lokko. The show ran between May and November 2023, under the rubric The Laboratory of the Future. What was unquestionably its great merit – the fact that for the first time, Africa and the African diaspora were in the spotlight of the world’s most important architecture exhibition – should not distract from the fact that the show was also accompanied by a hitherto unprecedented normalisation of anti-Israeli agitation, presided over by a curator who is the daughter of a Jewish Scottish mother (and Ghanaian father). The Laboratory of the Future was for architecture what documenta fifteen was for the arts – only without a critical public [fig. 4]. The biennale finished on 26 November 2023 with a graffiti attack on the Israeli Pavilion [fig. 5].

fig. 3: IGmA conference on "Antisemitism in in the Cultural Field", October 2024.

figs. 4-5: Anti-Israel agitation during the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 included a graffiti attack on the Israeli pavilion.

 

“Occupied Palestine, on Both Sides of the Green Line”: The Case of Petti and Hilal (DAAR)

The exhibition’s bias is evident simply from the fact that the 2023 Golden Lion for best contribution to the main exhibition went to Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti of Decolonizing Architecture Art Research (DAAR). Based in Bethlehem and Stockholm, the Palestinian/Italian duo, who are supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, showed an installation called Ente di Decolonizzazione – Borgo Rizza. The work was conceived as a travelling exhibition, whose intention was to explore possibilities for the “critical reappropriation, reuse, and subversion of fascist colonial architecture and its modernist legacy”[10] – based on the Sicilian settlement of Borgo Rizza, which was built in 1940 by the Ente di Colonizzazione del Latifondo Siciliano (ECLS), the body responsible for colonising Sicily’s latifundia. Multipurpose items of furniture were set up in the Arsenale for the installation: they borrowed their form from the façade of a key building in the settlement and were used for screenings and debates before, during and after the Biennale. The view of Sicily from the point of view of DAAR is thus an emblematic means to grapple with the built heritage – and Italian colonialism, in particular – because a similar architectural design to that of Borgo Rizza was used by fascist urban planners at around the same time in Libya, Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia. The way a critical engagement with the legacy of Italian fascism – commendable in itself – is turned into an oversimplified ‘criticism of Israel’ in the interests of short-term political expediency is brought out in DAAR’s best-known publication, Architecture after Revolution, the book they authored together with Eyal Weizman in 2013, which examines how built legacies are dealt with in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In this publication, DAAR ponders the key question of how an architecture of decolonisation might actually look or, to be more precise, the extent to which relationships based on violence can be repurposed and thereby reproduced. Between the extremes of a decolonial frenzy of destruction and a usage that simply continues unchanged, they advance the idea of a “third way”, conceived as a well-thought-out act of repurposing. For inspiration here, Hilal and Petti look to the Fossoli POW camp in Carpi in northern Italy: during the Second World War, this was used as, among other things, a deportation camp for Jews; after the war it was taken over by a priest and converted into an orphanage, operating as such until 1952. Or they turn to the Staro Sajmište camp in Belgrade, which was originally built in 1936 as a fairground, then fell into Nazi hands and became a site of murder and imprisonment, before being transformed in the post-war period into a community centre by artists and Sinti and Roma.[11] Architecture after Revolution now puts Israel in the absurd line of tradition of Nazi Germany, speculating on the future of “Israeli colonial architecture” on the basis of a series of paper projects: “That is, reusing the evacuated structures of Israel’s domination in the same way as the occupiers did – the settlements as Palestinian suburbs and the military bases for Palestinian security needs – would mean reproducing their inherent alienation and violence: the settlement’s system of fences and surveillance technologies would inevitably enable their seamless transformation into gated communities for the Palestinian elite.”[12] Passages like the one in which the authors speak of “occupied Palestine, on both sides of the Green Line” make it clear that, in the context of “Israel’s domination”, DAAR does not just mean the West Bank, with its history of occupation dating back to 1967.[13] This is tantamount to a kind of delegitimisation of Israel, because – it should be remembered – the ‘Green Line’ is the ceasefire line drawn after the 1949 War of Independence, and those on both sides who regard it as ‘occupation’ see Israel’s right to exist, if it is to exist at all, as limited, at maximum, to the borders established in the UN partition plan of 1947.

At first sight, the DAAR projects seem to gravitate toward a gentle dovishness – such as the idea of planting olive trees in former Israeli watchtowers and repurposing them as aviaries. However, this should not be allowed to conceal the fact that the architects – as the title of their book telegraphs – hope for a revolution, and a violent one if necessary: “Popular uprising, armed resistance, or political negotiations . . . are, of course, integral and necessary parts of any radical political transformation.”[14] In line with this, Architecture after Revolution is infused with a calculated cultivation of Palestinian hatred: “Are you a one-, two-, or three-state solutionist? A partitionist? A federalist? . . . The only state we know is a state of conflict and struggle.”[15] DAAR suggests that Palestinians, as DPs, are simply not able to become native residents anywhere and must reconcile themselves to a status quo (as some 12 to 14 million German expellees managed to do after the Second World War) – no, they are to vegetate in refugee camps, if you please, and on the basis of some duplicitous political calculus at that: “What makes refugee life a potentially powerful agent of decolonization is that the ongoing desire for return is the strongest possible challenge to the sovereign power of the state.”[16] The authors regard their book as an “invitation to rethink the problem of political subjectivity not from the point of view of a Western conception of a liberal citizen but rather from the point of view of the displaced and extraterritorial refugee”.[17] The award of the Golden Lion to DAAR originated in the decision of a five-person international jury, presided over by the Italian architect, curator and former OMA partner Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, who, after 10/7, put himself and his office 2050.plus at the disposal of the ‘Portraits for Gaza’ campaign, which was critical of Israel. One member of the jury was Nora Akawi, a Palestinian professor of architecture at New York’s Cooper Union who had also signed the 2021 open letter. At Cooper (and elsewhere too), the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ran hot after 10/7. On 26 October 2023, Jewish students had to take shelter behind locked library doors to protect themselves from demonstrators yelling “Free Palestine”.[18] After 10/7, Akawi’s social media presence was conspicuous, featuring multiple posts in support of Hamas; she also celebrated the siege of the Museum of Modern Art in February 2024, in which pro-Palestinian activists unfurled an enormous banner in the great hall of the museum bearing the genocidal slogan ‘FREE PALESTINE – FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA’, which calls for the obliteration of a state with more than nine million people [Fig. 6].

fig. 6: Screenshot from Nora Akawi's Instagram account, February 2024.

“Mobile Parcel of Earth”: The Case of Léopold Lambert and The Funambulist[19]

The English-language architecture magazine The Funambulist, which operates out of Paris, also featured prominently at the 2023 Architecture Biennale – with co-financing from the Institut français – and had a plaque in the Arsenale presenting all the magazine’s issues and book titles. The Funambulist started life in 2010 as a blog produced by Léopold Lambert, a Frenchman born in 1985, and has been published as a bimonthly print magazine since 2015. Lambert is regarded as one of the most aggressive supporters of BDS in the world of international architecture. His 2016 article ‘On the Future of Palestine: Letter To My Liberal Friends’ provides a more detailed sense of his Middle East worldview, which could be described as a more explicit variant of DAAR.[20] He rejects a two-state solution because it would bring nothing other than a retroactive legitimisation of the ‘Nakba’ – the ‘catastrophe’ which led, with the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, to the expulsion of the Palestinians and displacement of their traditional way of life. He remains silent about the expulsion of 850,000 Jews from North Africa and all across the Islamic world, which took place in parallel with the Nakba.[21] The future of Palestine, according to Lambert, should once again be in the hands of the Palestinians themselves; there should be no more Israelis there in the future, only “Palestinian Jews”.[22] Although Lambert accuses his “liberal friends” of being unnecessarily peace-oriented, he states: “I’m not here to attack you here [sic], I ‘come in peace’.”

Four years earlier, Lambert had already made clear what lies behind his contradictory declaration of peace in connection with the Israel-Palestine conflict – and what this means on an everyday political and architectural level. In the Funambulist essay ‘Architectural Stockholm Syndrome’ (2012), he objects to the successful economic policies of Salam Fayyad, who was finance minister from 2002 to 2005 and then prime minister of the Palestinian Autonomous Territories from 2007 to 2013. With his reforms, Fayyad temporarily brought economic growth of 8.5 per cent to the West Bank, almost on par with China, but many Palestinians – and Hamas, in particular – considered him far too pro-US and pro-Israel. Lambert complains that under Fayyad’s aegis, a Palestinian bourgeoisie has emerged in the West Bank that dares to feel comfortable in more luxurious housing complexes modelled on Israeli settlements. Lambert misrepresents these preferences as an architectural “Stockholm syndrome”, i.e. the identification of an abductee with their captor. By contrast, he argues – in terms that are almost völkisch in their use of blood-and-soil language – in favour of a traditional architecture redolent of an assumed Palestinian national identity that would play a defensive part or even be used as a weapon in the “territorial struggle” in the West Bank.[23]

In another Lambert essay, also published in 2012, entitled ‘The Palestinian Archipelago: A Metaphorical Cartography of the Occupied Territories’, it becomes clear what kind of residents he envisages for the identitarian houses that are to be built: not citizens with “cars, phones, computers and comfortable houses” – that would be a dangerous social change towards Palestinian prosperity for the author – but a poor, angry mass of revolutionary, nomadic bodies that are ready to use violence and shouldn’t just swallow the sedative pill called comfort. For Palestinians, says Lambert, it’s about – and there you have it – becoming a “mobile parcel of earth” that the body itself limits. On 7 October, many of these “mobile parcels of earth” got through the barriers around the Gaza Strip, murdered almost 1,400 civilians and soldiers, injured 4,100 people, kidnapped over 210 others, and tortured children, parents and elderly people, killing them in front of rolling cameras. Lambert celebrated the start of these sadistic crimes with a Facebook post in which a photo of a fence broken through by diggers was commented on with the sentence, which was liked hundreds of times by the Funambulist community: “You’re beautiful like a smashed prison door” [fig. 7]. A few days later he proclaimed, again with a Facebook post, that “Palestine will be free from the River to the Sea”. After 10/7, on 30 November 2024, to be precise, Lambert even defended the taking of Israeli civilians as hostages with the following words: “There is surely something to be reflected upon around the idea that one can hardly think of a more effective way to make a settler fathom the colonial conditions Palestinians are living under than to literally force them to live under colonial siege” [fig. 8]. It is important to locate such sentences at the heart of the 2023 Architecture Biennale – not to do so would be to underestimate the seriousness of the situation: Lambert sits on the scientific advisory board of Lokko’s African Futures Institute, and many of the biennale’s contributors have been featured in The Funambulist. Never before can a European biennale have been staffed by so many supporters of BDS, all working towards a global isolation of Israel that is tantamount to a new ghettoisation of Jews. The cultural and historical significance of this happening in Venice of all places – and, incredibly, under a Jewish director of the biennale – has not yet been considered: the word ‘ghetto’ is derived from the Venetian island of the same name in the Sestiere di Cannaregio; this island was the self-contained area where the city’s Jewish population lived in segregation from the sixteenth century until the decree instituting it was countermanded in 1796 under Napoleon.

figs. 7-8: Screenshots from Léopold Lambert's Facebook account on 10/7 and shortly after.

“We Stand in Opposition”: The Call for Immediate Action

The Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, to which Israel responded on 27 October 2023 with a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, has led to major upheavals in almost every cultural milieu. This is evident, too, in the countless open letters and calls that have since been published. The art world set things in motion with an ‘Open Letter from the Art Community to Cultural Organisations’, published in the American art magazine Artforum on 19 October 2023, before the ground offensive had even begun. Without so much as one word criticising Hamas, more than 8,000 signatories expressed their “support” for “Palestinian liberation”, deploring “crimes against humanity that the Palestinian people are facing” and an “occupied and besieged Gaza strip” and demanding an “opening of Gaza’s crossings” – only twelve days, mind you, after hundreds of armed men descended upon Israelis from there. The letter, which was uncritically shared by other art portals like e-flux and Hyperallergic, was illustrated with an artwork by one of the signatories, New York-based artist Emily Jacir, the 2008 recipient of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s Hugo Boss Prize.[24] Shortly after 7 October, she had become known for posting a photo on social media of eighty-five-year-old Yaffa Adar – pictured with a distraught smile after being abducted by Hamas from her home in Kibbutz Nir Oz – and for adding the pernicious text: “This captured settler looks happy. I hope they feed her a good Palestinian dish” [fig. 9]. The letter was signed by many well-known artists, musicians and intellectuals – including Judith Butler, Jarvis Cocker, Brian Eno, Nan Goldin and Barbara Kruger, as well as Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman. David Velasco, editor-in-chief of Artforum since 2017 and another to sign the letter, was subsequently dismissed.

fig. 9: Screenshot from Emily Jacir's Instagram accunt shortly after 10/7.

The architecture world was not slow in going public with statements of this kind. The ‘Call for Immediate Action to Architecture and Planning Programs, Organizations, and Individuals to Stand Against the Destruction of Lives and Built Environments in Palestine, and to Protect Academic Freedom’ was published on 14 November 2023 by a group calling itself Architects and Planners Against Apartheid; others were to follow.[25] Again, not a word is said in it about the Hamas acts of terror; and one-sided solidarity is expressed for the Palestinian position. Israel is charged with both genocide (“deliberately inflicting conditions of life to bring about the destruction of a group in whole or in part”) and urbicide (“deliberate destruction of built environments”). The authors of the letter entirely fail to mention that Hamas, meanwhile, has been firing rockets at Israel on an ongoing basis since seizing power in the Gaza Strip in 2007, using its own civilian population as human shields. Instead, the complexities of the conflict have been simplified and cast as the supposed struggle of the oppressed (Palestinians) against the oppressor (Israel) and its alleged “colonial violence”. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is singled out as representative of the diverse ways in which the disciplines of architecture and urbanism are enmeshed in a general history of violence, in a bid to put a final end to unethical behaviour on the part of planners, with the roles of villains and saints clearly allocated: “The disciplines of architecture, planning, and historic preservation have been historically complicit in regimes of violence and oppression. It’s vital to take a clear ethical stance against the destruction of lives and built environments. We stand in opposition to colonialism, militarism, apartheid, racism, white supremacy, and genocide in Palestine and around the world.” Note that antisemitism as a form of discrimination – unrivalled in terms of its deadly effect – is not mentioned once in this list.

More than two thousand people from all over the world signed this appeal, including Léopold Lambert, Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman, as well as many other well-known figures. What is striking is the complete absence of the names of any teaching staff from German universities. Austrian signatories are likewise rather few and far between, although there is one notable exception that proves the rule: the letter is also signed by Bärbel Müller, head of the Institute of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Things are very different in the UK and especially in London, where at the time of mid- to late November 2023, the two most important architecture schools – the Architectural Association (AA) with ten signatures and The Bartlett with thirteen – turned out to be real hotspots for anti-Israeli sentiment. Signatories from the AA included Manijeh Verghese, head of public programmes, and curator Harriet Jennings, as well as José Alfredo Ramirez, co-head of the landscape and urbanism programme, and Nicholas Simcik Arese, chair of history and theory; and from The Bartlett, professors Murray Fraser, James O’Leary and Catalina Ortiz. The picture is even worse at Belgium’s KU Leuven, where eighteen people have affiliated themselves with the appeal, including such well-known professors as architectural theorist Hilde Heynen, philosopher Lieven De Cauter and architect and co-founder of Dogma, Martino Tattara. There is an even more serious situation at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where twenty-five people have signed – including professors Danielle N. Choi, Ana Maria Léon and Valentina Rozas-Krause. At the time of publication of this letter, conditions at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University in New York were the worst, with fifty-eight affiliations. The Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich, the sole European ‘leader’ in structural Israel hatred, ranked second worldwide with twenty-seven affiliations. Therefore, the following separate studies will be devoted to the latter two architecture schools, which will also consider developments since then.

 

“Zionist Killing Machine”: On the Situation at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich[26]

Although the vast majority of Jewish architects of the Zionist project in the early twentieth century were not trained in Zurich, but mainly in Germany and Austria – primarily in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Darmstadt, Dessau and Stuttgart[27] – ETH Zurich deserves credit for having academically researched their history with great thoroughness. This achievement is primarily attributable to architectural historian Ita Heinze-Greenberg, who conducted research at the university from 2012 onwards and, from 2016 until her retirement in 2020, also served as Adjunct Professor for the History of Modern Architecture under the Andreas Tönnesmann Chair at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta). Since her departure, which left a major gap in Zionism expertise, anti-Israel rhetoric has become part of the ‘radical chic’ of everyday university life, as was evident not least during a departmental conference in December 2023: it was accompanied by ‘Stop the Genocide’ calls displayed on digital screens. The Parity Group, an otherwise commendable diversity initiative, also promoted a radical, pro-Palestinian narrative with online statements that uttered no critical words about Hamas’s mass rapes and femicidal violence. On Instagram, it accused its own university of “silencing” “certain voices” – the ETH had banned a demonstration planned for 12 October 2023 on the university campus with slogans like ‘Intifada until victory’.[28] The group, which does not publicly disclose its members’ names, also accused Israel of “ongoing apartheid”. It was believed that this accusation adequately described a state that, even under its current right-wing government, offers the Arab-Muslim part of its population more freedom than any other Arab country and ranks 31st in The Economist magazine’s Democracy Index – whereas Hamas-financing countries appear at the bottom of the list: Qatar (117th place), Saudi Arabia (148th place), Iran (154th place).[29]

The anti-Israel rhetoric at the ETH Department of Architecture was fuelled by a vocal, pro-Palestinian milieu of teachers, both at the mid-level and professorial levels, on social media and in campus spaces. For example, Nadi Abusaada, a former postdoctoral fellow at the gta Institute, not only defamed the new Israeli National Library, recently completed by Herzog & de Meuron, on social media as a building “built on theft” [fig. 10], but also celebrated the crimes of 7 October as the beginning of an “open, liberated geography”, thus calling for the destruction of the beleaguered country [fig. 11]. He is deeply disappointed that only some ETH colleagues are willing to follow his exterminatory desire, as he expresses in a conversation available on YouTube.[30] Also worth mentioning is former gta employee Faiq Mari, who, as part of an ETH research project, established the online library Maktabat Sabil to make “knowledge on Palestine and its anti-colonial struggle” more accessible. The website,[31] which for a time had an ETH URL but was relocated after an online petition in early 2024,[32] contains digital copies of Arabic-language journals, including Al Hadaf – an outlet affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which is listed as a terrorist organisation by the EU and the US [fig. 12]. Furthermore, Mari’s dissertation, Masha' Of The Periphery, supervised by Philip Ursprung and published in 2024, delegitimises Israel as an “imperial outpost in the region”[33] and a “small, hostile European settler colony implanted within a huge Arab nation.”[34] Ethel Baraona Pohl, assistant to the Chair of Architecture and Care, also agitates against the existence of Israel by posting phrases like ‘From the River to the Sea’ or maps of a ‘free Palestine’ on social media [fig. 13]. As expected, all of the ETH employees mentioned signed the ‘Call for Immediate Action’. Two now former professors in the Department of Architecture who struggle with the fact of Israel’s existence also signed this letter: the Algerian-born Swiss architectural historian Samia Henni and the Dutch architect Anne Holtrop, who builds extensively in the Arab world, especially in Bahrain. While Holtrop, who now teaches in Mendrisio, quickly reveals his anti-Israeli bias with Instagram posts that describe Israel as an “evil country” [fig. 14] and propagate “It’s free Palestine til’ Palestine is free” [fig. 15], one must take a closer look at Henni, who, after a visiting professorship at ETH, has been teaching at McGill University in Montreal since autumn 2024.

figs. 10-11: Screenshots from Nadi Abusaada's Facebook account before and on 10/7.

Fig. 12: The online library Maktabat Sabil, developed by former ETH employee Faiq Mari.

Fig. 13: Screenshot from Ethel Baraona Pohl's Facebook account, December 2023.

Figs. 14: Screenshots from Anne Holtrop's Instagram account, December 2025.

Figs. 15: Screenshots from Anne Holtrop's Instagram account, December 2023.

In 2017, Samia Henni published her book Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria, published by gta Verlag at ETH Zurich [fig. 16]. It was based on her dissertation of the same name, also supervised by Philip Ursprung.[35] Although it focuses on the period of the Algerian War from 1954 to 1962, Henni unfolds the history of a violent nexus that stretches from National Socialism to the end of French colonial rule in Algeria. Her central figure is Maurice Papon. As a high-ranking Vichy official during World War II, he was responsible for the arrest and deportation of over 1,500 Jews, primarily to Auschwitz. After the war, he ruled for many years as colonial prefect of the province of Constantine in French Algeria. From 1958 onward, he served as police prefect in Paris, where, among other things, he was responsible for the ‘Paris Massacre’ of 200 peaceful Algerian demonstrators in 1961. Papon’s biography provides Henni with a framework for blending the Nazi regime of violence with French colonial rule: “[…] the ghosts of Vichy continued to live and serve in colonial Algeria, and echoes of the Vichy regime and the Second World War persisted in Algeria under French rule even after Papon’s departure from Constantine.”[36] Even the considerable differences between Nazi concentration camps and French ‘camps de regroupement’ are condensed into a kind of concentration camp continuum.[37] A more precise analysis of the respective camp realities and their objectives is omitted. She doesn’t even shy away from accusing the French ethnologist, Vichy resistance fighter and Ravensbrück concentration camp survivor Germaine Tillion of trivialising the French camps in Algeria.[38] Like Léopold Lambert, Henni doesn’t acknowledge the expulsion of 850,000 Jews from the predominantly Islamic region, which took place in parallel with the Algerian independence movement and the founding of Israel[39] – in 1948, 140,000 Jews still lived in Algeria alone; today, there are none.[40] Between the lines, Henni subsequently expatriates Arab Jews who have settled in North African territory for 2,000 years, long before the emergence of Islam, by categorically distinguishing between ‘Jews’ and ‘Algerians.’[41] At no point does she refer to ‘Arab Jews’ or ‘Algerian Jews’; rather, for her, ‘Jews’ are always the Other. In doing so, she reproduces the colonialist civic segregation with which France, with the Crémieux Decree of 1870, granted French citizenship to Jews but not to Muslims – and, in a sense, naturalises them. Unsurprisingly, Henni sees the Algerian liberation struggle as the blueprint for “anticolonial movements and struggles around the world”, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).[42] In 2020, while still an assistant professor at Cornell University in the United States, she attracted attention with anti-Israel events that led to expressions of discontent from many Jewish students and teachers.[43] Her guest, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, a radical Jewish anti-Zionist, gave an online lecture in which she showed the famous photograph of David Ben-Gurion at the proclamation of the state of Israel in 1948, but edited it to black out all the people – including Theodor Herzl’s face, which hangs over the scene [fig. 17]. She also blacked out other photos of Zionists from the 1930s and 1940s, as well as Israeli flags in the images. Her reasoning: “I can’t bear to look at them.”[44] A Cornell staff member interrupted the session with the brief, diplomatic comment that the topic being discussed was “sensitive” and would provoke “multiple viewpoints”, which they would also consider in future events. This led to a storm of indignation in the ruthless Israel-hating community, which reacts extremely sensitively to the slightest criticism of their positions, and over 1,000 outraged people came together in defence of Henni and Azoulay with an open letter in which the phrase “settler colony known as Israel” is used.[45] These included Lesley Lokko, Eyal Weizman and many ETH lecturers, such as Philip Ursprung and Laurent Stalder. Who published the letter? Léopold Lambert with The Funambulist. In 2024, Henni’s anti-Israel sentiment also became apparent when “she publicly adopted phrases like ‘Zionist killing machine’ [fig. 18] and co-signed – like Holtrop – the call for a boycott of the Israeli Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Art Biennale.”[46] Since the departure of Henni, Holtrop, Abusaada and Mari from ETH Zurich in 2024 and 2025, the situation there for people in solidarity with Israel has noticeably improved – not least as a result of discussions following the publication of an earlier version of these remarks in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Although this was followed not only by a – misleading – rebuttal from the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zurich,[47] but also by a legal dispute against the NZZ initiated by Henni and financed through a crowdfunding campaign,[48] the article could not be made to disappear because his statements proved to be incontrovertible in court.[49]

Fig. 16: Samia Henni's book Architecture of Counterrevolution, published in 2017.

Fig. 17: Ariella Aisha Azoulay's Cornell presentation from 2020 with blacked-out faces of the proclamation of the state of Israel.

Fig. 18: Samia Henni published phrases like “Zionist killing machine” in an Instagram post, March 2024.

 

“Dismantlement of Zionist Settler-Colonialism’: The Situation at Columbia University’s GSAPP[50]

While things have improved at ETH Zurich through a mix of internal discussions and journalistic observation, at Columbia University in New York this is only happening due to authoritarian pressure from the Trump administration, which has rightly identified the “Achilles heel of antisemitism” as a welcome opportunity to carry out a reactionary rollback that will unfortunately not help Jewish life in the long run. The fact that after 10/7, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) in New York developed into a mecca of institutionalised hatred of Israel in the field of architecture and urbanism is not due to a sudden antisemitic eruption, but rather has a long local history. The university was strongly influenced by Edward Said, the US American literary scholar of Palestinian origin, who taught at Columbia as an assistant professor from 1963 and as full professor of English literature and comparative literature from 1966 to 2003. Many of his best-known books were published during this time, including the postcolonial standard work Orientalism (1978) and The Question of Palestine (1979). In the latter, Said untruthfully portrays Zionism as a movement that was built on a “total denial of the Palestinian presence”.[51] He also trivialises the “Jewish Nakba”, i.e. the expulsion and expropriation of around 850,000 Jews of Mizrahi and Sephardic origin from Arab and Islamic countries after the founding of the state of Israel, turning it into a kind of voluntary relocation – and speaks of “Jews who left the Arab countries to come to Israel”.[52] Rashid Khalidi, another American with Palestinian roots, was also teaching at Columbia from 2003 until his retirement in 2024, as the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies. The BDS supporter rigorously rejects any compensation for Jewish refugees from Arab countries on the grounds that this would be an “insidious argument” – “because the advocates of Jewish refugees are not working to get those legitimate assets back but are in fact trying to cancel out the debt of Israel towards Palestinian refugees”.[53] In 2004, students produced the film Columbia Unbecoming, which critically examines the “anti-Semitic rantings” of three Columbia professors – Joseph Massad, George Saliba and Hamid Dabashi – all of whom teach in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures Department (MEALAC). In 2007, the then Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadineschād, even gave a hotly debated speech – at the invitation of Lee C. Bollinger, the then president of Columbia, who wanted to demonstrate “the sovereignty of democratic institutions” but succeeded, first and foremost, in normalising an antisemitic Holocaust denier with genocidal intentions.

Given this background, it is no surprise that the ‘Call for Immediate Action’ was signed by many Columbia architecture professors, including some well-known names such as architectural theorist Reinhold Martin and architectural historian Mabel O. Wilson, but also Farah Alkhoury, an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia. After 10/7, she posted statements on social media like “The fascist right wing can’t be defeated without the liberation of the Global South” or “Terrorism is the only area where white people do most of the work and get none of the credit”. With calls for a “dismantlement of Zionist settler-colonialism” the statement also calls for the elimination of the state of Israel. From 2023 to 2024, Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski, who are notable on social media for their particularly militant anti-Israel statements, were also teaching as adjunct assistant professors at the GSAPP. Signatories of the ‘Call for Immediate Action’, they see Israel as a synonym for “75 years of occupation” and an “openly genocidal racist state”, describe “peace” as a word used by white people, believe that the decoupling of racism and antisemitism is a “white supremacist move”, view Zionism as “the most regressive invention of the modern world” and adopt Malcolm X’s antisemitic statements about “Zionist dollarism” [fig. 19]. The architectural theory journal Avery Review, which is run by the GSAPP’s Office of Publications, is also fully in the hands of BDS-affiliated Israel haters, as became publicly known on 13 October, if not before with the publication of the open letter ‘Solidarity with Palestine’. Just six days after the massacre, the entire editorial team not only declared their support for the “Palestinian people in their struggle against Israeli occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing” but also spoke of “Israel’s 75-year-long settler colonial occupation”. This is about nothing less than questioning Israel’s right to exist. This is what they called for: “In addition to demanding a ceasefire from the international community and an end to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, we stand with a notion of peace that attends to the complete decolonization and end to the oppressive, settler colonial project in Palestine.” They state almost duplicitously: “To call for justice for Palestinians is to call for justice for Black, trans, feminist, Indigenous, and Jewish life.” Finally, mention should also be made of Hiba Bou Akar, associate professor at the GSAPP and director of the Post-Conflict Cities Lab – which was established in 2018 – who also signed the ‘Call for Immediate Action’. On 23 April 2024, she proudly noted on social media that she – like many other teachers – held her “last class of semester” in the “Gaza Solidarity Campus” on the grounds of Columbia University. This was evacuated by the police on 30 April and 1 May 2024 at the request of Columbia president Nemat ‘Minouche’ Shafik after antisemitic attacks and property damage occurred.[54] Since Donald Trump’s second term as US president, the university has been under immense pressure. His administration has cut grants to Columbia amounting to the equivalent of around $400 million, accusing it – not without reason – of having done too little to combat antisemitism and protect Jewish students. Even after an agreement with the government, the university must pay a $200 million fine for its failure. Meanwhile, Reinhold Martin, who also serves as president of the Columbia branch of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), has come under fire from Trumpist doxxing websites like Canary Mission, which accuse the architectural theorist of being close to BDS and of participating in a “pro-Hamas encampment at Columbia University”, where chants included “Disclose! Divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!” [fig. 20].[55]

Fig. 19: Screenshot from Cruz Garcia's and Nathalie Frankowski's Instagram account, March 2024.

Fig. 20: Screenshot from Canary Mission website, September 2025.

Just as the Columbia development as a whole did not come out of the blue, the GSAPP developments after 10/7 were not entirely unforeseeable. For example, in 2016, The Arab City: Architecture and Representation was published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, one of Columbia University’s distributed presses.[56] The book was edited by the then dean Amale Andraos together with Nora Akawi, a jury member of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, who is also radically anti-Israel. The publication is influenced not only by spectacular architectural and urban development projects in Arab states but also by the failed Arab Spring in 2011, the resulting civil war in Syria, and the founding and spread of the terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq. It speaks a lot about identity – about “Arab identity”, “Emirati identity”, “Qatari identity”, etc., and in some cases, it also attempts to deconstruct this search for identity – but that Jews were historically part of the Arab world and were largely expelled from it in around 1948 is suppressed in the texts. Israel appears (in an essay by Nasser Rabbat that is otherwise well worth reading) either as the victor of 1967, which plunged the Arab states into a general “mood of melancholy and wounded ego” or – in Akawi’s case – as an aggressor who occupies, destroys and rages in Gaza with remote-controlled Caterpillars. Following Said, Akawi warns against a “pact universities make with the state or with national identity” – this pact, she says, has pushed Arab universities in particular into the trap of an ‘Arabisation’ that is at once postcolonial and loyal to the government. But she seems unwilling to reflect on the fact that her hatred of Israel and wish to eliminate it is fuelled by precisely this Arab nationalism, from which she maintains a rhetorical distance. Any attempt to avoid portraying Israel in a one-sidedly negative light as a contemporary ‘perpetrator state par excellence’ is taboo in these university circles. Accordingly, only one Jewish Israeli is represented in this book: Eyal Weizman, the founder of Forensic Architecture and favourite researcher of the Israel-bashing international within the architecture and art world, was allowed to contribute a text on ‘The Nakba Day Killings’ of 2015, in which two Palestinian teenagers were shot dead by Israeli soldiers in Beitunia in the West Bank.

Consensual Shrinkage through Projections onto Israel

The 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale considered the comments on hate-fuelled antipathy for Israel worthy of an exhibition and an award, and these sentiments were disseminated in the academic world with the help of important educational institutions in the realm of architecture like Columbia University. It is evident from this that seventy-five years after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the country is facing the greatest existential threat in its history, to which many disciplines have contributed – including an architectural discourse dressed up as science. Israel’s territory, which, owing to its complex history – one that is primarily Jewish extending far back into pre-Muslim and pre-Christian times – is extraordinarily ill-suited to an essentialist discourse of decolonisation with clearly defined roles of coloniser and colonised, and is in danger of becoming a target onto which all the possible experiences of injustice that the world currently has to offer are projected. In the United States (Columbia University, etc.), Israel is being condemned for the kind of settler colonialism that has been practised for centuries – with support, irony of ironies, from a university named after Christopher Columbus. Researchers from Arab countries or Iraq and Iran are making one-sided accusations, charging Israel with a ‘Nakba’ that was contemporaneous with a ‘Jewish Nakba’ in their homelands. And in France (Léopold Lambert), Italy (Alessandro Petti), the Netherlands (Anne Holtrop) and Spain (Ethel Baraona Pohl) – there are many other examples that could be mentioned from the UK or Portugal – Israel is seen as the colonial state par excellence that should be eradicated, instead of contemplating the ‘decolonisation’, or demolition in plain language, of the city centres of Amsterdam, London, Paris and Rome, which were also financed, first and foremost, by colonialism. In countries with a particularly long and brutal history of colonialism, the university milieus, especially those that are left-wing and liberal, tend to recognise, as part of a discourse of decolonisation, the abysses their nations have fallen into historically but to baulk at the existential economic and political consequences of this – allowing them to treat Israel as a surrogate that is to be razed to the ground. Michael Brenner recently adverted to a pattern of hypocrisy when he said in an interview with Der Spiegel: “There would be more compelling arguments for returning New York to the Native Americans than for giving Israel back to the Arabs.”[57]

According to the historian and antisemitism researcher Günther Jikeli, the patterns of thought informing this development can be traced back to two intellectual movements. The first, as he explains in his essay ‘Ascheregen über den amerikanischen Eliteunis’ (Ashfall over American Elite Universities), is the emergence of Saidian postcolonialism, which has encouraged binary thinking that divides the world “into oppressors and oppressed, into privileged and disadvantaged”, with a stand needing to be made against the oppressors: “Against imperialism, the state, the system, in other words. But this doesn’t mean all states, all forms of imperialism, all patriarchal structures, at least not if they are outside Europe or North America.”[58] According to Jukeli, antisemitism is a “perfect mass of contradictions that is put in people’s hands”.[59] The second is the postcolonial theory of intersectionality, inspired by Angela Davis, which is correctly used to analyse multiple discrimination as it really exists, but which, in the process, sorts the world into white oppressors and non-white oppressed with a form of binary thinking that is even more pernicious. Jikeli recognises in the two movements revenant thought patterns that were already used – as Izabella Tabarovsky observed before him – in the “Soviet Union's anti-Zionist propaganda campaign between 1967 and around 1988”.[60] “The radical anti-Zionism developed during this period connected Israel with racism, settler colonialism, imperialism, fascism, Nazism and apartheid.”[61] Jikeli goes on to argue that the slogans that can be heard at anti-Israeli demonstrations today are “astonishingly similar to those from the past, except that in the West they are now being propagated at elite universities and in mass demonstrations and not just in left-wing splinter groups”.[62] For Jikeli, it is only a small step from postcolonial intersectionality’s refusal to systematically see Jews as possible victims of discrimination, even accusing them of being “privileged whites” – despite or perhaps because of the centuries of persecution they have suffered – to the tirade against “Jewish privileges”: “a prominent theme in Mein Kampf”.[63]

Long before 10/7, British Jewish comedian David Baddiel had devoted his book Jews Don’t Count (2021) to the ignorance of antisemitism that is structural in ‘progressive’ left-wing movements. According to Baddiel, “Jews are the only objects of racism who are imagined . . . as both low and high status. Jews are stereotyped, by the racists, in all the same ways that other minorities are – as lying, thieving, dirty, vile, stinking – but also as moneyed, privileged, powerful and secretly in control of the world.”[64] As Baddiel writes in consternation, “Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity’s secret masters. And it’s this racist mythology that’s in the air when the left pause before putting Jews into their sacred circle.”[65] What is becoming apparent is that just when an authoritarian takeover by the right (Trump, etc.) is in full swing, parts of the ‘global left’ have also turned into geopolitical supporters of an authoritarian axis involving Russia, Iran, Hamas and the Houthis. Democratic and (left-leaning) liberal-minded milieus now find themselves tragically caught between a rock and a hard place, a dilemma that is also articulated, most evidently, in the fields of art and architecture. The erosion of solidarity on the left with Jews living in a Jewish state (including the people there who are fighting against Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government), which has a long tradition but did not become globally visible in its full extent until after 10/7, comes at an extremely inauspicious time. For at the very moment when the requirement for a terrestrial politics is at its most urgent to tackle the impending climate catastrophe, an increasingly multipolar Earth is fragmenting and degenerating into a parcelling out of separate, self-contained identities, whereby for sections of the global population – including architectural milieus that approve of terrorism – a shrunken consensus can only be brought about by externalising perceived or actual problems and projecting them onto Israel.

Stephan Trüby, PhD, is Professor of Architecture and Cultural Theory and Director of the Institute for Principles of Modern Architecture (IGmA) at the University of Stuttgart. Previously, Trüby was Visiting Professor of Temporary Architecture at the State College of Design in Karlsruhe (2007–09), Head of the postgraduate study programme ‘Scenography/Spatial Design’ at Zurich University of the Arts (2009–14), a lecturer at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and Professor of Architecture and Cultural Theory at the Technical University of Munich (2014–18). His publications include Exit-Architecture. Design Between War and Peace (2008), The World of Madelon Vriesendorp (2008, with Shumon Basar), Germania, Venezia. Die deutschen Beiträge zur Architektur­biennale Venedig seit 1991 (2016, with Verena Hartbaum), Absolute Architekturbeginner: Essays 2004–2014 (2017), Geschichte des Korridors (2018) and Right-Wing Spaces. Political Essays (2020).