Liberation Day, Without the Jews Who Fought For It

In Milan, on April 25, 2026, during the celebrations for Liberation Day, a crowd screamed “siete saponette mancate” at Jews marching in the parade. The phrase means, roughly, that the Jews should have been rendered into soap by the Nazis. It was directed at members of the Brigata Ebraica (Jewish Brigade), the descendants of the same soldiers who fought to liberate this country in 1945. 

I am Italian. I write from Italy, where the 25th of April is meant to be the most sacred date on our civil calendar, the day Mussolini’s regime collapsed. For decades, that day belonged to everyone who had fought the Nazi occupation: communists, Catholics, monarchists, liberals, and yes, Jews. This year, the Jewish Brigade was forced out of the parade by people who call themselves antifascists. The Jewish delegation, which included Luciano Belli Paci, son of Liliana Segre (Auschwitz survivor and senator for life), was blocked by hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters. The police eventually escorted them out of the procession. The same day in Rome, Matteo Hallissey, president of the Italian Radicals, was sprayed in the face with pepper spray by activists of Cambiare Rotta, a far-left student group. His offense: he was carrying a Ukrainian flag. The crowd that surrounded the Jewish Brigade was not an organised antifa squad. It was the bulk of the procession: ordinary marchers, with Palestinian flags, who decided that Jews were not welcome.

The hypocrisy is what I want to write about, because the historical record is not in dispute, and almost no Italian newspaper today will state it plainly.

The Jewish Brigade was a real military unit. Around 5,000 Jewish volunteers from Mandatory Palestine enlisted in the British Eighth Army, fought across the Senio River in the Spring 1945 offensive, advanced toward Bologna, and helped liberate the country I live in. Italy awarded the unit a gold medal for military valor. Moreover, roughly 2,000 Italian Jews fought in the partisan brigades. The Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia, which directed the Resistance in the north, had two Jews among its five leaders: Emilio Sereni and Leo Valiani. The Jews who marched today in Milan are the descendants, biological and political, of the people who liberated Italy from Nazism.

Now consider the other side of the demonstration. The Palestinian flag that was waved everywhere is, of course, not the same flag that flew over Berlin in 1941. But the man who is rightly considered the father of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, spent the war years as Hitler’s guest in Berlin. He met Hitler in November 1941 and lived on a Nazi stipend until 1945. Husseini helped raise the 13th Waffen-SS “Handschar” Division in Bosnia, where over 20,000 Muslim recruits were enlisted under the joint authority of Heinrich Himmler and the Mufti himself. He broadcast anti-Jewish propaganda on Nazi radio to the Arab world. In May 1943, he personally requested Ribbentrop to halt the planned emigration of 4,000 Jewish children and 500 adults from Bulgaria to Palestine. The Mufti was, in the strict and documented sense, an Axis collaborator. Mahmoud Abbas has called him a pioneer. Yasser Arafat referred to him as his mentor and pledged that the PLO would continue in the path he had set. 

So we are left with this picture. On one side of the demonstration: the descendants of partisans, the heirs of the Brigade that crossed the Senio with the Eighth Army, the children of survivors. On the other side: a crowd waving the flag of a national movement whose founding figure spent the war recruiting Muslim SS volunteers in the Balkans. The first group was thrown out. The second was the parade.

The leadership of ANPI, the Italian partisan veterans’ association (which has very critical positions on Israel), did not do the basic thing a serious organization should have done. It did not stop the march and refused to continue until the Jewish delegation was readmitted. Its national president, Gianfranco Pagliarulo, instead suggested that the Jewish Brigade had “violated agreements”. Walker Meghnagi, president of the Milan Jewish community, replied that this is incitement to antisemitism. He is correct. The Italian Jewish institutions had already foreseen this. UCEI, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, withdrew its formal participation in the parade weeks ago, partly because the 25th fell on Shabbat and partly because, in 2026, Italian Jews still need a police cordon to walk in their own civic ceremony. 

Italy did not invent its antifascist memory in order to host a movement that, on the most important day of that memory, expels Jews and assaults people carrying Ukrainian flags. If the 25th of April still means anything, it cannot mean this. The Brigade marched in 1945 against the people who screamed “viva Hitler” in the streets. Yesterday, in Milan, a crowd screamed “viva Hitler” at them.