Students at Berlin’s UdK University display palms stained with red to symbolize blood during a Nov. 13 pro-Hamas protest. Photo: Screenshot

German students who engage in antisemitic agitation could face expulsion from their universities, the country’s education minister said on Thursday as she addressed concerns voiced by the Jewish student union.

“What before Oct. 7 was perhaps only thought and not lived is now very public — also in the universities,” Federal Education Minister Bettina Stark-Watzinger told the Augsburger Allgemeine news outlet, referring to the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel in which more than 1,200 people were murdered and over 200 kidnapped, triggering a heavy Israeli military response.

Germany’s Jewish student union, the JSUD, has pointed to a handful of high profile incidents that underline the growing insecurity faced by Jewish students. Earlier this month, police were forced to clear a lecture hall at the Free University of Berlin occupied by pro-Hamas activists, while at the end of November, dozens of students at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) staged a protest that involved them sitting around a table with their palms facing outwards painted in red ink to symbolize blood. While the gesture was apparently intended to condemn the German government’s support for Israel’s defensive military operation, several observers noted a striking similarity with the notorious lynching of two IDF reservists, Vadim Nurzhitz and Yosef Avrahami, in the West Bank city of Ramallah in Oct. 2000, when one of their killers appeared at the window of the police station delightedly displaying his blood-stained palms to the appreciative crowd gathered outside following the murder of the two Israelis.

In a Dec. 15 interview with the NZZ news outlet, Hanna Veiler, the JSUD’s president, warned that there had been “a veritable explosion of antisemitic ideas” in the weeks since the Hamas atrocities. She criticized the management of the universities for “reacting far too slowly.” Students convicted of antisemitism should be deregistered, she asserted, along with a ban on “antisemitic, anti-democratic, and extremist” groups.

In her interview on Thursday, Stark-Watzinger seemingly expressed agreement with these demands, saying that universities should not shy away from deregistering those students involved in “particularly difficult cases.” She argued that while universities should be centers of open debate, antisemitism could not be considered as a legitimate opinion but as an “expression of hatred and conspiracy theories.”

Nearly 5,000 antisemitic incidents have been reported in Germany since the Hamas atrocities, while earlier this month, German police arrested four men allegedly dispatched by Hamas to carry out terrorist attacks on Jewish targets in Europe.