‘Hava Nakba’: Italy’s May Day hits a new low

Nothing says workers’ dignity quite like turning a Jewish folk song into a Hamas anthem. But that’s precisely what happened in Rome, where the band I Patagarri, previously known only to their cousins and a handful of squatters, grabbed their 15 minutes of infamy by chanting “Free Palestine” to the tune of Hava Nagila.

It took place at the Concerto del Primo Maggio, May Day music festival, ostensibly a celebration of labor. In practice, the event has long since morphed into a sprawling open-air rally for whatever causes the radical Italian left happens to be peddling that year. Originally conceived as a celebration of workers’ rights, the concert is now little more than a stage for collectivist nostalgia and revolutionary cosplay. What started as a musical tribute to the dignity of work has become, under the guise of cultural expression, a fogna—a cesspool—of antagonistic militancy.

This year marked a return to the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano, the traditional venue where the Italian trade unions CGIL, CISL, and UIL sponsor hours of live music and slogans underwritten, as always, by public money. It’s become the Glastonbury of grievance: part concert, part soapbox, and increasingly a showcase for posturing radicals who wouldn’t last five minutes in a factory but are eager to chant slogans about Palestine, climate, capitalism, or whatever the algorithm feeds them that morning.

Then, I Patagarri, a band whose name alone sounds like something invented for an episode of The Simpsons set in Naples. They took the stage and launched into their act of cultural vandalism, singing “Free Palestine” over the melody of Hava Nagila—a klezmer classic that has survived pogroms, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and even Eurovision, but perhaps not this. The crowd cheered. The organizers smiled. And the message was clear: antisemitism is no longer a bug in this festival—it’s a feature.

If the theft of Hava Nagila wasn’t enough, reports from across Italy confirmed that this year’s May Day festivities included the usual quota of flag burning. In Turin, demonstrators torched Israeli, and American flags. As usual, for the left and its fellow travelers, Palestine is just a pretext, a way to rebrand stale ideological reflexes: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and third-world romanticism dressed up as moral urgency.

What’s notable is not the anti-Zionism per se, but the unseriousness of it all. This is less political commitment and more protest chic. These aren’t people with a plan; they’re people with a Spotify playlist. I Patagarri’s stunt wasn’t an act of courage. It was a TikTok-ready provocation dressed up as conscience. A gimmick, piggybacking on a conflict they scarcely understand, to earn relevance they couldn’t achieve with their music alone.

So now Hava Nagila has joined the ranks of co-opted symbols, repurposed to serve causes its creators never intended and would certainly find appalling. One wonders what’s next: a “Free Assange” remix of Avinu Malkeinu? Or perhaps a BDS-themed hora?

Let’s be clear: this wasn’t cultural criticism. It wasn’t protest art. It was desecration, off-key, unoriginal, and subsidized. But I Patagarri got what they came for: a fleeting spike in Spotify streams and a footnote in the long, embarrassing annals of Italian radical theatre.

Their moment will fade, as all gimmicks do. But the stain they leave behind, the normalization of hate dressed up as performance, sticks. And maybe that’s the real tragedy: that antisemitism no longer even bothers to wear a mask. It sings.

And sometimes, appallingly, it sings in Hebrew.