CEU Students for Palestine: A Call for Action
Addressed to CEU Chief Operating Officer (Norbert Sabic), CEU administration, and wider CEU community.
We the students, here undersigned, wish to express our solidarity with the Gender Studies faculty and staff, and to highlight our anger at the shameful attempt to silence their Pro-Palestine positions.
On October 12th, members of the GENS (Gender Studies) faculty and staff received an email from Norbert Sabic, CEU's Chief Operating Officer, demanding the removal of Pro-Palestine posters which displayed the phrase "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free". The email stated that if staff failed to comply, the posters would be taken down by October 15th, and any obstruction of the removal of the posters "may constitute employee misconduct, to be addressed in accordance with HR policies and procedures". The posters have since been removed against GENS faculty and staff's wishes, disregarding CEU's disciplinary procedures. We abhor this fundamental attack on free speech.
Mr. Sabic's decision to remove posters stems from an anonymous, informal complaint made to the Ombudsperson Network. The Network must follow clear guidelines to "protect the rights, safety, dignity and wellbeing of all members of the University Community". Yet, the COO took the matter into his own hands to escalate the 'complaint', and the Ombudsperson, acting as an intermediary to the COO, failed to follow the Network's protocol, thus failing to uphold CEU's code of conduct. Mr Sabic took the complaint to the Chair of the Disciplinary Committee (DC) and with the Chair’s counsel, made his own decision, without the consultation of the committee, to enforce the removal of GENS staff posters. This was in direct breach of the rules of the DC, with the required procedures not followed.
According to Mr. Sabic, his procedural escalation has been justified by advice to CEU's legal team, who (informally) advised the head of the DC that the phrase "from the river to the sea" is a form of hate speech under Austrian law. This is not the case! Austria has not explicitly criminalized this phrase, and so basing the forced removal of the posters on a subjective interpretation of Austrian law is a cowardly excuse, an outright lie, and such policing is fundamentally Islamophobic and discriminatory. Moreover, the affected faculty were not given adequate time to seek legal advice themselves and were not allowed to represent their side of the story, which is required by both the Ombudsman Network and Disciplinary Committee rules. They were arbitrarily threatened with disciplinary action. Mr. Sabic's escalation and inappropriate use of authority are a major breach of disciplinary procedure at CEU and require their own investigation. The improper handling of this anonymous complaint can be interpreted as nothing less than a unilateral attack on the free speech of the GENS faculty. It sets a dangerous precedent for how the CEU administration treats support for the Palestinian cause, or any cause fighting for equality, freedom and against authoritarianism.
Since it has been suggested that "from the river to the sea" is a criminalized phrase (which it is not!) we want to emphasize the importance of this phrase as a call for justice, liberation and equality. The Israeli state enacts a regime of apartheid, genocide and racism across the entirety of Palestine, from the river to the sea. In Gaza, Palestinians have suffered a brutal genocide, for which Israel still enjoys impunity. In the West Bank, the Israeli state perpetuates a regime of dispossession and displacement of the Palestinian people from their land that can be seen as nothing more than ethnic cleansing. Many Palestinians in the diaspora cannot exercise their fundamental right of returning to their homeland. Within Israel, Palestinians face constant legal discrimination, physical and sexual violence, and a complete limitation of their civil liberties and political rights. The call for freedom of Palestine "from the river to the sea" is a call against the fascist policies of the Israeli state.
We demand:
1) The reinstatement of the posters unjustly removed from the doors of GENS faculty offices
2) A formal, written apology from Norbert Sabic to the affected GENS faculty members
3) Assurance that future complaints follow university disciplinary procedures.
CEU promotes the advancement of open, just, and democratic societies as central to its mission. How can it claim to do so when it silences criticism of an ethno-nationalist genocidal state? The values CEU expects us to respect and embody are not being upheld by the administration. The university cannot get away with calling itself a safe haven for academics and rising voices for change—not as long as professors, staff and students can be threatened with disciplinary action for displaying a slogan calling for liberation of an oppressed people.
Free Palestine from the River to the Sea!
Sign the open letter here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd26yWKC4oshNddfJtBaYzjiikBHEOI4-JWHh4hYf0FgOqDYw/alreadyresponded
Editor’s note, October 26th:
The following open letter was written and submitted by CEU Students for Palestine. It is published as received. The views and claims in it belong to its authors.
The Stand is publishing this letter in keeping with its commitment to freedom of expression. We oppose restrictions on speech that serve to silence debate rather than engage with it.
The letter characterizes Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide. In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
