Pro-Palestinian demonstration at the Prague faculty: They were not our students, the dean said

Protesters with Palestinian flags and anti-genocide slogans gathered in front of the faculty building on Thursday. It was several dozen people.

“The organizers of the demonstration with whom I spoke were not students of the Faculty of Humanities, not even students of Charles University. I encouraged them to discuss the role and responsibility of an academic institution in a global conflict, the role and responsibility of the faculty leadership and me as dean. There was no interest in such a discussion,” responded the dean in a statement, who, according to her, was present at the scene the whole time.

According to her, the action in support of Palestine was not announced and the faculty management condemns the form of protest.

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The protest was organized by a group that calls itself Academics Against Apartheid and presents itself as a collective of independent individuals operating on the grounds of academic institutions in the Czech Republic. More information about its members is missing.

On social networks, they write, for example, that they strive for “the elimination of oppressive Israeli apartheid, but also the dominant Zionist ideology as a whole, which is the main cause of oppression and violence in historical Palestine.”

Thursday’s event was said to draw attention to the university’s silence on what is happening in Gaza. There, Israel is conducting a retaliatory operation against Hamas, which began in response to last year’s bloody incursion by terrorists into Israel and the kidnapping of hostages who are still being held.

The group criticizes the cooperation of Charles University with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and accuses the University of Prague of being complicit in the situation in Gaza.

The dean stated that she respects the right to express one’s free opinion, but according to her, the role of the academic land and the academic community is different. She believes that it should be a space of mutual respect and dialogue, which she did not see at the demonstration. According to her, by covering their faces, loudly chanting and using a megaphone, the participants created a sense of threat in many and to a considerable extent also disrupted the lessons with their noise.

“Respect for freedom of expression and assembly has and must also have its limit and must be mutual. However, the demonstrators did not show mutual respect for the rights of expression: one of the demonstrators physically attacked a student from the dormitories, who was showing that he did not agree with the protesters, and wounded him in the face,” Sokolová wrote.

Police spokesman Jan Daněk told Novinkám on Monday that the police are not investigating any violations of the law in connection with the demonstration. They said they did not notice any attacks during the protest itself.

“The police were there the whole time, there was no attack. The group of demonstrators then calmly dispersed,” said Daněk.

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