Italian Academia: ‘Zionists Out!’

Last night on my way home, I turned onto the famous Via Toledo in the heart of Naples and watched as protesters chanted “I-N-T-I-F-A-D-A!”.

Other chants included “Israel is a murderous state!”, “Death, Death to the IOF” (this one, of course, was in English), “Israel is criminal, Palestine is immortal!” and “Zionists: Get out of Napoli!”.

Thousands joined the march over the course of the evening to oppose Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza City, and to support the Sumud Flotilla.

Among the bystanders next to me watching from the side, most clapped along except for a couple that I immediately recognized as Israeli tourists. I heard their Hebrew; the familiar sounds jumping out at me amid the cacophony of a protest. Worried, I told them to go in the other direction and don’t speak Hebrew with one another too loudly until they’d cleared the protest.

Making my way home through the sea of Palestinian flags, flare sticks and chants glorifying “the resistance”, I hadn’t yet heard that earlier in the day a Political Science and Comparative Law Professor at the University of Pisa had reportedly been assaulted by Pro-Palestine activists who “occupied” his class and demanded “Zionists out” due to his insufficiently Pro-Palestine views. While not actually a Zionist advocate or activist, Professor Rino Casella isn’t “pro-Pal” and doesn’t support Italian universities severing ties with Israel — thus making himself a target for those who demand Italian universities be “Zionist-free” zones.

Casella ended the day in the hospital with a head injury and bruises.

Elsewhere, in Turin, Pini Zorea, an Israeli guest lecturer at the Polytechnic University of Turin, ended his day by getting fired. After student groups posted a video on social media of Zorea saying that the IDF was the most moral army in the world, the university’s Rector promptly summoned and suspended him.

Of course, if Zorea had praised Hamas or the IRGC — as some Italian academics and student groups openly do — there would have been no controversy.

The story is circulating widely among Pro-Palestine Italian student groups, outraged that “a Zionist” was even allowed to teach at the university.

When I first arrived in Italy to begin my doctorate last December I naively didn’t understand why I was clearly being ignored and isolated. It didn’t occur to me that people who hadn’t even heard my opinions or knew my background story would boycott me. At Tel Aviv University, during my B.A. and M.A., my classmates always ran the gamut from anti-occupation leftists who voted for the Hadash or Balad to the mainstream Yesh Atid crowd to religious Zionists who voted for Smotrich or Ben Gvir (yes, they exist at TAU). Living in Jerusalem, I davened at a modern Haredi shul, had one chavruta who followed Rav Thau and another who was non-binary and learning at Pardes, spent time with Palestinian friends in Palestinian cities in the West Bank and always took part in the annual LGBTQ Pride. I’ve never lived in a world in which our identities or politics determine with whom we can speak or be friends.

However, over the months, after being asked to leave local businesses and restaurants around the universities in Napoli unless I explicitly declared I’m an anti-Zionist and having the distinct displeasure of getting to know the obsessively anti-Zionist student groups that dominate the university’s buildings and general culture with an uncompromising intolerance and virtually no opposition, the pieces came together.

I realized that my existence as an Israeli (I’m also very obviously American, but that doesn’t matter to anyone here) at the university was not only deeply problematic for some student groups, fellow doctoral candidates and faculty, I also represented what they believe to be a tainted ties between the university and Israel. I wasn’t just a guy who moved here from Jerusalem to work on an interesting project comparing late ancient Zoroastrian and Jewish texts; for them, I’m a symbol of collaboration with genocide.

For Pro-Palestine student groups in Italy, there is not even a basic understanding of what Zionism is or isn’t — and certainly not what it means to Jews or Israelis today. They have no ideological context, no historical background and no tools to differentiate between reality and propaganda. For them, anything that is not explicitly, unequivocally and consistently anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian (including the right of Palestinians to use violence against Israelis) is “Zionist” — and nothing could be worse.

For them, “Zionist” is synonymous with racism, fascism, apartheid, oppression, war, genocide and small children being buried under rubble. That’s where it begins and ends; no further discussion. In a toxic combination of old Soviet and Pan-Arabist propaganda, traditional Catholic cultural antisemitism, and Palestinian nationalism, Zionism is the quintessential evil in the world. This is a core dogma of the new Palestinismo (i.e., Palestinianism) sweeping Italy, and any kind of dissent on this point, even if only in the form of adding nuance or historical context, is met with a fierce shut down.

The same kind of shutdown we saw yesterday in Pisa — and of which, we will unfortunately see more of as Italian universities start the academic year.

Tragically, rather than channeling their apparent passion and interest in Israel/Palestine to support permanently ending this horrific war, achieve relief and aid for Gazans, release the Israeli hostages and help develop long-term solutions for Israelis and Palestinians, many Italian academics and students are only interested in ideological purity and a disturbing dogmatic intolerance of any diversity on the question of Palestine. For too many, the urgent task is not building a new post-Hamas and post-Bibi reality for Israelis and Palestinians, but rather launching an inquisition to cleanse their universities of the alleged great cosmic evil responsible for all the ills of the world, i.e., Zionists.