Italy’s left embraces Hamas in parliament motion

If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the applause from Doha and Tehran. In a rare display of unity, Italy’s far-left coalition—Partito Democratico (PD), Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S), and Alleanza Verdi Sinistra (AVS)—has tabled a motion demanding immediate recognition of a Palestinian state. But not just any state. Not the state rising out of a negotiated peace. The fantasy of a state cobbled together from slogans, abstractions, and the usual contempt for Israel that animates Europe’s radical left.

The motion is everything one would expect from a political class that substitutes indignation for realism. It calls on the government to recognise Palestine now, without delay, without waiting for a peace process, and without conditioning that recognition on anything resembling democratic governance or the renunciation of violence. No roadmap, no requirements, no prerequisites—just recognition on demand.

According to the text, Italy must take the lead in pushing other European countries to follow suit. The authors invoke the two-state solution, but they show no interest in the only path that could plausibly get there: direct negotiations and mutual compromise. Instead, the motion frames Israel as the exclusive source of the conflict, presenting Palestinian statelessness as an injustice inflicted, rather than a consequence of repeated rejections of peace offers and the continued entrenchment of armed groups.

The language is predictably loaded. It condemns the “occupation,” denounces Israel’s military operations, and calls for an end to all arms sales to Jerusalem. There is no parallel condemnation of Hamas, no mention of the October 7 massacres, no recognition that the group still holds Israeli hostages. The phrase “terrorism” appears only in reference to Israeli actions; the perpetrators of rape, mutilation, and kidnapping are nowhere to be found in the moral accounting.

Even the internal contradictions are passed off as virtue. The motion affirms Israel’s “right to exist” in one line and undermines it in the next, by erasing any security consideration or territorial claim that might justify its current defensive posture. It pretends that October 7 is either ancient history or a misunderstanding. It reduces Israel’s effort to dismantle Hamas infrastructure to an act of collective punishment, without asking what responsibility lies with the group that embeds itself among civilians while pursuing genocidal aims.

This is not a peace initiative. It is a political gesture designed for maximal visibility and minimal thought. The recognition of Palestine, in the context laid out by the motion, is less about diplomacy than atonement—for colonialism, for Western hypocrisy, for whatever historical grievance the left happens to be nursing this week. The Palestinian cause serves as the vessel into which all these frustrations are poured, while the reality of Palestinian governance—authoritarianism, corruption, violent factionalism—is conveniently ignored.

Nor is this about Italy. The motion’s real audience is the transnational activist circuit, the NGOs, the Brussels functionaries, and the editorial boards who treat Israel’s continued existence as a provocation. For the PD and its fellow travellers, it’s a way of rebranding old ideological instincts—anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, third-world romanticism—under the banner of international law and human rights, terms they drain of meaning by deploying them so selectively.

One might expect a motion on such a delicate issue to at least consider European strategic interests or the security implications for Italy’s Mediterranean partnerships. Instead, the proposal reads like a freshman essay—emotionally insistent, historically vague, and devoid of any practical consequence beyond stoking divisions. What’s being called for is not peace, but a posture: virtue signaling, achieved at the cost of strategic coherence.

In the end, the PD-M5S-AVS alliance has done what Europe’s far-left does best: stage a ritual of purification in which Israel is cast as the eternal aggressor, the Palestinians as eternal victims, and those who complicate that narrative—whether Israeli centrists, Arab moderates, or dissident Palestinians—as irrelevant.

This is not a roadmap to peace. It’s a letter of endorsement for the worst actors in the conflict. And it shows, once again, that for a certain strain of Italian politics, no cause is too violent, no movement too theocratic, so long as it shares their favourite enemy.

Hamas doesn’t need to pursue victory. The Italian left does it for them.