Those who attend the June 7 march will fuel the catastrophic antisemitic surge that began after the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023 and recall other acts of Jew-hatred.
Fiamma Nirenstein
(JNS)
After decades of tireless effort, the haters of Israel, who prefer to call themselves defenders of the Palestinians, have finally been rewarded. On June 7, they will hold a rally in Rome, promoted by several of Italy’s political groups, including the Partito Democratico, the Five Star Movement and the Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra. The march is nothing more than the latest chapter in an old story, as today’s accusations of genocide and colonialism are just new labels placed on postwar antisemitism. As always, when antisemitism spikes, it signals a deeper existential crisis in the West.
Whenever a civilization loses its way, it blames the Jews. The world, threatened by Russian President Vladimir Putin and China, destabilized by President Donald Trump and paralyzed by Islamic terrorism it dares not name, lashes out instead at Israel, Zionism, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Jews. It bases this hatred on a mountain of lies—lies that incite murder while willfully ignoring the violent criminals it defends.
That public square, including the so-called moderate left that asks Israel to stop defending itself, will bear moral responsibility for the wave of Jew-hatred now staining every corner of the globe. “Occupation” is the go-to slogan, one that is entirely unfounded. What we are witnessing is the containment of a territory until it no longer poses the catastrophic threat Hamas has proven to be.
The word Zionist has been twisted into an insult, paired with “colonialist,” as though Jews were not the only indigenous people to maintain a spiritual and historical bond with their land, and return to it through fully legal international processes, even offering half of it to their most violent enemies.
Throughout the centuries, Jews were accused of deicide. Now, as if wrapped once again in a burial shroud, they’re falsely charged with killing children in Gaza for pleasure—a blood libel reborn. The Nazis claimed that Jews were imperialist capitalists, manipulators, vermin to be exterminated. Shouting it in the streets didn’t make it true. Nor did it diminish the horror of the Shoah.
This protest movement is wrong. It must revisit the false casualty numbers (see Honest Reporting or the Henry Jackson Society for factual numbers), confront the monstrous crimes of Hamas and acknowledge that Hamas used civilian tunnels for terror, not for protecting the population. It should investigate stolen humanitarian aid, repurposed to build instruments of death.
Those who attend the rally will be fueling a catastrophic antisemitic surge—one that was emboldened by the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas gloats, “We raped, burned, dismembered Jews—thanks to your support, we’ll do it again across the globe.” Attending this protest means siding with that ideology.
Hamas’s fatality statistics are false. At least 75% of those killed were adult males, many affiliated with Hamas or another terrorist group. Some of those people died from illness or old age. Israel has done everything possible to minimize harm, despite fighting in a terrain where rocket launchers, explosives and death squads were hidden in homes, schools and hospitals.
By March, Israel had sent 975,000 tons of food, 50,000 tons of water and 25,000 tons of medicine to the Gaza Strip. This was an unprecedented case of a country at war providing aid to its enemy. From day one, however, Hamas seized those supplies at gunpoint for their own benefit.
Israel’s demands are simple: Surrender your weapons, return the hostages. That’s Netanyahu’s “terrible” condition. Israel is fighting a war of survival. The rift between right and left has not undone its democracy.
Israel is unforgivable, they say, because it defeated Hezbollah, pushed back the Houthis and Iran, helped topple Syria’s longtime dictator Bashar Assad and, of course, crippled Hamas. But heaven forbid that it wins this war—one that could rid the world of a terrorist force like ISIS or Al-Qaeda; one that executes dissidents, enslaves women, kills homosexuals, amasses billions of dollars and in builds 750 kilometers of tunnels that never provided shelter to a single Gazan woman or child and that tortures its hostages.
Those who attend the June 7 rally will join the ranks of the shopkeepers who throw out Jewish customers, hoteliers who post “Jews not welcome,” festival organizers who blacklist Israeli artists, those who threaten via social-media and, quite possibly, the next shooter. Like the one who killed 2-year-old Stefano Gaj Taché outside a Rome synagogue on a Jewish holiday in 1982, or the lone gunman who last week shot and killed Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26, who worked at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.
Baby Ravid Chaim Gez was just buried in Israel, having lived for only two weeks. His mother, Tzeela Gez, was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist while on her way to the hospital to give birth. The family donated her organs so that others could live.
Thousands of Israel Defense Force soldiers are only 18 or 19 years old. Nearly 1,000 have died defending a humanitarian democracy under siege. Israel is fighting to defeat terrorism to protect its citizens and the world. Do your part, do not attend the June 7 protest.
Image: A plaque outside of Rome’s Great Synagogue pays tribute to 2-year-old Stefano Tache who was murdered there in 1982. Credit: Christian Michelides via Wikimedia Commons.
