By Gianluca Solera, advisory board member
Years ago, a Palestinian writer, we were in Ramallah, told me that every time Israel comes with good news, you have to worry about the bad news hidden behind it. She had given me the keys to understanding how things work, and I didn’t realise it. It was 2005, Arafat had disappeared, and the second Intifada was coming to an end. It’s only today that I realise it, but not because of some brilliant personal gift, but because everything is happening in broad daylight.This is a war for land – dreaming of Greater Israel – and the unfortunate people who still live there will have to be driven out, by hook or by crook. By bombing all the infrastructure (in Gaza) or demolishing their homes (in the West Bank). Today, with an increasingly theocratic government at the helm of the Jewish state, religious exaltation accompanies firearms and calls for racial deportation. As theologian Mandreoli describes, it seems that in the midst of post-modernity, we are faced with a perverse alliance between religious sentiment, reference theologies and the perception of land, ethnicity and a superior and exclusive “us”. «When, as we heard in Hebron, someone claims that it is a religious duty – perceived as directly given by God – to take back all the land, the presence of the other becomes a demonic presence, to be eliminated with devout and scrupulous compliance».
It is in broad daylight that, when convoys carrying food supplies enter the Strip, they are distributed exclusively at the southern border of the Strip in order to force people to leave their neighbourhoods. It is in broad daylight that, when Israel agrees to a ceasefire, it is to undermine the dignity of the Palestinians, who are not even recognised as having the right to demand an end to hostilities. It is likewise clear that, when the Israeli Prime Minister invites from the White House to carefully consider the new American administration’s proposals to grant the Gazans new land with services and better standards of living, it is to prepare for their deportation. All in plain sight, while we become accustomed to this state of impunity, of the untouchability of the Jewish state at a time when war crimes are being committed, and the next crimes against humanity are being prepared. We become accustomed and addicted to using double standards that trivialise evil, defined as such only when it comes from a certain side.
Let us consider the concept of terrorism. Hamas is designated by Western governments as a terrorist movement, and many politicians and media constantly repeat this, but Hamas is first and foremost a national liberation movement (Hamas is an acronym for ‘Islamic Resistance Movement’), which has been using terrorist tactics, what is rightly and necessarily reprehensible and condemnable. The difference is not insignificant, because by not recognising the Palestinians’ right to defend themselves and take up arms in their struggle against military occupation, their right to self-determination is denied from the outset. On the other hand, Simon Taylor defines state terrorism as «state agents using threats or acts of violence against civilians, marked by a callous indifference to human life, to instill fear in a community beyond the initial victim for the purpose of preventing a change or challenge to the status quo». These acts of violence can include both the types of state violence that some argue should be considered terrorism, such as genocide, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, disappearances, detention without trial and torture, and more widely accepted methods of terror, including bombings and targeted killings. I leave it to you to associate these practices with those carried out by the Jewish state from 7 October 2023 onwards. However, you will never find a sentence in the newspapers associating Israel with state terrorism.
So we live in a world where everything is duplicitous and nothing is certain, to the advantage of the strongest and the law of the jungle.
This duplicity destroys the foundations of the rule of law, democracy itself in Israel and in our nations, and the roots of our Mediterranean culture.
A new bill is rapidly advancing in the Knesset and threatens to destroy what remains of civil society in Israel. If passed, it will impose an 80% tax on any foreign funding received by Israeli NGOs: a deliberate and targeted attack on human rights and peace organisations. It is crucial to emphasise that the law would apply selectively only to organisations deemed “political”, with the determination left to the discretion of the government. This means that groups defending Palestinian rights, documenting abuses related to the Occupation or promoting peace and equality will be taxed into collapse, while settler organisations and institutions aligned with government policy, many of which also receive funding from abroad, will be exempt. The complaint comes from Combatants for Peace, the only Israeli-Palestinian movement active on the ground in the West Bank, which brings together Palestinians from the Occupied Territories and Israelis in joint non-violent resistance.
On the other hand, even in Arab countries such as Egypt, the right to dissent and protest is suppressed in the name of state interests, and if a group of citizens takes to the streets to protest against the genocide in Gaza, they risk arrest, as Egyptian intercultural dialogue activist Rasha S. confirmed to me by telephone last week.
Meanwhile, French writer Jean Hatzfeld, a Jew and author of works on the massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda, denounces that with the destruction of Gaza, Israel is destroying Judaism, one of the founding cultures of the Mediterranean: «I fear the worst. It is a threat hanging over the Palestinian people, who are being massacred, but it is also a renunciation by Israel of what has been. We are facing a turning point in the destiny of these two peoples, in which Israel may destroy itself by renouncing Jewish values. By destroying Gaza, Israel is destroying Judaism. It is trivial to say this, because every Jew can appropriate Judaism in his own way, after interpreting the religious texts, whether he is a believer or an atheist, but for me it is first and foremost a humanist philosophy».
When evil becomes commonplace, when institutions intervene in favour of Ukraine but remain immobile on Palestine, when the circles of repression of fundamental freedoms widen, you don’t know how far the rule of law will succumb, because nothing is certain anymore, everything can be trampled on. Do you remember that text by the Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller written during Nazi Germany, which began with «First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist», and ended with «One day they came for me, and there was no one left to protest»?
In an interview published on Republic Day, 2 June 2025, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs reportedly stated that only the Americans can stop Netanyahu. Thank you for pointing that out. So shall we just let it happen because nothing else would work? And keep exporting our weapons over there? Is this our foreign policy line?
Dozens of initiatives are undertaken every week by individuals, companies and citizens: the latest, so wonderful even for an adopted Florentine like me, is that of 30 May, when the Unicoop Firenze shareholders’ meeting decided that Israeli products would no longer be sold in its supermarkets. Then there are also striking initiatives such as that of the Freedom Flotilla‘s Madleen vessel, which set sail from the port of Catania on 1 June loaded with humanitarian aid, with the intention of breaking the Israeli siege around Gaza. Conscience, the previous ship, ended its journey in Malta a month earlier, after being hit by a drone (believed to be Israeli, although Israel has remained silent): I doubt that Madleen will be able to continue on to Gaza.
So can governments really do nothing? Of course they can, and not only by recognising the State of Palestine, freezing arms sales, imposing sanctions on Israel or suspending cooperation programmes. If we are truly witnessing genocide, much more must be done if we do not want the impunity we grant Israel to end up destroying our democracies as well.
And the first thing to do is to force the blockade around Gaza to allow humanitarian aid to enter. A coalition of governments should send their naval cargo ships carrying humanitarian aid, escorted by the navy. After all, weren’t France, the US and the UK quick to bomb Yemen last year to “defend international trade” in the Red Sea? We puff out our chests and don Top Gun jackets in the face of the Houthis, a group with ridiculous military capabilities, while we bow our heads, winking, apologising, threatening without taking steps towards Israel. Oh, what a shame…
Why is no one proposing to escort humanitarian aid to Gaza, leaving private citizens to take on the burden of setting sail on a yacht at the mercy of the dangers of the sea and drones? When I ask myself this question, a terrible pain grips my stomach, because the only answer I can give myself is: a banal mixture of complicity and submission.
The result is an inability to defend the constitutional values on which a democratic country like Italy is founded. And that pain grows because you feel terribly alone and lost, between the people dying in Gaza and the silent contamination of our own country by the banality of evil.
«First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist».
Gianluca Solera is an Italian activist, writer and civil society development professional. He bears a surname of Sephardic origin and he considers himself a man of the frontier. He was policy advisor in the European parliament, and has been living and working in the Middle East and North Africa during many years.