Illuminated By The Flames: A Response To Arson At The Munich Palestine Solidarity Camp
The arson attack on Munich's pro-Palestine encampment is not an isolated hate crime — it’s part of the Germany's systemic dehumanization of Palestinians. A week on from the attack, students respond.
There was nothing unusual about the evening of August 2nd at the pro-Palestine encampment in front of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) in Munich. It was a warm night, and foot traffic had died down for the day.
Most members of the camp were together, talking and praying in a tent, while others kept watch. It was almost 1am when, from a distance, the camp Nachtwache (“night watch”) observed a man approaching the camp.
The man was white with short hair, dressed in black, and appeared to be in his mid-twenties. Later, members of the camp would recognize him from previous hostile interactions. He’d come to the camp to spit on the camp’s Palestinian flag before. But from a distance, in the dark, they could only see a figure with a jerry can, pouring an unknown liquid onto the banners, pallets, and flags that marked the front of the campsite.
The man waited until the Nachtwache students walked towards him. As they got closer, the acrid smell of petrol hit them. The man bent down and put a lighter to the Palestinian flag, igniting several litres of accelerant he had used to douse the edges of the site.
Fire engulfed the front of the camp within seconds.
The camp includes a dozen personal tents, larger communal tents for studying and workshops, pavilions for community events, and an information stand. It occupies a small green space in a heavily pedestrianized area, Professor Huber Square, in front of Ludwig-Maximilians-University.
Police disbanded an earlier occupation of an LMU lecture hall on January 31st. The LMU president refused to engage in dialogue with protesters before, during, or after the occupation. Students then applied for and received a permit to establish a camp on public property in front of LMU. However, both the University and local government took the students to court in an attempt to prevent them from establishing an encampment.
In response, the organizers of the Munich encampment successfully fought and won two court cases in two separate Administrative Courts brought against them by the University and by the city. The encampment is the latest incarnation of the student intifada in Munich and was finally established on public property in front of LMU.
The camp has been in place since May 13th and includes students from LMU, Technical University of Munich, and Munich University of Applied Sciences. Its visibility has given organizers opportunities to speak while people are passing by, bringing attention to the complicity of Munich’s universities in the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people.
This visibility has also made the camp vulnerable to violence. Passers-by and counter-protestors have rained racist, homophobic, antisemitic, and Islamophobic abuse on students. The camp has had to deal with numerous Nazis, Zionists, and other members of the far right. Even within this context, the arson attack on the night of the 2nd was a shocking escalation of violence against the pro-Palestine movement in Germany.
Suddenly, the summer night was illuminated by a column of flames. They spread rapidly across the front of the encampment. Students rushed to put out the fire — they needed to extinguish the flames before they spread deeper into the camp. By the time emergency services arrived, they had extinguished the flames and peacefully detained the perpetrator.
Police officers took most of the burned and damaged material as evidence. Alongside the large “Students for Palestine” banners and flags visible in videos of the destruction, artwork made by campers was destroyed. This included the camp’s memorial for murdered Palestinian children. The fire consumed their photos and names, leaving behind only blackened fragments of photos of young, smiling faces and the smell of gasoline and burnt fabric.
The next day, students in the encampment held a rally. Their message was clear: while the arson attack was horrifying and infuriating, it does not compare to the atrocities witnessed and endured in Gaza every day.
Burning tents have become a mainstay of the genocide in Palestine. More and more Palestinians have been forced to leave their homes and have been displaced to refugee camps, where they have been offered the false promise of “safe zones”. But there is nowhere safe in Gaza. Israeli bombs regularly tear through refugee camps, creating conflagrations that consume tents and the families sleeping within them. The images of martyred children that were burned in Munich act as a distorted mirror to the children killed in the “tent massacres” in the Tel al-Sultan refugee camp in Rafah and the al-Mawasi camp in southern Gaza.
The indifference of the German public to the genocide has been made possible by decades of dehumanizing and demonizing coverage of Palestinians by the German press. Palestinians are continually and casually treated as a monolith and are often implicitly or explicitly blamed for their own genocide. Their deaths are ignored or justified.
The language and narrative used by the German media undermine Palestinian human rights and have been deployed against anti-war protestors and encampments by German papers, which have repeatedly printed sensationalized and speculative stories. In May, Bayrischer Rundfunk, a state-funded outlet, described a sign reading ‘Free Palestine for German Guilt’ as advocating to “leave behind the memory of the Holocaust and the reappraisal of the crimes of the Nazi regime.” Later that same month, the paper Süddeutsche Zeitung published an article titled, ‘München: Wo für einen jüdischen Staat kein Platz ist’ (Munich: Where a Jewish State has no Place) and claimed a sign from the Munich encampment reading “War Criminal” and showing two red handprints could be interpreted as calling for the murder of all Israelis. This irresponsible and inaccurate reporting incites violence, putting peaceful protestors in danger.
There has been an increase in support for encampment members in the wake of the arson attack – for the first time, some local politicians have voiced their support, speaking at the rally held in the days following August 2nd. This reaffirmed the status quo: the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed since October have been met with silence. German students who were attacked have been met with more compassion and empathy than the victims of a genocidal military campaign that has now lasted over 300 days.
None of the universities who have students involved in the encampment – Ludwig Maximilians University (whose students make up the majority of the encampment), Technical University of Munich, and Munich University of Applied Sciences – have made any statements condemning the attack. The President of LMU, Professor Bernd Huber, has remained silent and has not issued a single statement about the attack.
The day after the attack, students reached out to Professor Huber by email. “For over two months, we have been trying to establish a dialogue with the university administration,” they wrote, “we urge you to take responsibility for our safety and take a public stand against this violence.” They received no reply and there have been no public statements made by the university administration. Professor Huber has refused either to negotiate with or even support his students, despite the blatant and ongoing danger their lives have been put in by this action.
Two hours after the arsonist first poured gasoline, the last police officers collecting evidence left camp. The students only had each other to rely on for safety, knowing the scale of the danger they faced, with no university security or admin checking in with them that night or in the subsequent days.
To Jewish members of the camp, it is a double insult: to have their identities weaponized by German institutions to suppress free speech and excuse genocide and then have those institutions stay silent when their community members are violently attacked. “To me the message is clear,” a Jewish member of the encampment commented on the arson and the resulting silence, “even with all their posturing about protecting Jews, they would not care if Jews burned to death in their sleep.”
The attack on the Munich encampment is an extension of the racist, colonial violence Palestinians face every day under occupation. It’s an extension of Islamophobia and xenophobia in Germany, and it's the consequence of decades of dehumanizing rhetoric by the media.
One man might have held the lighter to the flag on August 2nd, but the kindling for the fire was provided by violent, racist Zionist rhetoric across Germany. The German government, education system, and media are complicit in the arson attack in the same way they are complicit in the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians since October 7th.
The encampment in Munich is standing firm. Those in power have failed Palestine, but the camp will not fail Palestine. The students and their supporters will not let themselves be intimidated. If anything, the incident has strengthened the commitment and determination to fight for liberation with Palestine.
Based on interviews with German members of the Munich encampment, including Jewish and Palestinian students