Over the past two years, conflicts around the topic of Israel/Palestine have occurred at the camp. In this context, we as an organisation have been accused both of having or acting from an “anti-deutsch”/Zionist position, as well as of having or acting from an antisemitic position.

As the camp organisation, we have made mistakes over the past two years. We see these mistakes, among other things, in relation to insufficient collective preparation for possible conflicts, a lack of clear solidarity with people in Palestine and parts of the Palestinian solidarity movement at the 2024 camp, as well as a lack of clear distancing from antisemitism and antisemitic incidents at the camp and a lack of active solidarity with Jewish people in our movement.

Without being able to go into every incident and every detail precisely, we want to apologise for the incidents in which people were hurt, for which we were not sufficiently prepared or to which we did not respond appropriately.

We also want to address here the decisive structural points which, in our assessment, made these mistakes possible.

We cannot address all the mistakes that happened at the camp, nor can we promise that we will not make any mistakes this year. But we want to try to learn from previous years, to better prevent discriminatory incidents and to prepare ourselves better for different situations. We also invite all camp participants to contribute to this.

Following the 2024 camp, a strong solidarity with people in Palestine and closer cooperation with groups from the Palestinian solidarity movement developed in 2025. Unfortunately, there was no comparable dynamic regarding solidarity with Jewish people. As a result, some Jewish people did not feel welcome or safe at the camp, and some even left the camp.

This lack of solidarity and lack of sensitivity towards antisemitism can be illustrated through two examples.

• Handling of posters showing Jewish hostages of Hamas by the group Honestly Concerned:
  At the camp in Frankfurt, people from the group Honestly Concerned put up posters with photos of Israeli hostages held by Hamas. The posters also contained one-sided descriptions of the Israel-Palestine conflict and German national flags (national flags of non-oppressed states are not welcome at the camp — see Red Lines).
  The way camp participants dealt with the posters varied. Some covered parts of the posters (such as the German national flags), others removed only the texts, while others added texts intended to contextualise the posters.
  Ultimately, however, the posters were repeatedly torn down by some camp participants. The posters and/or photos were then disposed of. This was hurtful for some people, especially Jewish people, and was perceived as disrespectful towards the hostages and murdered people shown in the photos.

• Throwing of paint bags:
  The conflicts with the group Honestly Concerned escalated when camp participants threw a bag of paint at a counter-protester from the group. Red paint was used, which consciously or unconsciously evokes associations with blood.
  Blood is repeatedly used in connection with various antisemitic narratives and conspiracy theories (the blood libel myth). Whether intentional or not, the paint-bag throwing therefore created antisemitic imagery.

• Lack of preparation:
  As the camp organisation, we failed to take sufficient measures to prevent an escalating atmosphere and, for example, to contact Jewish organisations on site early enough in order to exchange ideas about our approach to antisemitism and local Jewish history.
  The 2025 camp took place in a park that belonged to a Jewish family and was stolen from them by the Nazis in 1935. This was neither addressed nor did we consciously acknowledge the emotional significance of the park resulting from this history.

The conflicts around the posters and especially the paint-bag throwing were also strongly covered by the media, and the entire camp was perceived publicly as antisemitic. At that point, there was a lack of a clear opposing stance and solidarity with Jewish people coming from within the camp, both internally and publicly.

Above all, we regret that there was not enough emotional and political support for Jewish people at the camp and that there was not enough space for exchange and discussion about the incidents.

This was also due to the fact that there were no shared discussion spaces (camp plenaries) at the camp and existing information channels (camp ticker) were not sufficiently used to inform people and give them the opportunity to respond.

We see another problem in the concentration of responsibility and power within the camp organisation. Because there were no plenaries (and neither participants nor the people who organized the camp called any), it was impossible for the people responsible for public communication to bring a response from the camp to the public that was even approximately representative of the incidents. At the same time, access to the media through press work was held by the organisation. It also certainly played a role that people from the camp organisation, due to many tasks and overload, did not have the necessary capacity to initiate processes with the entire camp.

Based on these observations, we have made structural changes this year:
There will be plenaries again at the camp, and tasks at the camp, including public communication, will be carried out by all camp participants. We call this collectivisation process the Haufen concept: you can find more information about it here.

In order to find a collective approach to possible discriminatory and boundary-crossing incidents this year, in addition to an Awareness team for emotional support and a conflict moderation group, there will also be the possibility to advance processes and exchange ideas in so-called networks of affected people and anti-oppression reflection groups. These meetings can be independently created by all camp participants, who can come together with other interested people to discuss incidents, positions and other topics. The thoughts and suggestions from these groups can then be brought to the entire camp through meetings.

In addition, an anti-discrimination concept and the camp’s Red Lines will be communicated more clearly to all camp participants.

Overall, we wish all camp participants to engage with care and awareness, and to respond when boundaries are crossed, even if they are not personally affected.

The fact is that situations have occurred at the camp that were hurtful for people with different positions, experiences of marginalisation, political views and for different reasons. At this point, we want to acknowledge our responsibility as the camp organisation while also naming the open and collective character of the camp. The camp organisation cannot and does not want to control everything that happens at the camp.
Instead, we want to create a collective space at the camp where different positions within relatively broad red lines can be discussed and where all people take responsibility for what happens at the camp and how others experience it.
We want to create a space for discourse that is, in some places, broad enough to allow contradictory positions to exist within it.
Our goal is to strengthen common ground and promote the ability to tolerate contradictions.

At the same time, we naturally also have a certain foundation of values that frames the camp and the space we are creating, and which is necessary in order for us to work together. However, the SCC organisation is an open and therefore constantly changing and heterogeneous association of people with different backgrounds and positions, which means that this foundation of values is also not fixed in every detail. At the same time, the majority of people in the camp organisation are currently, alongside other privileges, socially shaped by white-Christian and German contexts. This means that many important experiences with different forms of discrimination and liberation struggles, and therefore also important perspectives, are missing. At the same time, the camp organisation is also a group in which people directly affected by these issues are represented. Despite these limitations, we would like to name some values and attitudes that we want to stand for:

We are clearly in solidarity with people in Palestine and support movements aimed at ending the genocide by Israel’s far-right government and the German government’s support for it. We want the camp to be able to contribute to those parts of these movements that are within the framework of our basic values and red lines. We want the camp to be a space for solidarity with Palestinians and we condemn the criminalisation of the Palestine solidarity mvement in Germany. For us, it is also clear that an end to the current genocide can only be a beginning and does not end the injustice of the long-lasting and repeatedly deadly occupation, displacement and discrimination that Palestinians are subjected to.

We also want to make clear that the camp is nevertheless not a safer space for Palestinian people or people in solidarity with Palestine. Among other things, the media at the last SCC equated Palestine solidarity protests per se with antisemitism and criminalised them. Among other things a person wearing a keffiyeh was attacked during the camp.

At the same time, we clearly stand against antisemitism and condemn the instrumentalisation of the genocide as a justification for hatred and antisemitism towards Jewish people. The majority of the camp organisation considers the IHRA definition (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) of antisemitism to be unsuitable and instead orientates itself more towards the JDA (Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism). At the same time, we also criticise that these declarations are part of nationalist structures and believe that therefore neither one nor the other provides a blueprint for a truly liberated world. We also recognise that there is antisemitism in parts of the Palestine solidarity movement. We condemn the continuity and current increase of antisemitic violence and the lack of solidarity with Jewish people in Germany and in many other places. We also condemn the massacre committed by Hamas and other groups on 7 October 2023. For us, this violence is not a form of legitimate resistance.

We invite people to come together, to learn from one another, to engage in debate and disagreement, and we particularly invite white-Christian participants, participants with other privileges and participants who are not directly affected (which can also include non-white people) to listen, try to build bridges and discuss, rather than prematurely ending conversations with slogans and accusations of structural violence. We are aware that this topic is very emotional and personal for many people, and therefore we want a careful discourse that does not simplify or generalise, but instead does justice to the complexity of the situation, does not hide behind academic language, and recognises all human lives as equally valuable.

The SCC should be a space for learning that is open to people with different backgrounds and different levels of knowledge. As a result, it will unfortunately probably not be possible to completely avoid boundary violations during discussions about the topic of Israel/Palestine, which can be hurtful — especially for people who are personally affected and exhausted by the constant confrontation with violent realities. Therefore, we ask everyone to pay attention to their own boundaries and those of others. We hope that this year we can all navigate larger conflict situations between individuals and/or groups at the camp better together. We therefore invite all participants to independently pay attention at the camp to ensuring that discriminatory or hurtful behaviour does not have space to take place in the first place. If you experience overwhelming situations, you can contact the Awareness team. The Awareness team can provide emotional support and help you find ways of dealing with the situations you have experienced, but it is not responsible for conflict mediation or solutions at the camp-wide level.

If conflicts arise, we would like the parties involved in the conflict to try to find a solution among themselves. For support during conflict discussions, you can contact the mediation team, which will try to support you within the limits of its available capacities. The camp organisation is not the appropriate point of contact for such situations. We neither have the necessary capacities nor the expertise to mediate in conflict situations, nor do we see our role as being to make authoritarian decisions. We will only intervene if the red lines that we have defined are crossed.

We hold an anti-authoritarian fundamental position. We oppose all forms of oppression and violent hierarchies. We want to stand in solidarity with resistance from below and with left-wing and/or anarchist emancipatory forces in Palestine, Israel and everywhere else. Because we feel that in the past our anti-authoritarian position has been misunderstood as a lack of solidarity with different political struggles, even though we are indeed in solidarity with them, we have formulated our current position on two specific topics: national flags and authoritarian behaviour at the camp.