1938 Is Back. But This Time, We Know Everything

Rome, May 1, 2025. During the traditional May Day concert in Piazza San Giovanni, the Milanese band Patagarri – launched by X Factor – performed Hava Nagila, the historic Jewish song. At the end, they chanted “Free Palestine,” invited the audience to repeat the slogan, and dedicated the performance to the right to self-determination. But the message that came through, powerfully, was another: a symbol of Jewish identity was being used to legitimize those who want to erase that very identity from the map.

Naples, May 3, 2025. A couple of Israeli tourists was expelled from “Taverna a Santa Chiara,” a restaurant that adheres to the campaign “Spaces free from Israeli apartheid.” The video went viral. The owner, Nives Monda, proudly defended her choice: “It’s a political position.” The message was clear: in that restaurant, you don’t eat if you’re Israeli. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you believe, or what your life is. You’re kicked out because of your passport – or your surname.

Two episodes. A stage and a plate. But behind them, a single emotional and symbolic direction: the normalized demonization of Israel and the Jewish people.

We are back there. Back to 1938, where antisemitism no longer speaks with the same words but still uses the same mechanisms. There is an active, violent, militant minority. But its power doesn’t come from force – it comes from the silence of the majority. Back then, people looked the other way. Today, they click “like.”

And yet, in 1938, those who chose not to know had an excuse. The Nazis did not openly declare their plan for extermination. There was still a sliver of shame in horror. The racial laws inspired fear. The yellow star was not popular. Hatred still needed masks.

Not today. Today Hamas says it clearly. They write it, broadcast it, show it live. October 7th was the most thoroughly documented and publicly announced genocide attempt in history. And those who now take Hamas’s side, or adopt its narrative, can no longer pretend they didn’t know.

In 1938, Hans Müller was a bank clerk in Munich. He wasn’t a monster. He wasn’t a Nazi official. But when Aryanization offered him the chance to buy a confiscated Jewish clothing store for a bargain, he didn’t hesitate. The original owner, Herr Levi, fled after Kristallnacht. Müller ran the store until 1945. He was never charged. He went back to the bank. His story remained in the gray zone: not hatred, but opportunism. Not crime, but convenience.

Today, those who chant “From the river to the sea” are not Hans Müller. They’re not petty bureaucrats pretending not to know. They are informed, educated, connected Western citizens. And if they choose to publicly delegitimize Israel, they do so not out of ignorance – but conviction.

On October 11, 2023, four days after the massacre, physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote:
“Israelis massacre Palestinians: no problem for the West.
Palestinians massacre Israelis: the West is totally shocked.
Decades and decades like that, and continuing.
If this is not racism, what is it?”

That sentence, written in the heat of the moment, is not just problematic: it is morally distorted, historically false, and ideologically aligned with a narrative that justifies terrorism.

Let’s break it down:
Rovelli equates Hamas’s deliberate terrorism (babies burned alive, systematic rapes, mass shootings) with Israel’s military operations – which, however tragic or controversial, have never aimed to deliberately massacre civilians. This kind of moral symmetry is the most effective weapon of disinformation: it numbs moral judgment.

The sentence implies a historical continuity in which Israel is always the aggressor and Palestinians always the victim. This is a selective, ideological reading that erases crucial events: the founding of Israel under attack, the Arab rejection of the 1948 compromise, Arafat’s terrorism, the intifadas, Hamas’s charter.

It also accuses the entire West of racism for mourning only Israeli victims. In fact, Western media are often tilted against Israel, with preemptive accusations, emotional images, and relentless campaigns. But above all: Rovelli wrote this just two days after the worst massacre of Jews since the Shoah. And his first instinct was not to condemn the perpetrators, but to attack those who mourned the victims.

This is a perfect example of complicit intellectualism: using pseudo-ethical language to normalize hatred against Israel while pretending to offer impartial analysis. And someone who speaks this way is not uninformed like Hans Müller. He is educated, informed, present. Which is why – if he supports or sanitizes Hamas – he is far more culpable.

And if that October 11 tweet was enough to mark Rovelli as a complicit intellectual, his most recent post goes even further: it turns him into an active defender of a terrorist organization.

In a Facebook post dated May 4, 2025, Rovelli accuses Italian journalist Alberto Faustini of spreading a “malicious and insidious lie” for having stated on the radio that “Hamas’s program is to exterminate the Jews.” According to Rovelli, this is “totally false.” He claims that Hamas rejected antisemitism in its 2017 charter and only fights the “Zionist project.” He goes so far as to quote passages from the document, as if that were enough to overturn decades of public declarations, videos, documents, and actions that clearly confirm the group’s genocidal intent.

What Rovelli does in that post is not only deny Hamas’s antisemitism: he attacks those who expose it, insinuates bad faith, and offers a “humanist” gloss on a massacre that is still drenched in blood. It’s a further and definitive step: from confused intellectual to justifier. The same Rovelli who, the day after October 7, accused the West of caring “only for Israelis,” now defends Hamas as an “official organization that rejects persecution of Jews.”

His gaze is that of an ideologue who has already decided whom to excuse and whom to blame. It doesn’t matter that Hamas tortured children and raped women. It doesn’t matter that those crimes were filmed and proudly shared. It doesn’t even matter that Hamas’s 1988 charter is still cited and that its leaders continue to say, openly: “We want to repeat October 7, again and again.”

What matters to Rovelli is preserving the narrative frame: Israel is the oppressor. Terrorists are “resisters.” And those who challenge the script – even just by telling the truth – must be discredited, silenced, delegitimized. Just like those few German intellectuals in the 1930s who dared to say that maybe, just maybe, the Jews weren’t the problem.

Those who support Hamas today, or echo its slogans, are not fighting for freedom. They are working to enable a new genocide.
And if in 1938 some people truly didn’t know, today that excuse is gone.
Anyone who stays silent – or worse, sings along – has already chosen which side of history to be on.
As for us, we know how to recognize collaborators. And we will remember them.