Dr. Uri Rosenberg (affiliated researcher) - August 2025
Dialogue in a time of war: a Heidelberg workshop on Israel/Palestine and Germany
From 28 July to 4 August 2025, the Hochschule für Jüdische Studien Heidelberg hosted an intensive workshop on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its spillover into Germany. Bringing together Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim and German participants, the seminar explored not only the conflict itself, but also the ways it reshapes public life, intergroup relations and everyday feelings of safety in Germany. The workshop combined structured dialogue, academic discussion and public engagement.
For the RTG Ambivalent Enmity, the workshop was more than something to support from the sidelines. It was shaped in essential ways by RTG-affiliated scholars. The two organizers, Dr. Uri Rosenberg and Tom Khaled Würdemann, are both affiliated with the RTG, as postdoctoral researcher and doctoral researcher respectively. Two of the seminar participants were RTG researchers as well. Prof. Svenja Taubner, an RTG principal investigator, served as the workshop’s on-site psychologist and delivered the opening keynote on dialogue and collective trauma.
The workshop grew out of a cooperation between the Israeli-Palestinian NGO Tech2Peace () and scholars in Heidelberg who wanted to create a dialogue format outside Israel/Palestine, while also addressing the German context in which the conflict is intensely debated. The result was a “trialogue” format: alongside Israeli and Palestinian participants, Germans from different backgrounds joined the seminar, nearly half of them Muslim and Jewish Germans.
This was not just about adding another group. It reflected a basic premise of the workshop: the Israel-Palestine conflict does not stay “over there”. It plays out in European societies as well, through memory, migration, media, political activism and competing solidarities. Germany, with its own historical burden and present-day tensions, is one of the places where this is especially visible. One of our goals was therefore to bring Germans into direct contact with Israelis and Palestinians who are already engaged in dialogue and peacework, and to encourage more grounded and constructive conversations about a conflict that is often discussed in Germany in a polarized and, at times, toxic ways.
Over the course of the week, forty participants took part in a structured series of sessions that moved from trust-building and self-reflection to more difficult political and emotional discussions. The dialogue began with questions of identity and belonging, then shifted to personal memories, competing narratives and experiences of fear, trauma, anger and exclusion. Later sessions addressed the conflict more directly and its reverberations in Germany, including antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Zionism, anti-migrant sentiments and the pressures many participants experience in German public debates. The aim was not to reach agreement, but to make it possible to speak honestly, listen carefully and stay engaged even when the conversations became tense.
The academic programme ran alongside the dialogue sessions and was designed to bring research into conversation with lived experience. Panels addressed comparative ethnic and political conflicts, internal Israeli dynamics after 7 October, Jewish-Muslim relations in Germany and the broader question of how divided societies negotiate memory, violence and coexistence. One especially notable contribution from the RTG was the panel composed entirely of RTG-affiliated scholars: Prof. Monika Juneja, Dr. Fabian Baumann, Sou-Jie van Brunnersum and Tom Khaled Würdemann. This panel highlighted the range of perspectives gathered in Ambivalent Enmity and demonstrated how the RTG’s work on conflict, enmity and entanglement can speak directly to urgent contemporary questions.
A distinctive feature of the academic programme was that presentations were not followed by a conventional plenary Q&A. Instead, participants broke into smaller discussion groups with individual speakers. This allowed for more direct exchange and reduced the distance that often separates academic expertise from personal experience.
What did the workshop achieve? It would be easy to fall back on vague language about bridge-building, but that would miss the more concrete significance of the week. The seminar created a temporary space in which participants could test whether dialogue remains possible under conditions of war, grief and mistrust. It also showed how much such dialogue depends on careful preparation, emotional support and strong facilitation. At the same time, it made clear that Germany must not be treated merely as an external observer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For many participants (especially those living in Germany), Germany was itself one of the key sites under discussion: a place where the conflict is argued over, moralized, projected onto minorities and woven into ongoing polarized discussions on belonging and exclusion.
For the RTG Ambivalent Enmity, this workshop was therefore not just an event adjacent to its research agenda. It was a concrete example of that agenda in practice. The RTG’s scholars did not merely analyze ambivalent enmity from a distance. They helped build, accompany and reflect on a setting in which enmity, empathy, solidarity and fear were all present at once. That is precisely what made the workshop intellectually serious and socially relevant.
