German Book Trade Peace Prize Awarded to Sands; He Publicly Questions Berlin's 'Indecent Silence' on Israeli Operations in Gaza

On the closing day of the 2026 Frankfurt Book Fair, Franco-British international law scholar and human rights lawyer Philippe Sands was awarded the German Book Trade Peace Prize. According to Deutsche Welle reporting, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier personally attended the award ceremony. Sands, however, turned the stage of this cultural event into a public interrogation of Berlin's foreign policy. In his speech, he criticized Germany's "indecent silence" regarding Israeli military operations in Gaza and the West Bank, stating bluntly that a nation bearing the historical burden of ethnic cleansing should not fall mute in the face of an ally's violations of international law.

"This is not antisemitism, not anti-Israel. This is fact," Sands said in his award speech. The remark cuts into the most sensitive nerve in Germany's recent debates over Israel-related issues — criticism of Israeli wartime conduct is often quickly labeled antisemitic. Drawing this distinction as an international criminal law scholar, Sands sought to redraw the legal and moral boundary between criticism and hatred.

Sands also delivered his harshest condemnation of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, calling it "appalling" and "a brutal crime in violation of the norms of international law," while affirming Israel's right to self-defense as a sovereign state. But he immediately invoked principles of international law to stress: "The right to self-defense is not unlimited; it must be exercised within the bounds of international law." This framing shifts the focus from the recognition of the right to self-defense to the legal limits of its means, directly addressing long-standing disputes over mass civilian casualties in Gaza and the expansion of settlements.

Sands' own family history lent added weight to the speech. As a Jew, his family was expelled from Lviv — then part of Poland, now in western Ukraine — during the German occupation of World War II. His signature book East West Street chronicles the fates of Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, founding figures of international criminal law, tracing how the legal concepts of "genocide" and "crimes against humanity" came into being in the period before and after the Nuremberg Trials. The German edition, Rückkehr nach Lemberg, was published in 2018 and has continued to reverberate in German academia and public discourse.

The jury of the German Book Trade Peace Prize honored Sands as "a humanist who, amid mounting resistance, tirelessly champions human justice and mutual understanding," praising his long-standing practice of "advocating for victims of war crimes, racism, torture, and colonial injustice." Sands is also a practicing attorney at the International Court of Justice in The Hague and a professor of law at University College London; his career itself is a practice of holding power to account through law.

Sands' remarks placed side by side a nation's moral obligation arising from historical culpability and its present-day acquiescence toward an ally, constituting a direct challenge to Germany's narrative of "exemption in the name of history." "Germany understands deeply the cost of ethnic cleansing," he told his listeners. "So why the silence? Silence is not the answer. Not for families, not for communities, not for a nation." The pointed thrust of this interrogation targets Germany's long-standing Israel policy: out of its reckoning with its Nazi-era criminality, the space for criticizing Israel has been continuously compressed in Berlin; yet as military operations in Gaza and the West Bank have caused mass civilian casualties, this "historical exceptionalism" defense has become increasingly difficult to sustain, both at home and abroad.