Elham Asaad Buaras
A leading German research institution has sacked a Lebanese-Australian professor of Anthropology for criticising Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza.
The Max Planck Society stated on February 7 that it had terminated the employment of “highly acclaimed” scholar Ghassan Hage owing to social media remarks that they deemed incompatible with the institution’s values. The statement added that “racism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, discrimination, hatred, and agitation have no place in the Max Planck Society.”
Reacting to dismissal Hage said he couldn’t tolerate being labelled as racist based on his opinions and that he was informed that his dismissal was a reaction to a query made by a right-wing newspaper, Welt am Sonntag, alleging that a series of his social media posts criticising Israel were antisemitic.
Hage said the newspaper had emailed him on January 31, saying they noticed him making “increasingly drastic statements towards the state of Israel.”
The publication also claimed that Hage has been “an activist for the [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS)] movement for years,” which he denied, saying that “I take my job as an academic too seriously to have time to be an activist.”
Shortly after, Hage’s institute received a similar query and informed him that the president of the Max Planck Society in Munich had forwarded it to the society’s lawyers.
“No one in Munich, lawyer or otherwise, contacted me or sought my opinion about [the allegations],” he said. He was notified by the institute’s directors the following day that his two-year position as a visiting professor would be terminated.
“The decision was based on the way antisemitism has come to be defined and institutionalised in Germany, which has been analysed and critiqued by many,” Hage said in his statement.
“For anyone who knows the German landscape now, nothing is surprising about this happening to me. Many people other than me have copped a variation on this same treatment.”
On December 20, the Society pledged €1 million (£85,000) to Israeli research institutions in response to the Hamas-led attack on October 7.
Photo: Ghassan Hage.(Credit: Institut für Sozialanthropologie CC)
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