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An alumnus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) has identified extensive anti-Israel content on the university’s architecture department website and in external resources recommended to students.
The alumnus, who is not Jewish and has asked to remain anonymous, graduated from ETH Zurich in another discipline.
After the October 7th massacre in 2023, he organized silent solidarity walks through Zurich carrying Israeli flags. Through those events, he connected with another ETH graduate who had studied architecture and pointed him to the departmental pages.
His investigation focused on Professor Philip Ursprung’s Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture. He reviewed years of seminar descriptions, reading lists, lecture pages, maps, and other online material, even recovering deleted pages through web archives. He then compiled his findings into a report.
Key Report Findings
- A 2011 seminar week titled “Landna(h)me,” German for “land grab,” sent students to “Israel and the Palestinian Autonomous Territories.” Its recommended resources included the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the academic arm of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel. All of it was officially designated as preparation for seminar participants.
- PACBI pages accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” “colonialism,” and “war crimes,” while advocating a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions. One page featured an unverified image of a Palestinian child in a rifle’s crosshairs, visually casting Israeli forces as targeting Palestinian children. Another displayed a four-panel map titled “Maximum land with minimum Palestinians,” depicting expanding Israeli control at the expense of territory portrayed as Palestinian. The map conflated land ownership, sovereignty, and political control, creating the false impression that Israel progressively seized and dismantled a sovereign Palestinian state that had never existed.
- The same list carried the Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR), whose content framed Israeli actions through narratives of colonization, displacement, and the destruction of Palestinian homes, while omitting the threats posed by Hamas.
- Students were also directed to Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organization that disseminates allegations of IDF misconduct internationally through anonymous and unverifiable testimony from former soldiers. Its accounts omit crucial context about threats from Hamas and Hezbollah, presenting a relentlessly negative portrayal of Israeli military conduct. It receives extensive funding from foreign governments that it uses to demonize Israel abroad. ETH pointed students there without any corresponding resource on Israel’s security situation or any response to the group’s claims.
- After October 7th, the department’s “Parity Talks IV” platform published a page titled “Learning Palestine — Until Liberation II” that charged Israel with an unfolding “genocide” and invoked the “destruction and annihilation of life.” Alongside the text was a stylized map that completely erased the State of Israel.
Read the full report: The Responsibility of ETH Zurich: Analysis of the Spread of Antisemitism and Hate Propaganda
Seeking Accountability
The alumnus first approached Ursprung, who responded that people were entitled to different opinions and defended the department’s work as science. He then submitted the report to ETH’s administration. The Swiss-Israeli Society intervened, sending the university’s communications office a formal letter demanding a reply within 10 to 14 days.
He subsequently took his case beyond the university. Switzerland’s federal auditing office initially said it would examine the matter but, according to the alumnus, never followed up. Because ETH receives U.S. funding, he also briefed a congressional aide in Washington, raising concerns about American taxpayer money reaching the university.
In March 2024, architecture critic Stephan Trüby brought the controversy into public view in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, describing the department as a hub for “scientifically dressed-up antisemitism.”
The department responded publicly, arguing that criticism of Israel did not constitute antisemitism. It also stated that no complaints had been filed with its formal reporting office, and invoked freedom of teaching and research.
The alumnus rejected that defense. “But if you have a rifle scope,” he said, “that is not science.”
By October 8, 2024, several of the pages documented in his report were no longer accessible online.
Antisemitism Across Switzerland
What the alumnus uncovered at ETH was not confined to the university.
In Greifensee, vandals defaced a children’s summer camp poster with the words “Kill Jews.”
In central Zurich, he photographed the words “Zionism Kills” spray-painted in red on a stone ledge.
At the University of Bern, where he is completing his PhD, he saw students wearing shirts bearing the German words for “Intifada until victory” in the months after October 7th.
These incidents track with European-wide trends. CAM’s Antisemitism Research Center (ARC) monitored a total of 2,962 antisemitic incidents in 2025, nearly a 50% rise from the previous year.
The ETH alumnus is now preparing to leave Switzerland for a postdoctoral position at the Technion in Israel. Asked why, his answer was simple — he no longer wants to live in a country he does not want to support.
Take Action
CAM has launched Report It, a secure app to report antisemitic incidents anonymously and in real time. Don’t stay silent. Download it today on the Apple App Store or Google Play. See it. Report it. Stop it.
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