Pro-Pal blitz in the classroom, lecture interrupted at the University of Pisa, lecturer assaulted

 A score of pro-Pal students, affiliated to left-wing university collectives, interrupted a lecture at the political science department of the University of Pisa this morning. And in a few moments what was supposed to be little more than a demonstration action for Gaza became a physical assault on a lecturer who had tried to stop the demonstrators. 'They accuse me of being Zionist,' says Rino Casella, associate professor of comparative constitutional law, 'just because I have always said that I am not pro-Pal. 'None of the more than 200 students who were attending my lecture,' added the lecturer who filed a complaint, 'sympathised with these people and when one student tried to snatch the Palestinian flag from their hands the beating started, I shielded him but both the boy and I suffered kicks and punches. At the emergency room they gave a report of seven days'.

Solidarity with the lecturer was immediately expressed by Rector Riccardo Zucchi, who also vindicated "the goodness of the choices made in recent months by the University, which has decided to say no to any scientific research with military purposes, and expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people, victims of something that closely resembles ethnic cleansing: having said this, any form of violence is unacceptable and it is also violence to interrupt a lesson, even more so when it leads to physical aggression".
Immediate political reactions with bipartisan condemnation, from the deputy prime minister and Lega Nord minister Matteo Salvini to the Fdi group leader in the Chamber of Deputies Galeazzo Bignami and the deputy president of the Italian Democratic Party Simona Bonafè. University Minister Anna Maria Bernini also telephoned the rector, Casella himself, and the prefect of Pisa Maria Luisa D'Alessandro. 'Universities,' says Bernini, 'are not free zones where it is allowed to interrupt lectures or assault professors. What happened is intolerable for a society that recognises itself in the values of democracy and inadmissible for an academic community, such as that of Pisa and all of Italy, that is open, free and inclusive'.
For Noemi Di Segni, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, "what happened at the University of Pisa is precisely the escalation that we have long feared, a drift of violence that has already been tolerated for so long, a flattening on the propaganda narrative of Hamas. This is how terrorism continues to be legitimised'. The Jewish youth speak of an 'attack on academic freedom and the security of the university community' and recall 'the expulsion from the Turin University campus of representatives of the Ugei', the youth of the Jewish community. Meanwhile, the universities take a position on possible collaborations with institutions directly involved in the war in Gaza.

The Academic Senate of Milan's Statale University approved a motion in which it resolved to refrain from proceeding with "new agreements with universities and institutions that are directly or indirectly involved in the violations currently taking place" in Gaza. The University of Florence also passed a motion pledging to evaluate "agreements with Israeli universities, bodies and institutions and to maintain only those that do not contribute to the maintenance of the illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territory and to the perpetration of the most serious violations of international law".
The Polytechnic University of Turin, on the other hand, decided to break off all relations with Pini Zorea, a lecturer at the Israeli university of Braude and a lecturer on a doctorate course, after learning that the professor had defended the IDF during a lecture, calling it "the cleanest army in the world".