Protesters hurled paint at a well-known pro-Israel writer in Spain on Tuesday while she was giving a lecture at a center of higher learning.
Pilar Rahola, a former lawmaker, resumed her talk shortly after the incident near Barcelona. She cleaned herself up, put on a clean sweater and continued the lecture while sitting at a paint-splattered speaker’s podium, people who attended the event wrote on social media.
About 100 people attended the lecture by Rahola, an advocate of Israel’s right to exist and critic of the proliferation of antisemitism on the left, at the Martí l’Humà University Foundation in La Garriga. A crowd gathered outside calling for the destruction of the State of Israel.
A video of the incident shows a young man accusing Rahola of complicity in “genocide” before the paint is hurled at her by someone in the audience.
“They won’t silence me. I will not hide. I will not be intimidated. I’m a free citizen in a free country. Fascism, whether on the right or on the left, will never prevent me from exercising my liberty. Which is what you, the aggressors, are afraid of: Liberty,” Rahola wrote on X.
The Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain in a statement on Wednesday condemned the incident, calling it “a violent and vandalistic” act against “freedom of expression.”
Rahola, 65, is a former deputy mayor of Barcelona. A left-leaning liberal, she has called out the creeping acceptance of antisemitism in left-wing circles and has vocally linked it to anti-Israel vitriol.
In 2013, the Jewish National Fund planted a forest with 2,500 trees in her honor in Yatir, in the Negev Desert.