It’s time to wake up: We are faced with a wave of catastrophic antisemitism, worse than any since the 1930s, a complete collapse of a society supposedly dedicated to human rights. The wave has resulted in violence against people of all ages and walks of life, against property and schools, creating a totalitarianism of hate and prejudice.
In Italy, where I was born and am visiting, the courageous honorary consul of Israel in Florence, Marco Carrai—a Christian—is being ruthlessly persecuted, besieged by demonstrations and abuse both physical and rhetorical, accused of remaining silent “on the massacre of children in Gaza.” He is the president of a children’s hospital, yet a terrorist ready to throw a Molotov cocktail at the consulate has been discovered by police. The “demonstrators” have made no mention of the Israeli children massacred by Hamas. Many of them openly state that the massacres never happened at all.
Antisemitism in Italy is becoming a flood. According to the Fondazione CDEC-Observatory on Antisemitism, Italy saw 454 antisemitic incidents in 2023, compared to 241 in 2022. In Italy’s leading daily Corriere della Sera, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was just accused by the secretary of the main left-wing party Elly Schlein of preparing a “new massacre” in the Hamas stronghold of Rafah, as if destroying Hamas’s last redoubt were not a strategic objective but the target of Netanyahu’s sadistic obsessions.
Indeed, to the media, there is only this blood libel. The war that has been forced upon Israel by 13,000 missiles, the slaughter of over 1,200 people, the rape and mutilation of women and children, the kidnapping of over 300, and all the other atrocities of Oct. 7, does not exist. A war fought in 800 km of tunnels against an Islamic Nazi group with 30,000 terrorists, weapons and weapons factories in civilian structures, command centers beneath the headquarters of the collaborationist U.N. agency UNRWA, and an entire population to use as a human shield; a population from which Hamas steals the so precious humanitarian supplies that were so demanded from Israel by all the world, and among whom the kidnapped are hidden.
What of the Israelis displaced from their kibbutzim, the families deprived of their loved ones, and the soldiers fighting without rest for months? They do not exist either. They are Jews, so they are erased. There is nothing else in the news, in politics, on the screens but the blood libel. Pure antisemitism everywhere.
Thankfully Israel is not allowing itself to be erased. Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, for example, fought back when the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur (read collaborator) on “the occupied Palestinian territories,” Francesca Albanese, engaged in the vilest antisemitism. French President Emmanuel Macron, she said, was wrong to call the Oct. 7 massacre antisemitic. The massacre was, she raged, caused by Israeli oppression. It appears that she believes Israelis deserve to be murdered, raped, and kidnapped. Her cynicism and sadism know no bounds.
To Albanese, Israelis are nothing. Therefore Katz has rightly banned her from entering the Israel she hates so much. To her, there is only the inestimable “suffering” of the Palestinians, which justifies anything and everything—even a generation of new Hitlers.
Katz demanded Albanese be fired, saying, “The time of Jewish silence in the face of such misrepresentations has passed. We must stand strong and vocal against such narratives.” This resolve in the face of Albanese’s racism was heartening and true.
He, like other Israelis and Jews, knows that the threat posed by antisemitism is global, as it was in Hitler’s time. No one understood this back then. We must ensure that they do so now.