Pro-Palestine students sit in Florence ‘Away with Israel from universities’

FLORENCE, JUNE 18 – About fifty pro-Palestine students demonstrated with flags and two gazebos this morning in front of the rectorate in Piazza San Marco in Florence, where the Academic Senate is meeting. Also on the agenda of the session is a motion promoted by students, teachers and university workers to ask for the suspension “of the agreements currently in force” between the Florentine University and universities, organizations and other Israeli bodies “on a precautionary basis”, in waiting for the agreements to be evaluated by an ethics commission which should be established by July 30th. “We demand that we move from words to actions – says Arturo Gambassi of Students for Palestine – The commission doesn’t exist yet, it’s too vague and the timescales are too long”. The demonstrators then left the writing ‘Unifi complicit in genocide’ on the asphalt of Piazza San Marco, in front of the Rectorate. The Academic Senate should have put the motion to the vote but, as the students say, it was not a topic of discussion but was read as a simple communication together with a text from University employees, because it was presented too late. “We find this attitude antidemocratic – explains Arturo Gambassi of Students for Palestine -. Yesterday we were told by the rector’s secretariat that the motion had been admitted to the agenda as an item to be voted on and discussed. This morning, in an arbitrary way, in our opinion, things changed. We delivered it on Friday afternoon, exactly like the one voted in the last Academic Senate which also took place on Tuesday. The process was the same.” “We had also had a fruitful dialogue with some professors – he adds -, we find it serious that the University does not want to take an effective and concrete position on this issue, avoiding debate with students, hiding behind bureaucracy”.