Why we disrupted Annalena Baerbock’s award speech

When, in late August, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation announced that former German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was its 2026 medallist, we were stunned. The cognitive dissonance was striking, even if we had become used to this after years of unabashed hypocrisy within the world’s most powerful institutions.

According to the foundation’s homepage , the medal is given to a person who “contributes to a more just, peaceful and environmentally sustainable world through valuable achievements in politics or research”.

As this year’s medallist, Baerbock was invited to visit Uppsala University and deliver a lecture. Here was an event claiming to celebrate “ compassion, humanism and commitment to international solidarity ” while honouring the foreign minister of a government that approved 94 million euros ($102m) in arms exports to Israel in the span of three months in 2024.

The motivation provided for Baerbock’s selection as the 2026 Dag Hammarskjold medallist sounded like satire to us. She is described as a “strong proponent of a rules-based international order” even though her actions illustrate perfectly how she is the opposite of that.

As soon as Uppsala University started promoting the ceremony on campus, we decided to plan a protest. Baerbock needed to know that she was not welcome, that the university’s stance did not reflect the position of its students.

We entered the event split into groups and interrupted Baerbock’s seminar four times. She was increasingly frustrated with each interruption. She tried to respond to the argument of the first group with an incoherent ramble about an alleged misfired Palestinian rocket. But we were not arguing over a single rocket; we were criticising her unapologetic support for horrific violations of international law.

As foreign minister, Baerbock repeatedly expressed her strong support for the state of Israel as an occupying power, declaring that Israel’s security also is “ in the interest of the German state ”. As Germany’s foreign minister, she called it her responsibility to always defend Israel’s “security” – something she deemed “ non-negotiable for Germany ”.

She had no reservations about upholding Israeli claims that it had the right to target schools, hospitals and other civilian establishments because the alleged presence of resistance forces removed their protected status .

Baerbock has held these positions despite the International Court of Justice indicating provisional measures against Israel with the intention to encourage the international community to take action against the genocide in Gaza and despite the International Criminal Court issuing an arrest warrant for Israeli leaders on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Instead, Baerbock chose to fuel the fire.

For all of these efforts, she was “rewarded” with the position of president of the United Nations General Assembly. Even in that role – in the heart of the institution that is supposed to uphold international law – she refused to call what is happening in Gaza a genocide. This is despite multiple reports, including by UN experts, that this is exactly what the mass killing is.

That Uppsala University co-organised Baerbock’s lecture is not surprising. The university continues to refuse to implement even the most modest of measures against an occupying power that openly commits genocide .

In 2022, the university administration showed no hesitation in ending collaboration with Russian institutions after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Three years into the genocide in Gaza and the intensified ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank, it has taken no such action against Israeli institutions, despite repeated demands from students and faculty.

Yet we are grateful for this perfect opportunity to demonstrate why radical resistance is necessary. For many years, protests against the genocide in Palestine have obeyed the rules defined by those in power, without any effect. Palestinians have been killed while places of higher education refuse to take responsibility and diplomats utter nothing but hollow words.

If they will not listen to voices within their regulated framework, we see no choice but to disrupt their everyday efforts to hide their complicity.

We are criticised for our methods because they are “too much”. But for us, genocide is too much. Disagreeing politely and hearing out those who sell bombs to genocidal armies is what has brought us to this point of deadly inaction.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.