I would like to ask readers for help. My Italian wife and our six children, aged 10 to 22, believe that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza and that Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is complicit in this genocide.
I do not.
What should I tell them?
Once again, I am forced to remember how precious truth is – yet how difficult it is to demonstrate. Also, how easy it is to convince people that an untruth is the truth. And yet, at the same time, how easy it is to doubt the truth when all around you are telling you it is an untruth – especially if they are your own family.
Quite obviously, this is terrifying.
Matters came to a head in our house on Friday when there was a one-day general strike in Italy, in which huge numbers of Italians took part – people who believe much the same as my family about what is going on in Gaza.
The strike blocked stations, motorways and other major roads, a couple of major ports, and it closed universities and schools.
Two million Italians took part in 100 towns and cities, according to the trade union leaders who organised it. The number was nearer half a million, according to the Interior Ministry. Either way, it was an extremely high turnout, and many of the participants were in their early twenties.
The terrorist attack by Jihad al-Shamie at the synagogue in Manchester the previous day was a mere footnote in the Italian media.
All our children remained at home because many teachers had joined the strike – as indeed had some of them.
My two eldest daughters, Caterina, 22, and Magdalena, 18, and my middle son, Giovanni Maria, 13, took part in a demonstration in the nearby small city of Forlì.
Magdalena and many in her class at the music school they attend in Forlì had used face paint to depict a Palestinian flag on one cheek and, on the other, the English word ‘FREE’ in red.
She sent me a photo on WhatsApp. I found the juxtaposition of her beautiful young face and those two images disturbing.
For a start, a country called Palestine does not exist – so how can it be free?
Even if she had done this as a fashion statement, that would have been bad enough, but she – in particular among my children – is passionate about ‘the Palestinians’.
I cannot help admiring her passionate commitment. But that just makes me feel worse. And I am sure she just wants peace, as we all do, and that she does not condone violence in favour of the ‘pro-Pal’ cause, or contemplate using violence herself. But that does not help me much either.
Anyway, on Friday my two eldest daughters, who have the vote, and a young son who does not, marched with what organisers said were a few thousand people behind a huge banner which proclaimed: ‘You will not stop the student wind against the genocide.’
Among other things they chanted: ‘Forlì sa da che parte stare! Palestina libera dal fiume fino al mare!’
In Italian, this rhymes beautifully but in English not at all: Forlì knows on whose side it stands! Free Palestine from the river to the sea!
I find all these young people chanting the same refrain used by those such as Hamas – to mean the destruction of the Jews and of the state of Israel – pretty depressing.
They also chanted: ‘Meloni fascista! Meloni fascista!’
I am far less perturbed by this, as it is preposterous.
The formal reason for Friday’s general strike was to show solidarity with the Global Sumud Flotilla, which had aimed to break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza and deliver aid to Palestinians, but which on Wednesday and Thursday was stopped by Israeli forces. The 470 activists on board the 42 smallish, mostly sail-powered vessels – who included Greta Thunberg and a handful of left-wing Italian MPs – were taken to Israel, where nearly all are still detained awaiting deportation.
But the real, hardly concealed reason was to accuse Israel of genocide and the Meloni government of complicity in that genocide.
The Italian left, like the left in so many democracies, is fractured and incapable of creating a compelling narrative to fit the times. It has been tearing its hair out in despair at the success of the government of Meloni.
Before her election triumph just over three years ago it had stoked up most global media – who, of course, leapt at the chance – into the relentless branding of Meloni as the heir to Mussolini because she and many of those in her party, Brothers of Italy, were once members of Italy’s long-defunct post-fascist party.
Despite this, the right-wing coalition Meloni led won a clear majority.
Incredibly, she became the first leader of a coalition to become the Italian prime minister since Silvio Berlusconi resigned in 2011 actually to win a majority in an election. All six, mostly left-wing prime ministers in between were not leaders of a party, let alone a coalition, and four of them not even elected members of the Italian parliament.
Furthermore, Brothers of Italy, which she co-founded as a conservative party in 2012, has increased support in the polls since the September 2022 election – something that is virtually unheard of for a governing party in a democracy, especially in Italy, where governments last little more than a year on average.
There have been 69 since the end of the second world war in 1945.
Italy’s first female prime minister will this month become the third-longest-serving Italian prime minister since then, and if she survives one more year, the longest-serving of the lot.
But Meloni’s opponents feel that, at long last, with Israel and Gaza, they have got an issue able to unite them and attract enough popular support – if not to topple her before her five-year mandate expires in 2027, at least to win the next election. Palestine, they feel, is their Vietnam moment.
Certainly, they have a point.
‘Palestine, they feel, is their Vietnam moment.’
Nearly three-quarters of Italians (73.7 per cent) – thus, by no means just the left – think Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza, according to one poll this week. A similar percentage (70.6 per cent) support the flotilla ‘bringing food and medicine to the Palestinian people besieged by the Israeli army’, according to the same poll. And 59 per cent of Italians think Italy should break off diplomatic relations with Israel.
By contrast, though, according to another poll – this one earlier in September – 63 per cent of Italians think that Meloni is right not to recognise Palestine, and 59.8 per cent that she is right not to support the flotilla.
And her party’s candidate comfortably won the regional election last week (28 and 29 September) to retain power as president of Le Marche.
So I asked Magdalena, in particular: why is Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu guilty of genocide?
‘He’s called for the extermination of the Palestinians.’
‘No he hasn’t.’
‘It was in the Carlino the other day.’ (the Resto del Carlino, the regional daily.)
‘When?’
‘Mamma sent me the link.’
‘Anyway, all the Israeli killing of people in Gaza is the same thing, whatever you call it.’
Why is Meloni complicit in this genocide? She’s done absolutely nothing.
‘She sells arms to Israel.’
‘What does “from the river to the sea” mean?’
‘A Palestinian state from the river to the sea.’
‘But that means destruction of the Jews, doesn’t it?’
‘No! Just freedom for the Palestinians.’
I then said a British Muslim had just carried out a terrorist attack on a synagogue in Manchester and killed and injured British Jews – and that some of the things Magdalena and so many others in Italy are saying, if they do not incite such violence, most certainly encourage and sustain it.
‘What’s that compared to 60,000 dead Palestinian civilians?’
Of course, I asked Magdalena and the others if they felt they were useful idiots (no) and anti-Semitic (no) – and how should Israel have reacted to the 7 October pogrom against the Jews by Hamas?
In my house, it is clear – as in Italy as a whole – the Palestinians, or should that just be Hamas, are winning the propaganda war. And the more military destruction Israel causes in Gaza, the closer final victory gets.
So, dear readers, how would you handle such conversations with your wife and children?
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