Losing academic integrity in favor of whitewashing the Israeli army in the Occupied Territories

“On 6 March 2024, Barak Medina and Anna Peters published an article in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) with a question as their title: “Fighting Terror with Military Means?”… Why do we bother to write against another case of grave violation of basic academic standards? There are several reasons for making our rejection of Medina’s and Peter’s declared support for the Israeli army public.” By S.B. & A.M. The authors, who sign with initials for security reasons, are an Israeli and a German academics.

On 6 March 2024, Barak Medina and Anna Peters published an article in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) with a question as their title: “Fighting Terror with Military Means?”.

Who are the two authors of this article? Barak Medina holds the Landecker-Ferencz chair in the Study of Protection of Minorities and Vulnerable Groups at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. From 2009 to 2012, he was dean of the Faculty of Law (2009-2012) and rector of the university (2017-2022). Anne Peters is one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, professor at four universities in Germany, Switzerland, and the USA, and a former or current member of various important European legal institutions. She also was a member of the German legal team at the International Court of Justice in Den Haag defending Germany against Nicaragua’s accusation of complicity in Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

Readers of the FAZ piece who know an earlier article to which Anne Peters contributed as co-author might expect a “No” as an answer to the question raised in the headline of the FAZ article. In this other opinion piece on the blog le club des juristes, Peters and her French co-authors recognized the October 7, 2023 attack of the Qassem Brigades and their nine allied armed groups from other Palestinian factions as the result “of a long conflict, marked by grave violations of International Law” and the Israeli response as “massive”; back then they even asked for the application of international law for the Palestinian refugees.[1] This blog of 30 October 2023 stood out in the stream of hysteria, hatred, and complete amnesia regarding the long history of violence in this part of the Middle East at least since the British Mandate (1922–1948), after Great Britain and France had betrayed the leaders of the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1918.

However, the intervention of the other author of the FAZ article, Medina, leaves the informed reader in no doubt that “YES” is the answer to expect. Medina openly supports the continued oppressive anti-Palestinian project of Israeli governments and its various executioners, the army, the prison system, and the judicial system. As Israeli colleagues have shown for specific cases, Medina has no problems with violating basic academic standards in defence of this project.[2]

Then why do we bother to write against another case of grave violation of such standards? There are several reasons for making our rejection of Medina’s and Peter’s declared support for the Israeli army public.

First, both authors are presented in their bylines as academic experts in international law proposing to discuss the relevant legal questions of the assault of the Israeli government and its military extension, the army. With this expertise they try to impose rules on the readers of what is allowed to say and discuss, as did Jürgen Habermas and his adlati before Peters and Medina. Second, however, they do not fulfill their promise of discussing the relevant legal issues. They only raise a few of them and use them to whitewash the behaviour of the Israeli army in its war on Gaza. Third, both authors are part of the Max Planck Society or its Minerva network of cooperation with Israeli academia: Medina is the Academic Director of the Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Hebrew University; Peters, besides her position in the Max Planck Institute chairs its Academic Committee for the Minerva Foundation and the Max Planck Society. Their article was applauded by the official account of the president of the Max Planck Society, Patrick Cramer, on X as “an important international law assessment”, something that it is clearly not.[3]

On the contrary, an analysis of the FAZ article demonstrates that it represents a political statement that supports the Israeli army and its commanders rather than an academic assessment of the legality and legitimacy of a war. This lack of care in evaluating the merits of a publication further damages the reputation of the Max Planck Society among its scholarly communities as well as outside.

Established in 1964 as a subsidiary of the Max Planck Society and financed since then by more than 350 Million Euros by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the more than 20 Minerva Centres are at the heart of the cooperation of the Max Planck Society with Israeli academia.[4] The historical background of this cooperation, a wish to compensate for the very close symbiosis of the Max Planck Society’s predecessor organization, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, and numerous of its leading scientists and administrators with the Nazi Regime and their participation in the Holocaust, Euthanasia, and other crimes against humanity, is silenced on the webpages of the Minerva Foundation.[5] In 1997,[6] the society appointed a group of historians and historians of science to investigate this dark page of its predecessor as well as the lacklustre efforts until about 1960 to apologize at least to the victims among its employees and to compensate them to some degree.[7] On 25 October 2023, the Max Planck Society acknowledges this heritage on its website, but limited it exclusively to the Holocaust.[8]

Although acknowledging its heritage is important, the Max Planck Society does not reflect on what this heritage demands from the Society and its employees and in particular its scholars today: to stand up against crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of genocide, even if not yet formally confirmed by a court. Not only does its president unconditionally support Israel,[9] but more recently the Max Planck Society was accused of being involved in Israel’s occupation and AI surveillance research used in the war against Gaza.[10] Considering the institution’s history, such an accusation should be taken seriously.

Given such an institutional environment, an article in the FAZ, whitewashing the behaviour of the Israeli army in Gaza might be considered a minor act of complicity in the war. But within the context of the information war over the past year, we consider it essential to highlight the absence of academic integrity on the side of the article’s two authors in the hope that other academics wishing to exonerate the Israeli army from its responsibility for the incessant violation of international law in Gaza in this war (and in the West Bank and East Jerusalem for years) do so either by not pretending adherence to academic standards or do so by indeed following them and presenting controllable and verifiable evidence.

However, while Medina and Peters emphasize their academic competence, they fail to adhere to academic standards. Their qualifications and experience should have enabled them to ask all relevant legal questions and to weigh the problems, but they do not do it. In the face of the verdict of the thirteen judges of the International Court for Justice (ICJ) of 26 January 2024, Medina and Peters should have been willing and able to formulate an academically justified opinion on whether the ruling and the evidence it relied upon support the widely held opinion that the ICJ judges believed that the accusation of genocide was plausible. The plausibility statement in this ruling was heavily contested in its interpretation soon after its publication.[11] In April, the controversy reached the wider public with an open letter of 600 British lawyers and legal scholars and an interview given by Joan Donahue, the former president of the ICJ, to the BBC on 21 April, where she also briefly addressed the issue whether the Court had spoken of a “plausible genocide in Gaza”.[12] But the two academic experts of international law did not have to wait for the public debate of this controversial question. They most certainly will have been informed about it well in advance.

Acknowledging the controversial topic of genocide, however, would have required the authors to raise pertinent questions about the behaviour of significant parts of the Israeli army from its top brass down to the individual soldiers and about scholars, academic as well as judicial institutions that support such behaviour, and the commercial companies who collaborate with the Israeli army in a myriad of contexts. Yet Medina and Peters avoid this entirely.[13] In their article, the army, academia, and the military-industrial complex inside and outside of Israel are either absent or are portrayed as insignificant players in the disastrous inhumanity that unfolds since 8 October 2023. Instead, Peters and Medina claim, the Israeli army “needs support from outside (of Israel) and deserves recognition for their efforts not to damage the civilians [of Gaza] too much.”

Reducing a complex problem to some components can be a legitimate academic strategy to determine what truly matters. The chosen components need to be, however, adequate to the problem to be analysed and evaluated. To demand the reduction of the analysis of the legality and legitimacy of actors and actions in a war to its politicians, as well as restraint when criticizing the army of any wrongdoing despite the simple fact that it is the same army that commits the actual warfare is both inadequate and academically unsound.

Medina and Peters are of course well aware that such an approach cannot be upheld. Hence, they include the Israeli army in their discussion of the war, but not as the main actor who needs to be addressed, let alone as an actor who has committed atrocities and inhumane warfare since its very foundation.[14] It is Hamas whom they address first, thus following the narrative as constructed by Israel and its allies, among them the FAZ

Particularly questionable is their claim that the destruction of all hospitals in Gaza may be legitimate because Hamas allegedly used them for military purposes. Since this claim is contentious, academic authors should be especially careful to present evidence for their claim. If they do not possess solid evidence as seems to be the case for the hospitals in Gaza, normal academic standards demand phrasing the problem as a question and discussing the statement’s probability. Already in mid-November 2023 the Israeli army had attacked hospitals in Gaza 137 times, severely damaging many of them.[15] Additional evidence points to the killing of groups of patients and medics,[16] and burial of victims in shallow mass graves (the first news about them emerged in January 2024).[17]

All this evidence makes the veracity of Peters’ and Medina’s claim and hence the legality and legitimacy of those military acts highly doubtful. In addition, it has been proven time and again, both in former Israeli wars against Gaza and during this ongoing onslaught, that the Israeli army often denies responsibility or fabricates outright lies.[18] In addition, this war has been accompanied by the purposeful Israeli silencing of voices within Gaza, for example by preventing the entrance of international journalists into the Gaza Strip[19] and by what appears to be the intentional killing of local Gazan journalists.[20] Honest academic practice needs to acknowledge such issues instead of automatically accepting the Israeli army’s messaging at face value.

Moreover, as Leonard Rubenstein, distinguished professor of the Practice at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and director of the Program in Human Rights, Health and Conflict, wrote on 21 December 2023, even if the claims of the Israeli army would turn out to be true at some future date, “Israel was still responsible for minimizing harm to the wounded and sick in the facilities and medical staff, who all enjoy special protection under the [Geneva] Conventions. … [T]here is no indication in public statements or from on-site witnesses that the Israeli Defense Forces took the kinds of feasible steps needed to ameliorate the severe health crisis within the hospitals in the lead-up to or execution of the assault.”[21] This means the claim of Hamas’ “military usage of hospitals” does not provide the legitimacy suggested with some caution by Medina and Peters to the various attacks and massacres by the Israeli army. It also means that the two authors left out half of the legal issue that is relevant in this context and basically adopt the narrative of the Israeli army – whose aim is not to present the unvarnished truth but to justify its own actions to both international and domestic audiences.

The authors do not stop, however, at taking the narrative of Israeli politicians and army spokespeople at face value or presenting incomplete data. They also commit the more serious academic sin of outright falsification, when they write that “Israel’s war aims were to rebuff in a lasting manner Hamas’ continued attack”.[22]

This sentence not only reverses the position of the attacker and occupier with that of the refugees and defenders of the rights of the previous inhabitants of the land, it also hides the active participation of Israel’s political and military apparatuses in the political and military strengthening of Hamas as an opponent of the PLO and Fatah. The Israeli inhuman policy called by them “mowing the grass” was directed against military as well as non-violent forms of protest and resistance, pushing Hamas and many other Palestinian armed groups further and further to violence leading finally to their joint preparation and execution of the attacks on 7 October 2023. More specifically, the Israeli war aims were not merely this single and mildly formulated goal of “rebuffing” Hamas. As clearly stated by prime minister Netanyahu and various members of his government the goals were the relentless destruction of Hamas as a military and political force in Gaza, a religiously sanctioned revenge for the Palestinian prisonbreak, and a punishment of all Gazans, from children to the elderly, for the Palestinian insolence to answer the continuous terror of a much more powerful occupier with guerilla tactics copying their tormentors’ practices of  severe violations of international law. The strength of the elements of revenge, ethnic cleansing, and complete destruction were also made visible by Israeli officers and soldiers as well as civilians on social media.[23] It also became clear early on, that other aims of the brutal onslaught of the Israeli army against the people of Gaza and their entire living conditions were very personal goals of the prime minister and his extremist partners in the government. Limiting this complex set of goals to a single one and trivializing it to a mere “rebuff” is a serious, unjustifiable reductionism and hence a falsification.

Everyone watching the news, including Medina and Peters, could see the Israeli army operating in and against Gaza, not within and in defence of Israel. Plenty of written and visual evidence demonstrates the horrendous conditions of daily incessant heavy bombing and purposeful limitation of humanitarian aid, repeated ground offensives, sniper fire, massacres of families in so-called safe zones as well as in their homes and shelters such as hospitals, churches, or UNRWA schools and centres, as well as the dehumanization of Gazan men, women, and children. News about their brutal torture including gang-rape in the Israeli army’s Sde Teiman detention camp began to appear with force only in late March and early April 2024, but Ha’aretz had already pointed the finger to the camp on 18 December 2023 and reported about forms of torture and people dying there.[24] Medina most certainly knew not merely this article, but also that the Knesset had approved the fourth amendment of the Detention of Unlawful Combatants Law on 18 December 2023, transforming the base into a detention camp of the army and defining all detainees from Gaza as unlawful combatants, stripping them of their legal rights as prisoners of war.[25]

Carelessness as the one just mentioned is another feature of the article of Medina and Peters. In March 2024, the number of civilian victims registered by the Gazan ministry of health was already exorbitantly high. According to the UN, 31,184 civilians had been killed by Israel’s army at the beginning of the month.[26] In all likelihood, this number was too low since the thousands of unregistered victims (estimated at some 7,000 at the time) cannot be reliably counted, and those dying from diseases are counted as “indirect deaths” and therefore are not included in these numbers.[27] Nonetheless, the two academics argue that these numbers do not conclusively document that the actions of the Israeli army were “at least partially excessive,” nor do they discuss whether they violated and continue to violate the Geneva Conventions, i.e., are war crimes.

Therewith, they are in clear contradiction to findings by Human Rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or Oxfam, and many statements by the UN and the WHO and their various representatives, numerous countries around the globe, and legal as well as political voices in Israel and Germany and elsewhere, something they should have been fully aware of as scholars of Human Rights and International Law.[28] Academic decency demands at least mentioning the serious objections raised in other sources against a claim one wishes to defend. The fact that such objections are not mentioned is another indication that their piece is a political polemic rather than an academic intervention.

Even more surprisingly, both authors ignore statements by representatives of the Israeli government itself, provided already in December 2023, that 65% of all people killed in its war against Gaza are civilians. This percentage is most likely too low.[29] Evidence from within the Israeli army, namely, suggests that new rules were approved for the so-called “collateral damage” among the civilian population when trying to kill commanders and members of Hamas.[30] As Neve Gordon, professor of international law at Queens Mary University in London, reports, the numbers approved by these rules (20 civilian victims for one alleged junior Hamas fighter; 100 civilian victims for one killed senior commander) are a substantive increase of earlier permitted death rates when the different institutions of Israel’s armed forces executed Palestinians in extrajudicial killings.[31]

While ignoring a longer development that Gordon calls in July 2024 Israel’s effort “to rewrite the laws of war,” Medina and Peters emphasize at least that Israel, a.k.a. the Israeli army, is not allowed to damage Palestinian civilians intentionally and has to guarantee that the “collateral damages” which it causes are not “excessive”, i.e., that the number of killed or wounded Palestinian civilians is not “too high”. This reproduction of the official discourse of the Israeli army overlooks the best and most detailed account of the targeting policy of the Israeli army available since  November 2023, published in the Israeli-Palestinian online magazine +972,[32] as well as the evaluation of Avner Gvaryahu, the founder of the organization of Israeli war veterans Breaking the Silence,from 4 March 2024 in Foreign Affairs.[33] Both publications contradict the claims by the Israeli army, Medina, and Peters.

On 18 April 2024, the Independent Task Force on the Application of National Security Memorandum-20 to Israel delivered its findings of its investigation to the Biden Administration. A few days later, Noura Erakat, associate professor for law at Rutgers University and human rights attorney, and Josh Paul, a former State Department employee who resigned in protest against the US support of Israel’s war against Gaza on 17 October 2023, published a report about them. There they write that “(t)hough Israel has attributed the 34,000 Palestinian casualties, 70 percent of whom are women and children, to alleged human shielding by Hamas, we found that in 11 out of the 16 incidents we analyzed, Israel did not even publicly identify a military target or attempt to justify the strike. Of the remaining five incidents, Israel publicly named targets with verification in two incidents, but no precautionary warning was given and we assess the anticipated civilian harm was known and excessive.”[34]

Had Medina and Peters attempted to produce an even-handed analysis of the war, they would have found the same kind of information. As Erakat and Paul write, their voluntary Task Force has “combed through thousands of lines of data from credible nongovernmental organizations, ranging from human rights watchdogs to aid organizations working on the ground in Gaza.”[35] Overlooking or ignoring such publicly accessible evidence in favour of general statements, further suggests a lack of academic integrity.

In their article, Medina and Peters rhetorically limit the general applicability of international law to Israel’s war against Gaza with the caveat that one needs to consider its specific conditions. They use this demand to introduce Hamas as the continued aggressor, but they do not apply this rule to the Israeli army. They never mention the so-called “Hannibal directive”, also called the “Hannibal protocol”, a secret and highly contested document of the Israeli army that allows the prevention of the capture of Israeli soldiers by striking and even killing the captives with their captors.[36] Its application in the current war was already argued for with regard to the types and numbers of death cases on 7 October, especially those killed by the fire of Israeli soldiers in Apache helicopters and tanks against both cars driving towards Gaza and houses in some of the Kibbutzim.

Medina and Peters should have known that it had most likely been applied, because this supposition had elicited much attention in several Israeli and international news outlets and on social media already in the first months of the war.[37] For at least in Kibbutz Be’eri, the killing of Israeli citizens by the Israeli army was already confirmed by one Israeli witness in numerous interviews since 15 October 2023.[38] The story drew much attention in Israeli media. On 12 January 2024, the Israeli website Ynet reported in an article in Hebrew, which remained untranslated, about the Israeli army’s excessive killing of civilians, including Israelis and people working or having worked in Israel.[39] On 7 July 2024, the directive’s application was again confirmed by an investigative article in Ha’aretz.[40] Medina, if not also Peters, will have known about the directive’s existence and its contested legitimacy even within the Israeli army long before 7 October, because of the profound legal questions it has raised at latest since 2014,[41] none of which they address in their article.

Neither do they touch upon the cooperation between legal experts of the Israeli army and Tel Aviv University which redefines – against the Geneva Conventions – the lives of Israeli soldiers to be of higher value than that of Palestinian civilians.[42] They also should have observed the racist undertones of this kind of legal re-definitions of “the law of war”. These developments, that are actively promoted by the Israeli army, are of utmost importance to international humanitarian law and its future application. Instead, they declare in an authoritative voice that “de facto the last decision (for an attack against civil infrastructure) rests in the hands of the soldiers on site.” Indeed, thousands of videos and images posted by Israeli soldiers prove beyond doubt that many of them have no restraint when it comes to killing Palestinian civilians, destroying Palestinian property, defacing religious symbols and making fun of the entire situation, often by posing with the lingerie of Palestinian women who were forced out of their homes and are possibly dead.[43]

This claim by Medina and Peters serves to ascribe the main responsibility for the numerous crimes committed by the Israeli army to its lowest ranking actors.However, the Israeli army intentionally did not provide its rank and file with clear rules for engagement as was shown quite convincingly in July.[44] This refusal to declare the rules of open combat was practiced by the Israeli army since 1980, despite repeated demands by Israeli courts to publish them.[45] This suggests that in the current war again a policy of purposeful plausible deniability is pursued by army brass.

By now it is proven that the Israeli army has little to no restraint when it comes to Palestinian civilians. It accepts that its soldiers torture, rape, or kill them directly.[46] This has been confirmed by the UN special commission headed by Navanethem Pillay on 12 June 2024. Its report states among other results that “(i)n relation to Israeli military operations and attacks in Gaza, the Commission found that Israeli authorities are responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare, murder or wilful killing, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, forcible transfer, sexual violence, torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, arbitrary detention and outrages upon personal dignity.”[47] The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the occupied Territories B’Tselem called its recent report on the conditions prevailing not only in Sde Teiman, but all Israeli prisons for some 10,000 Palestinian inmates “Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps”.[48]

Even if Medina and Peters did not wish to believe that the self-proclaimed “most moral army in the world” could commit any such crimes, critical thinking and questioning are duties of an academic whatever her or his field of inquiry. But the two authors prefer to promote the denial of the possibility of Israeli war crimes and write that “there are signs that the army takes very seriously its obligation to uphold the law of the armed conflict.” These signs were almost non-existent at the time of their writing and have increased only incrementally in subsequent months. For example, already in early March Ha’aretz revealed that 27 Palestinians had died in the Israeli prison system, a number that has increased significantly since.[49] Despite the many cases of wanton looting and other war crimes (often uploaded by their perpetrators), until late May the Israel Military Advocate General opened only 70 investigations of supposed criminal offenses.[50] Refraining from upholding the law of armed conflict is clear also in earlier cases. For example, the Israeli NGO Yesh Din found out that between 2017 and 2021, less than 1 percent of accusations (11 out of 1,260, at least 409 cases included the killing of a Palestinian) against Israeli soldiers for harming Palestinians resulted in indictments, and fewer than those resulted in convictions.[51] This has long been the case: in 2014, only 3.5% (8 of 229) investigations of harm done to Palestinians led to any indictment, following a similar percentage (4.5% or 9 of 199) in the previous year.[52]

One wonders whether Medina and Peters regret having presented their claims about the “innocence” of the Israeli army since the information about the army’s use of the AI system Lavender for selecting killing targets among the Palestinian population of Gaza with an error rate of 10% has been published by the Israeli-Palestinian news outlet +972/Local Call on 3 April 2024.[53] +972 also alerted its readers to other electronic tools used by the Israeli army, such as the “Where’s Daddy?” system that tracks Palestinians and determines when they were united with their families at home in order to strike them there and not in military combat.[54] If they feel any such regret, they have not made it public through their writing and activity we are aware of.

The wish to lend their reputation as support to the Israeli army and its behaviour in Gaza does not speak in favour of the political and humanitarian values of Medina and Peters. It is nonetheless their right under the principle of academic freedom to express such an opinion. But this does not liberate them from their fundamental professional duties as academics should they wish to maintain their international reputation in their specific community and the academic world at large. They certainly lost our respect.

The gravest academic shortcoming of Medina’s and Peters’ unveiling of their political call for support of the Israeli army and its conduct in Gaza in the FAZ is the absence of central legal questions from their text that started out with the promise to evaluate precisely this aspect of Israel’s wholesale destruction of Gaza. One of the main questions omitted by them is the question of whether Israel as an occupying power has at all the right to self-defence. Politicians and other supporters of Israel usually use this as the main argument in support of Israel’s impunity.

Numerous legal scholars and human rights lawyers, however, often make the argument that an occupying power has no right to self-defence.[55] Various legal blogs as well as specialized academic articles, in contrast, submit that this is a complicated legal issue like so many others in international and national laws.[56] Hence, a word or two by the two experts of humanitarian law and the legal rights of minorities and vulnerable groups on this topic would have been fitting. Other legal issues ignored by Medina and Peters concern the right to life, the right to self-determination, the continued violation of the international human rights law by Israel’s siege of Gaza since 2006, or the incessant violation of § 43 of the 1907 Hague Convention relating to the obligations and duties of an occupying power to guarantee the safety of the people under occupation and to maintain the laws of the land.[57]

We are more than certain that we could find more such legal issues that are in dire need of discussion in regard to the conduct of the Israeli army in Gaza as well as the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and now also Lebanon. As high-profile legal scholars, Medina and Peters know all of these legal issues. It is unforgivable that they did not refer to them at least with the standard academic caveat that their discussion goes beyond the scope of their article, sacrificing their academic integrity to advance their political message.

In light of the war on Gaza, the increasingly violent, destructive attacks in the West Bank, and the repeated infractions of international norms and humanistic values over the past year, both of us would like to reiterate our commitment to basic human rights, including that all humans have a right to live under decent conditions, in personal safety, and with accessible education and health care.

S.B. & A.M.

The authors, who sign with initials for security reasons, are an Israeli and a German academics.


[1] https://www.leclubdesjuristes.com/opinion/conflit-au-proche-orient-rappels-a-la-loi-des-nations-1227/

[2] https://www.hujilawblog.com/single-post/on-barak-medina-s-review-of-maya-wind-s-towers-of-ivory-and-steel. For Medina’s review see https://www.hujilawblog.com/single-post/maya-wind-s-towers-of-manipulations

[3] https://x.com/mpgpresident/status/1765727823715582260

[4] https://www.minerva.mpg.de/about-us/minerva-stiftung/history

[5] https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/2008_1_2_hachtmann.pdf; https://www.doew.at/cms/download/b1c46/en_seidelman_max_planck_society.pdf; Wolfgang Schieder and Achim Trunk, eds. Adolf Butenandt und die Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft: Wissenschaft, Industrie und Politik im Dritten Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004.; https://brain.mpg.de/361371/max-planck-society-to-probe-third-reich-era-medical-science-thanks-to-the-institute-s-recent-activities-and-investigations; https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/KWG/Band1.htm.

[6] https://www.mpg.de/history/kws-under-national-socialism.

[7] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0964704X.2021.1959185#abstract; https://www.mpg.de/geschichte/kwg-im-nationalsozialismus; https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/KWG/projects.htm

[8] https://www.mpg.de/20998982/a-chapter-of-german-jewish-reconciliation-after-the-holocaust

[9] Here are some of the statements, published on various platforms either in the name of the president himself or the entire Max Planck Society and the Minerva Foundation, although the president knows very well that numerous employees, Ph D students, and visiting scholars did not agree with them and protested(see, for instance, https://freedomnews.org.uk/2023/12/17/dispute-within-max-planck-society-over-ties-to-israel/)  against the almost complete silencing of the history of the conflict and the silencing of Palestinian suffering:  https://x.com/mpgpresident/status/1712457974390661591; https://www.minerva.mpg.de/91046/statement-on-the-terror-attacks-against-israel; https://www.minerva.mpg.de/95829/Delegation-Trip-November-2023; https://www.forschung-und-lehre.de/management/max-planck-gesellschaft-trennt-sich-von-ghassan-hage-6228. In an interview with the German daily Tagesspiegel he even accused those who described Israel’s society as Apartheid, neocolonialism, and its current policy in Gaza as genocide “not to know what these terms signify”.  https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/chef-der-max-planck-gesellschaft-uber-israel-wissenschaft-kann-selbst-in-aussichtslosen-situationen-brucken-bauen-10893949.html. The president’s lack of respect for other opinions was made particularly clear in his decision to end the contract with the anthropologist Ghassan Hage and the various statements about Hage and the interaction of the MPG with him in the frame of the conflict about his solidarity with Palestinians and his criticism of Israeli politics. Hage contested the truth value of those claims. https://www.mpg.de/21510445/statement-ghassan-hage. For a comment on the accusation of antisemitism against Hage formulated in the right-wing press and adopted by Cramer see https://magazin.zenith.me/de/gesellschaft/forschung-deutschland-und-der-gaza-krieg.

[10] https://x.com/PhDs4Palestine/status/1817218346426814592; https://www.newarab.com/investigations/how-german-academia-contributes-surveillance-palestinians.

[11] https://www.ejiltalk.org/speaking-the-law-plausibly-the-international-court-of-justice-on-gaza/; https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/01/israel-must-comply-with-key-icj-ruling-ordering-it-do-all-in-its-power-to-prevent-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/; http://opiniojuris.org/2024/01/27/the-icjs-provisional-measures-order-in-the-south-africa-v-israel-case-unsurprising-politically-and-legally-significant/. For a summary of some the legal aspects see http://opiniojuris.org/2024/04/05/the-icjs-findings-on-plausible-genocide-in-gaza-and-its-implications-for-the-international-criminal-court/.

[12] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct5stw

[13] Medina published his opinion on the question of genocide in a blog post in July. This text, which deserves its own analysis, works with a number of deeply flawed presuppositions, insinuations, and simplifications that portray Israel as the continuous victim and Hamas the continuous aggressor, as well as with rhetorical strategies that diminish the death toll of the civilian population in Gaza in favor of an implied equality of the death toll on the Israeli side, imprecision regarding the provided numbers, and the trivialization of facts that contradict his opinions. https://www.hujilawblog.com/single-post/hamas-lawfare-the-plot-of-accusing-israel-in-genocide

[14] For the methods of Zionist migrants to Palestine and their support by the British Mandate administration see Thomas Suarez, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, London: Olive Branch Press, 2016.

[15] https://x.com/WHOoPt/status/1723765520699195612; https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/gaza-msf-doctors-killed-strike-al-awda-hospital; https://ecfr.eu/article/israel-hamas-and-the-laws-of-war/

[16] https://globalnews.ca/video/10256268/israel-gaza-palestinians-dig-mass-grave-inside-khan-younis-hospital-grounds; https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/remembering-our-colleagues-killed-gaza; https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/500-healthcare-workers-killed-during-israels-military-assault-gaza

[17] https://globalnews.ca/video/10256268/israel-gaza-palestinians-dig-mass-grave-inside-khan-younis-hospital-grounds; also the later https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68881325

[18] A high-profile lie early in the war was the presentation of al-Shifa hospital as the Hamas headquarters, which legitimized a raid on the hospital at the beginning of the war and served to normalize attacks on hospitals. Despite these major detailed claims, the actual evidence found to support them was underwhelming, as this Washington Post report found: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/21/al-shifa-hospital-gaza-hamas-israel/. For other cases such for example this report by Human Rights Watch and Oxfam: https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/19/israeli-forces-conduct-gaza, as well as the well-documented denial by Israeli army spokespersons about the deaths of 6- years old Ragab al-Hind’s and of the medics of the Palestinian ambulance sent to save her. https://www.albawaba.com/node/israel-denies-involvement-killing-hind-rajab-1554778; https://www.newarab.com/news/israel-army-didnt-contact-red-crescent-hind-rajab-killing; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/10/im-so-scared-please-come-hind-rajab-six-found-dead-in-gaza-12-days-after-cry-for-help; https://www.declassifieduk.org/found-dead-in-gaza-no-murdered-by-israel/; https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2024/hind-rajab-israel-gaza-killing-timeline/ .

[19] https://cpj.org/2024/07/media-organizations-urge-israel-to-open-access-to-gaza/

[20] https://cpj.org/2024/08/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-gaza-conflict/

[21] https://www.justsecurity.org/90789/israels-rewriting-of-the-law-of-war/#:~:text=Even%20if%20those%20claims%20are,special%20protection%20under%20the%20Conventions.

[22] See for a scathing critique of various utterances of Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and its Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi on the alleged, but repeatedly changing goals of the war at various moments since 7 October 2023: https://archive.ph/r8nP9.

[23] For some 100 soldiers, mostly officers, who call for the destruction of Gaza, ethnic cleansing and/or state that there are no innocent people in Gaza see this twitter thread based on their statements on social media: https://x.com/ytirawi/status/1794826941209702699

[24] https://archive.ph/20231218143512/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-18/ty-article/.premium/hundreds-of-gazans-arrested-during-war-held-blindfolded-and-handcuffed-at-israeli-base/0000018c-7ce6-de44-a9be-7df678fd0000#selection-549.0-549.86

[25] https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2024-01-24/israel-parliament-adopts-law-expanding-authority-to-detain-unlawful-combatants-during-wartime-or-significant-military-action/

[26] https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Gaza_casualties_info-graphic_12_March_2024.pdf The numbers, as understood then, included over 9,000 women and 13,000 children. 

[27] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext

[28] https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/middle-east/israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/report-israel-and-occupied-palestinian-territories/; https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/19/israeli-forces-conduct-gazahttps://gpil.jura.uni-bonn.de/2024/04/germany-takes-ostrich-approach-to-israels-violations-of-international-humanitarian-law-in-the-gaza-war/; https://ecfr.eu/article/israel-hamas-and-the-laws-of-war/

[29] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/05/middleeast/israel-hamas-military-civilian-ratio-killed-intl-hnk/index.html

[30] https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

[31] https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/7/15/israel-seeks-to-rewrite-the-laws-of-war . For comparison, various US officials claimed that in the hunt for both Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden the killing of up to 30 civilians was deemed acceptable. See: https://www.businessinsider.com/saddam-husseins-life-was-deemed-worth-29-civilian-lives-as-the-us-invaded-iraq-2015-3 ; https://www.defensedaily.com/pentagon-removed-non-combatant-casualty-cut-off-value-doctrine-2018/pentagon/

[32] https://qantara.de/en/article/972-editor-chief-ghousoon-bisharat-israeli-media-outlets-have-been-recruited-war-effort

[33] https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/myth-israels-moral-army.

[34] https://www.justsecurity.org/94980/task-force-national-security-memorandum-20/

[35] https://www.justsecurity.org/94980/task-force-national-security-memorandum-20/

[36] Hannibal Directive – Wikipedia

[37] https://www.makorrishon.co.il/news/684371/; https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1358197/a-dead-soldier-is-better-than-a-living-captive-israels-hannibal-directive.html; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkjRqAJYDUg; https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2024-01-08/ty-article-opinion/the-idf-must-investigate-the-kibbutz-beeri-tank-fire-incident-right-now/0000018c-e5b8-d765-ab9d-f5fd1f830000; https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/b1t67puft; https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/yokra13754368

[38] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cPeRSVgUpQ

[39] https://w.ynet.co.il/yediot/7-days/time-of-darkness

[40] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-07-07/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-ordered-hannibal-directive-on-october-7-to-prevent-hamas-taking-soldiers-captive/00000190-89a2-d776-a3b1-fdbe45520000

[41] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/world/middleeast/israeli-procedure-reignites-old-debate.html

[42] See Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, New York: Verso, 2024.

[43] Younis Tirawi collected and catalogued such videos for many months offering such a substantive base for evaluating the behavior and mindset of many soldiers in the Israeli army, whether living in Israel or having come from other countries to participate in the slaughter of the Gazan population. Younis Tirawi | يونس (@ytirawi) / X;

See also many of the videos in https://tiktokgenocide.com/military.

[44] See for example https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2024-03-31/ty-article-magazine/.premium/0000018e-9035-d9a4-a7bf-dc7d839e0000; https://www.mediaite.com/tv/just-shoot-every-man-in-fighting-age-israeli-journalist-reports-on-idf-comms-breakdown-causing-disaster-in-gaza/

[45] https://www.mekomit.co.il/ps/137173/; https://www.mekomit.co.il/%d7%94%d7%a6%d7%91%d7%90-%d7%a0%d7%aa%d7%a4%d7%a1-%d7%9b%d7%9e%d7%99-%d7%a9%d7%94%d7%a4%d7%a8-%d7%97%d7%95%d7%96%d7%94-%d7%91%d7%9e%d7%95%d7%91%d7%9f-%d7%94%d7%a2%d7%9e%d7%95%d7%a7-%d7%91%d7%99/

[46] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9drj14e0lo; https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/10/middleeast/israel-sde-teiman-detention-whistleblowers-intl-cmd/index.html; https://www.palestinechronicle.com/horrific-details-about-palestinian-detainees-in-naqab-revealed-cnn/; https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-phase-out-use-military-detention-camp-2024-06-05/; https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/israels-desert-torture-camp-faces-legal-challenge; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/31/israel-subjecting-palestinian-detainees-to-torture-and-abuse-un-report ;https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/7/one-samouni-brother-comes-home-in-gaza-recalls-months-of-israeli-torture;

[47] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/06/israeli-authorities-palestinian-armed-groups-are-responsible-war-crimes

[48] https://www.btselem.org/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell

[49] https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2024-03-07/ty-article/.premium/0000018e-1240-df16-a58e-1ffedcf70000

[50] https://www.kan.org.il/content/kan-news/defense/754177/; https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2024-06-03/ty-article/.premium/0000018f-dab1-db0d-a98f-def9186a0000

[51] https://www.mekomit.co.il/%d7%94%d7%a1%d7%99%d7%9b%d7%95%d7%99-%d7%9c%d7%9b%d7%aa%d7%91-%d7%90%d7%99%d7%a9%d7%95%d7%9d-%d7%a0%d7%92%d7%93-%d7%97%d7%99%d7%99%d7%9c-%d7%a9%d7%a4%d7%92%d7%a2-%d7%91%d7%a4%d7%9c%d7%a1%d7%98%d7%99/

[52] https://www.mekomit.co.il/%D7%A2%D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%92%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%99-%D7%97%D7%99%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%A8%D7%A7-%D7%A9%D7%AA%D7%99-%D7%97%D7%A7%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%AA/

[53] https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

[54] https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

[55] https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/27551; The United Nations Charter at 75: Between Force and Self-Defense — Part One (justsecurity.org).

[56] https://www.blogdip.org/analyses-et-opinions/palestine-occupation-en; https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2023/12/7-10-the-question-of-israels-right-to-self-defense-under-international-law/; https://www.ejiltalk.org/does-israel-have-the-right-to-self-defence-and-what-are-the-restrictions/; https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/27551; Christian J. Tams, Light  Treatment of a Complex Problem: The Law of Self-Defence in the Wall Case,  European Journal of International Law, 16.5 (2005): 963–978.

[57] https://internationallaw.blog/2024/02/09/has-israel-violated-international-human-rights-law-as-an-occupying-power/