Well, Look Who’s Back: The Jewish Question
On April 25th — Italy’s Liberation Day, commemorating the end of Fascism and Nazi occupation — the usual clash surrounding the so-called Jewish Brigade, which in reality was a military formation operating under British, or at least Allied, command (but let us stop there, because this constant historical rebranding is itself part of the problem), is often portrayed as though it were merely the reflection of a recent controversy. As if the tensions that resurface every year were simply the product of current political disputes, or at most a consequence of the latest developments in the Middle East.
And yet it is precisely this interpretation that is misleading. Because the events and disputes surrounding April 25th are presented as though they were part of a modern, almost contemporary debate, when in reality they are rooted in far longer historical processes. “Recent,” in this context, often means the last ninety years — which may seem like a long time in the framework of day-to-day politics, but in historical terms remains a relatively brief fragment. And it is exactly this temporal compression, this tendency to treat deep and ancient issues as though they were born yesterday, that makes the debate so heated and yet so often superficial.
The issue, in fact, is what for roughly two millennia has been called “the Jewish question,” a matter that has passed through many different phases. It has shifted from being, broadly speaking, a religious problem to a political one; and with the rise of European nationalisms — a phase which, I would argue, is by no means truly resolved, merely softened in part by the European Union — this question has periodically resurfaced across Europe in different forms, depending on the nation involved, and on the particular character of its nationalism.
And if we look at it from a historical perspective, then the distinction between “Judaism” and “Zionism” does not represent the solution to the problem at all: if anything, it represents a reaction to the problem. The crucial point, however, is that not every reaction automatically constitutes a solution. Very often, on the contrary, a reaction is simply the symptom of a pre-existing fracture, not its resolution.
Why do I say this?
First of all, the opposition between “Zionism vs. Judaism” — alongside the older, exhausted, and almost ritualized vexata quaestio surrounding Judaism itself — is also the most obvious and predictable formulation possible. It is the simplest, almost textbook way of translating a far older issue into the modern categories of nationalism.
In nationalist terms, in fact, the question is immediately reduced to recognizable formulas: “Are they more Jewish, or more Israeli?” is the most banal, direct, and immediate version. But there are cruder variants, more political ones, and historically more revealing. For example: “In the event of war between our nation and Israel, for which army would they fight?”
And here the tone changes. Because this is no longer merely a question of identity: it is a formulation that directly evokes a very specific European tradition — something more French in character, more reminiscent of the Dreyfus Affair. Not by chance: the Dreyfus scandal revolved around a military officer, and therefore placed at its center precisely the suspicion of dual loyalty, of national belonging compromised by an identity perceived as somehow other. In essence, the language changes, but the mechanism remains recognizable: the doubt is no longer simply about who one is, but about to whom one would truly belong in the ultimate moment of crisis.
Onto this mechanism are then grafted both propaganda — nationalist or otherwise — and, let us say it plainly, a remarkable degree of widespread amateurism on all sides involved: from foreign nationalists to sectors within Jewish communities themselves. And it is precisely here that the problem, instead of becoming clearer, often ends up growing even more complicated.
I can offer a few examples.
When Francesca Albanese — the Italian UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories — went to Genoa to hold a conference that was supposed to focus on her analyses of the war economy and on the economic complicities connected to Israeli conflicts, the formal protest did not come from the Israeli embassy in Italy. Instead, it was Jewish communities that mobilized. Now, whatever one thinks of the specific merits of that protest, it is obvious how such a dynamic makes it far more difficult, in the public sphere, to sustain a sharp and immediately intelligible distinction between “Zionists” on one side and “Jews” as such on the other.
Because the moment subjects presenting themselves as representatives of Jewish communities intervene directly in a matter perceived as political and tied to Israel, the theoretical distinction risks becoming, in the eyes of many, far less clear. And this, regardless of intention, was not exactly an act of great political wisdom.
There is also a second point. This ferocity directed against Albanese appears, in certain respects, almost disproportionate when compared to the actual substance of her claims. What, in the end, was she supposed to have uncovered? That war is also an economic enterprise, and that around wars flourish interests, profits, industrial networks, and financial conveniences?
Frankly, this is hardly some apocalyptic revelation. It is a historical reality as old as war itself. It happens today, it happened in the past, and it has happened in virtually every conflict in human history. There is no obvious reason why Israel should be considered ontological immune to dynamics that have accompanied nearly every modern military apparatus.
And it is precisely here that excessive reaction risks producing the opposite effect from the one intended. Because overreaction, when it appears disproportionate, tends to reactivate ancient imaginary, toxic symbols, and historically dangerous associations: money, economic interests, “the devil’s dung,” to borrow a classical expression, and the ancient accusation of Jews as a financial elite or as a group inherently associated with wealth.
This is an old theme — almost tedious in its repetition — and precisely for that reason all the more insidious: because every poorly calibrated reaction risks not extinguishing it, but setting it back into circulation. And this is where political amateurism becomes dangerous: when, in the attempt to defend an identity or a cause, one ends up reactivating precisely the worst historical reflexes one claims to be fighting.
And there are also other details that are far from irrelevant.
For example, the increasingly inflated use of the accusation of antisemitism against virtually anyone who criticizes Israel — and, in certain cases, even Jewish communities when acting as political or representative subjects — has produced a rather obvious side effect: the accusation itself, through indiscriminate overuse, gradually begins to lose its specific weight.
The problem is simple enough: if anyone who dares express criticism automatically ends up beneath that label, then over time almost everyone acquires some form of symbolic “antisemitism conviction” in their public record. With the possible exception only of professional sycophants — those capable of surpassing the limits of political decency every time they open their mouths, so long as they do so in the approved direction.
Nevertheless , a category used this expansively inevitably deteriorates. If everything is antisemitism, then nothing is truly recognizable as such with any real clarity. And this does not strengthen the fight against genuine prejudice: if anything, it risks trivializing it.
The deeper issue is that these rhetorical strategies are not neutral at all, nor are they especially brilliant.
Take the formula: “Does Israel have the right to defend itself?”
Put that way, on an abstract level, the answer is almost compulsory: every state claims the right to self-defense. But that is not really the point. When this formula is used, after two years, to justify operations involving large-scale civilian deaths, then its implicit meaning changes radically. Because at that stage, one is no longer discussing the general principle of defense, but rather attempting to semantically stretch the concept of “defense” until it includes virtually any subsequent consequence.
And frankly, that is not exactly a masterpiece of dialectical construction.
The same applies to the endless refrain of “But what about October 6th?” — or whatever ritual invocation of the initial traumatic event is used as an automatic and permanent justification. Here too, the issue is not denying the horror of an attack, but transforming that horror into an indefinite suspension of every subsequent moral criterion.
To put it plainly: I am not opposed to the killing of thousands of children because I believe their parents, their governments, or their fellow citizens are all saints.
I am opposed to the killing of thousands of children because the killing of thousands of children is horrific.
Full stop.
And it is precisely here that many of these propagandist constructions seem to collapse with surprising ease: because they often try to shift the discussion toward identity, factional loyalties, historical precedents, or collective guilt, when in reality there exists an extraordinarily simple reply that almost immediately disarms them on moral grounds.
I do not know who designed these rhetorical strategies, but they certainly do not appear to be the work of genuine propaganda professionals. Because effective propaganda, as a rule, does not build arguments that can be dismantled by a single clear and linear response. When just a few words are enough to expose the fragility of the entire framework, it usually means that something in the rhetorical machinery was badly conceived from the start.
What I see, observing the entire debate, is that almost everyone — critics of Israel, defenders of Israel, and even part of Israeli propaganda itself — is still relying on arguments that are two centuries old, if not older.
The problem is not merely that these arguments are old. The deeper problem is that, precisely because they are old, they have already been traveled, analyzed, dismantled, reconstructed, and demolished again countless times. They are rhetorical structures that belong to eras in which information control functioned vertically, when propaganda could still hope to impose itself through relatively one-directional repetition.
But within an informational ecosystem like the present one — where propaganda is no longer a dominant voice but merely one drop in a relentless torrent of information, counter-information, historical archives, polemics, digital memory, and immediate rebuttal — “old” ends up meaning something very simple:
it no longer works.
Or at the very least, it no longer works in the same way.
Because if you use nineteenth-century or twentieth-century arguments today, in a hyperconnected public sphere, you are not merely reintroducing a narrative: you are also automatically reactivating all the criticisms, refutations, and demolitions that narrative has accumulated across generations. And this applies to every side.
Once the limits of these intersecting propagandas have been laid out, only then can one truly return to the events of April 25th.
What do I mean by this?
I mean that April 25th is not simply one commemoration among many. For the Italian Republic, it is a moment that, if not absolutely identitarian in the strictest sense, is at the very least perceived as foundational. It is one of the central civic rituals through which the current nation narrates to itself its own political and moral origin.
And here the question changes profoundly.
Because asking whether the Jewish Brigade does or does not belong within the celebrations on the side of the “founders” — that is, among those associated with the Resistance and with the birth of republican Italy — does not merely mean debating the symbolic presence of one group within a public parade.
In deeper terms, it means asking whether Jews can or cannot be perceived as an integral part of the Italian national founding process itself.
And this, precisely, is not a question born with Israel.
It does not begin in 1948. It does not begin with Gaza. It does not begin with contemporary Zionism.
It is a vastly older question.
Of course, those who propose present-day answers to an ancient question will inevitably try to frame those answers within the present. And so, those who do not want Jews included in the founding narrative of the Italian Republic are unlikely to pose the issue in its clearest historical terms: far more often, they will shift it onto the terrain of the present — into contemporary polemics, into Israel, into Zionism, into current conflicts.
But this is precisely the point: using contemporary categories does not necessarily mean that the underlying question is itself contemporary.
And so, those who do not want Jews included in the founding of the Italian Republic — while also acknowledging that how far the Jewish Brigade actually represents “the Jews” is itself something that should be discussed historically rather than automatically assumed — will still tend to use current events as language, as framework, or as pretext. Because it is in the present that certain positions seek legitimacy, even when their roots lie in much older questions.
You can get a broad preliminary sense of the matter here:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigata_Ebraica
But the real question remains: why?
I mean this: the Jewish diaspora is very ancient, but it is not the largest in history. Italy itself experienced an almost global-scale diaspora, with a number of emigrants vastly exceeding the number of Jews currently alive.
So .... “Why so much hatred?”
The answer is simple: Israel did not begin in 1948.
And by this I do not mean to argue about legitimacy, or Zionism, or rights. I mean something more fundamental: the founding process of a nation — at least the one that underlies nationalism — is not primarily a formal or bureaucratic historical process.
You do not go to a notary public to create a nation.
The founding process of a nation is, above all, a myth.
A “foundational myth.”
We know perfectly well that Romulus and Remus never existed, and that a wild canid does not nurse human infants — it is far more likely to devour them. And we know equally well that the popular image of the American Puritans as the true founders of the United States is, at best, a simplified civic legend: the United States was in reality founded by a group of political elites, including Freemasons, among whom there were also slave owners.
But that is beside the point: the founding act MUST refer back to myth.
Because within myth reside the values of the nation — those truths inscribed once and for all into a past that must be mythic, though not necessarily remote.
To make a nation exist, borders or armies are not enough.
All that is truly necessary is for a foundational myth to exist, and to be widely shared.
And one must admit that the Old Testament, as a foundational myth, worked extraordinarily well.
So well, in fact, that Jews have consistently perceived themselves as a Jewish nation, and perhaps more importantly, have often been perceived as such by others. In practical terms, Israel exists, even when it does not physically exist, within its own foundational myth.
Under such conditions, conflict with local nationalists was almost always inevitable.
Ultimately, the propagation of a foundational myth is equivalent to — or at the very least is often perceived as — the foundation of a nation.
The problem is that, normally, founding a nation within the territory of other nations is politically, so to speak, problematic.
If you go into any country — France, Russia, Poland, or virtually anywhere else — and proclaim that your community believes in its own distinct national founding myth, then on the level of public perception you have, at minimum, created an enclave; but more likely, in the eyes of many, you have founded a nation inside someone else’s home.
And it is precisely this perception that lies at the heart of the matter.
Because regardless of actual intentions, when a collective group is perceived as carrying an autonomous national continuity — distinct, separate, and rooted in its own myth of origin — local nationalism can very easily interpret it not as a simple minority, but as a politically separate presence.
A development which, politically speaking, is not always wise.
And above all, it does not always produce the desired results.
Because foundational myths do not exist in a vacuum: they inevitably enter into relationship, and sometimes into conflict, with the foundational myths already present in the territories where they spread. And when two narratives of national belonging are perceived as competing within the same political space, the resulting tension often becomes far less theoretical than many would prefer to believe.
As if that were not enough, the other nations in which you proclaim your own foundational myth already possess their own foundational myths as well.
And arriving with yours implies something rather obvious: that you do not believe in the local foundational myth, but in another one.
This, on the level of perception, is the core of the issue.
Because if a community presents itself within an already existing national space while carrying its own distinct founding narrative, it also inevitably communicates a certain distance from the original narrative of the place hosting it.
So you arrive in a land that perceives itself as born from its own national story — whether religious, historical, or symbolic — and instead declare that your deepest identity refers elsewhere, that your foundational myth is another one, and that this myth precedes, surpasses, or relativizes the local one.
I can tell you immediately: local nationalists are unlikely to appreciate this.
But local religious authorities will not necessarily appreciate it either.
Because national foundational myth, in Europe as elsewhere, has rarely been only a political matter: very often it has also been a question of religious legitimacy.
After Charlemagne, for example, kings were crowned by the Pope, and temporal power sought symbolic consecration through religious structure. Who better than an organized Church to legitimize a foundational myth?
And this is precisely where the conflict becomes more complex: because when an alternative foundational myth enters a space where one already exists, what emerges is not merely cultural difference, but possible symbolic competition.
In this sense, the problem can be summarized as follows: a subgroup within the population does not adopt the national foundational myth of the place as its ultimate reference point, but instead privileges another one — often far older than the modern state itself — simply because it adopts a different origin story.
And so the question, from the perspective of nationalism, tends to condense into one brutal but historically recurring formulation:
If they reject our foundational myth in favor of their own, are they truly “ours”?
As became abundantly clear once again this April 25th, in Milan, what emerged was a question that is not simply about the existence of the State of Israel as such, nor merely about its actions.
Because this question existed even before that — when Israel, as a modern state, did not exist at all.
Those who frame it exclusively as the product of “Israel/Hamas” or “Israel/Iran” conflicts are, above all, contemporary militants, inclined to translate far older problems into the immediate language of current geopolitics.
But the issue itself is, in reality, much older.
And it reappears — significantly enough — precisely on April 25th, the moment in which Italy celebrates the foundational myth of the Republic, “born from the Resistance” against Fascism and Nazi occupation.
Many foreigners may laugh at this myth, just as Italians themselves may look skeptically at King Arthur, or Romulus and Remus, recognizing them for what they are: foundational myths.
But that does not alter the essential point.
They remain foundational myths nonetheless.
And foundational myths, whether literally true or false, do not exist to describe history with notarial precision: they exist to found political identities, collective belonging, and legitimacy.
That is why the question resurfaces precisely there, within a foundational civic ritual, and not merely within international headlines.
Honestly, this is a very ancient, deeply layered problem, and one likely destined to reappear whenever groups carrying different foundational myths enter into tension with local ones.
And this is precisely the most uncomfortable point: the mere existence of the State of Israel — which, in theory, might have absorbed or resolved part of this tension — does not seem to have resolved it, nor even substantially softened it.
In certain respects, it may even have made it worse.
I would certainly refuse to discuss this as though it were simply a matter of Israel versus Hamas, or Israel versus Palestine.
To reduce everything to that, in my view, means compressing a far older and deeper question into immediate headlines, treating it as though it were merely the byproduct of a contemporary conflict.
What was visible instead was, more clearly, a clash between foundational myths.
Between origin narratives, deep-rooted forms of belonging, perceived identities, and political symbols that were not born yesterday and will not be exhausted by the latest news cycle.
And that is precisely why this question will not disappear easily.
Because conflicts between states can change form, soften, transform, or even come to an end. Europe itself, through the European Union, offers examples of former national antagonisms being politically reconfigured.
Conflicts between foundational myths, by contrast, tend to be far more persistent.
Because they touch the way different collectivities define themselves, their own origins, and their symbolic right to exist within a given historical narrative.
