Italy marches again—and still against the Jews

The rallies are billed as protests for peace. So were the ones in the 1930s. Then too, the chants were loud, the placards moral, and the target unmistakable. Europe has a new uniform now: intersectional, photogenic, hashtag-ready, but the script hasn’t changed.

On June 7, 2025, a major pro-Palestinian march is scheduled in Rome. The demonstration is organized by various activist groups and the left parties (PD, AVS, 5 Stars), and is expected to draw significant participation. The rally aims to protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza, with slogans and banners calling for a ceasefire and accusing Israel of genocide. But the protestors of June 7 are not pleading with Hamas to lay down arms or release hostages. They are not marching for Palestinian democracy or the dismantling of theocratic militia rule. They are calling for “Israel to stop”—in effect, to stop surviving. They are demanding a ceasefire with those who, by charter and by practice, believe every Jew, from Tel Aviv to Turin, must cease to exist.

That’s what makes the Il Riformista declaration so vital—it cuts through the moral fog with the clarity Europe keeps avoiding. The declaration published today in the Italian daily newspaper is not a “petition.” It is an act of political defiance. A line drawn. At a time when the European intelligentsia trips over itself to rationalise pogroms, the 620 signatories (but new signatories continue to join—journalists, professors, lawyers, priests, Jews and gentiles) refuse to mumble their way into moral equivalence. They write plainly: October 7 was a massacre. And they identify its ideological authors: not “the occupation,” not “desperation,” but the Iranian-backed genocidal antisemitism of Hamas.

“This is the manifesto Europe was too cowardly to write in 1941,” says Fiamma Nirenstein, the Italian-Israeli journalist who promoted the declaration.

In the eyes of the West’s bien-pensants, protesting against “the war in Gaza” is an act of humanitarian concern.

The Il Riformista signatories are not engaging in the sentimental liturgy of “both sides.” They mourn every civilian life, but they are unambiguous about responsibility: Hamas, not Benjamin Netanyahu, started this war. Hamas, not Israel Katz, hides behind its own civilians. Hamas, not the IDF, made mass death a strategy. And the anti-Zionist euphemisms offered by the ICC and its sympathizers in Europe are, at best, a fig leaf for impotence, at worst, a diplomatic co-sign of terror.

There is a reason these words must be spoken now, and in Italian. This continent has form. Jews are used to the aftermath: apologies, museums, commemorations, one generation too late. But history does not repeat itself, it simply waits for intellectuals to forget what happened last time. The slogans scrawled on Jewish storefronts, the public calls to boycott Jewish businesses, the refusal of institutions to protect Jews in their streets. All of it has precedent. And all of it is being excused in the name of “justice for Gaza.” But, if Gaza moves you, but Sudan, Syria, the Yazidi, and the Uyghurs never did, you’re not driven by conscience. You’re just looking for a free pass to go after Israel—and the Jews. Netanyahu is your excuse. 

The declaration ends with a warning, delivered with dignity but not passivity: If the European conscience does not wake up, the antisemitism it has tolerated will again become the antisemitism it regrets. Perhaps too late.

This time, however, the Jews are not asking to be protected. They are speaking. And they are naming names.