Today we are talking about a paradox, a cultural and symbolic reversal that mirrors our country today and, in our opinion, a little bit of all Western democracies. It is a side effect of this new Middle East crisis that opened with the October 7, 2023 attacks in Israel and has been going on unabated ever since with Israel’s extremely harsh military response, first against Hamas in Gaza to the south, now against Hezbollah to the north, all the way into Lebanese territory.
For about a year now our squares have been filled with Palestinian youth flanked by antagonists, anarchists and many Italian students. They call them Pro-Gaza processions. In the latest one, in Milan last Saturday, besides lashing out as always unilaterally at Israel, they attacked Defense Minister Crosetto and a living monument to the Holocaust tragedy, Senator Liliana Segre. Both called “Zionist agents.” Deafening, and worrying, silence from the left. If for Crosetto we can partly understand it, he is an enemy of the government of that post-fascist Meloni (according to their simplification), for Segre it becomes more difficult. She is a woman who alone, with her story as a survivor of the horrors of the camps, represents a kind of Pantheon in the life of memory, of the perennial denunciation of horror.
Those who in the past have lambasted or wanted to re-discuss this symbol have been lynched almost out of hand. Now posts in its defense disappear on Instagram, a fact that even angered Enrico Mentana. In short, what’s going on? In contemporary hatred of Israel, do we re-legitimize anti-Semitism? Segre responded with irony, saying that she did not know she was, at 94, a Zionist agent. But there is little irony about a good chunk of Italy’s political culture, well represented by the cool mainstream media, which in foreign policy and geopolitics no longer gets it right.
We leave out for pity’s sake the convulsion and differences of positions on the Ukraine – Russia war, but on the Middle East the reading is producing precisely paradoxical effects. For opposing demonstrations on the anniversary of October 7 is maximum alert of our law enforcement agencies and maximum vigilance there will be on all Jewish sensitive targets on our territories. And this is because a bloodthirsty gentleman who did not hesitate to kill innocent Westerners in his attacks was killed? And what about, dear leftist friends, the Sunni Muslim world celebrating the blitz the other day that led to Nasrallah’s elimination? Did you know that perhaps the decisive information to the intelligence in Tel Aviv came from Iranian intelligence, a sign that regime change is also being considered in Tehran?
The world is increasingly complex and our poor Italian Manichean ideologies are now historically arteriosclerotic. And now they look bad supporting those who eat their own symbols.
The article Hands off Segre comes from TheNewyorker.
