ETH Zurich censors a talk on Palestine by Léopold Lambert (Sign the Letter)

THE FACTS ///

On Monday April 8, 2024, the executive board of ETH Zurich issued a statement announcing that they were canceling the lecture Léopold Lambert had been invited by ETH students to give at the Department of Architecture. The text states “after being in dialogue with the speaker it remained unclear to the Executive Board whether he was willing to distance himself credibly and explicitly enough from violence. This would not be in line with the values of ETH Zurich and the university’s statement in favour of all people in the Middle East conflict.”

The talk, scheduled for Wednesday April 10th, was entitled Weaponized Architecture: Settler Colonialism and the Built Environment in Palestine, and had been scheduled since mid-January, as part of the student-led seminar Unmasking Space. The cancellation comes after ETH’s executive board gave in to the pressure of local right-wing newspapers NZZ and 20 Minuten, which had recently published libelous articles about Léopold and his work.

In the days preceding the censorship decision, Léopold had exchanged a couple of emails with the university Rector, who demanded him to publicly “subscribe” to a statement made by ETH published on October 27, 2023, that claims its “solidarity with people in the Middle East” [sic]. This statement—whose tone is faithful to the legendary (colonial) Swiss so-called “neutrality”—designates with specificity the Israeli victims (and their families) of the October 7, 2023, attacks by militants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, while erasing Palestinians and Palestine in a wordy disgraceful abstraction. This is what Léopold answered to this demand on April 5:

I’m afraid that, like me, you will have to remain in a position of discomfort then, because I don’t see how I could possibly position myself (whether positively or negatively) with regards to a statement issued by the ETH, that therefore only engages the ETH’s responsibility (or rather de-responsibilization, as it is written in the form of a disclaimer, with this generic and colonial designation of Palestine as “the Middle East”).

I cannot help but notice that there is no statement following up on this and expressing solidarity with the two millions of Palestinians in Gaza who have been relentlessly bombed and starved for the past six months, but admittedly, it’s ETH’s prerogative not to issue any.

Prerogative is an important term in this conversation. It was the student’s prerogative to invite me, and I’m grateful they did (and again, I’m quite shocked by the level of stress they have to put up with). It is most definitely the ETH’s prerogative to ban the lecture from happening, but it is not in its prerogative to demand from me that I respond to articles published in newspapers that I could legitimately sue for slander if I had this kind of time. Banning it would however mean that you’ll have to accept what this means: the dissolution of the contract with the students that they are given the agency of conceiving their own curriculum (which I find admirable), and the recognition that ETH is somehow in agreement with these articles, which I will consider as unacceptable (which is my own prerogative). If the ETH truly values its relationship with its students more than its relationship with NZZ and 20 Minuten, the decision should not be hard to take.

The response to this message from the ETH Rector was sent on April 8 to announce the cancelation of the lecture.

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SIGN THE LETTER ///

Dear members of the ETH executive board,

We co-signatories of this letter, write to you to signify our outrage learning that the lecture Léopold Lambert was invited to give at the ETH Zurich has been censored. We observe the evident relationship between libelous articles and your censorship, and are appalled at the legitimacy you thus give to defamations about Léopold and his work by giving in to this tabloid-like pressure. We also express our deep concern, understanding this censorship in the broader context of silencing of scholars, researchers, and intellectuals whose work allows an understanding of the settler colonial violence at work in Palestine, or who, more generally, have publicly expressed their solidarity with the Palestinian people.

We do not demand anything from you. You and your prudent lawyers are responsible for the damaging of your academic integrity and we won’t help you repair it.

Instead, we would like to inform you that the lecture will happen online at the exact time it was originally scheduled (Wednesday April 10th, 7PM CET) and, as an homage to your toothless comment that Léopold did not “distance himself credibly and explicitly enough from violence,” this lecture will be entitled: When the Walls Tighten on You: On Palestinian Impossibility to Distance from Architecture’s Violence. We will attend; we hope you do too.

Léopold Lambert and 1946 other people are signatories of this letter