The Diplomat
Israel’s ambassador to Spain, Rodica Radian-Gordon, yesterday denounced on her Twitter account the “violent provocation” of a group of young people during an event held on Wednesday at the Complutense University in Madrid.
Student groups and pro-Palestinian activists rallied against the Israeli ambassador’s participation in an event at the Faculty of Philology, forcing the police to intervene to disperse the demonstrators.
The ambassador was surrounded by dozens of activists at the gates of an event to commemorate the Oslo accords, although the event was subsequently able to continue as normal.
“Even after violent provocation, I will not cease my actions in front of university students in Spain,” Radian-Gordon said on Twitter.
The ambassador thanked the dean of the Faculty of Philology and the Complutense University for their “firm stance in the face of violent provocations by BDS activists who are not students”. BDS stands for the anti-Israel movement ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’.
Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, contacted the diplomat after the incident to express his support: “We will continue to act so that our emissaries represent the country with pride and heads held high,” he wrote on his Twitter account.
A week ago, the Barcelona City Council, presided over by Ada Colau, broke off relations with Israel and terminated its twinning with the city of Tel Aviv, supporting the BDS campaign, which promotes the creation of so-called “Israeli apartheid-free spaces”.
For their part, student associations condemned in a statement what they described as “harsh repression against demonstrators” by the State Security Forces.
They said two activists were arrested and “dozens of students were identified, pushed, beaten and forcibly expelled” from the university. In addition, some of the participants denounced the presence of a man who, in order to stop the protest, pointed a gun at some of them outside the door of the assembly hall where the meeting was being held.
