Italian Fascists’ Love Affair With Israel Started Long Before Giorgia Meloni

Few nations have such a disconnect between the public and the state when it comes to Palestine as Italy. The Italian government is one of just three – the others are Germany and the United States – that have continued to supply major conventional weapons to Israel since 2020. Alongside attack helicopters, naval guns and parts for Israel’s F-35 fighter jets, Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni has continued to provide diplomatic cover to her Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, refusing to take even the symbolic step of recognising the (as yet mostly nominal) Palestinian state. The Italian people, meanwhile, have been full-throated in their support for Palestinian liberation.

The most recent Global Sumud Flotilla contained nearly 50 Italian activists, including four elected politicians. As the boats left the port at Genoa, they were saluted by a crowd of more than 40,000 people. But Meloni dismissed them as “irresponsible” propagandists, speculating that “maybe the suffering of Palestinians isn’t their real priority”. A representative of an Italian dockworkers’ union threatened to “shut down all of Europe” if the flotilla lost contact with the mainland. It wasn’t an empty threat.

When Israel illegally intercepted the boats in mid-October, the public response in Italy was gargantuan. In September, a general strike called by five grassroots trade unions saw over a million people take to the streets demanding the release of the flotilla activists, blocking transport routes from Milan to Palermo. Meloni denounced the protestors as “hooligans” and joked that they were taking “a long weekend disguised as a revolution”

While it might not seem surprising that a rightwing leader is lining up alongside Israel, Meloni’s support for Israel has a unique origin: neither German guilt nor American imperialism, nor even (or at least not solely) the Islamophobic mania of the rest of the European right. Her support tells a specifically Italian story, one that begins with the interwoven efforts to rebuild the Italian state and the Italian right after the second world war.

Funerals for fascists.

In response to fascist Italy’s defeat/liberation in April 1945, the state embarked on two complementary projects of absolution: forgetting fascism and celebrating the resistance. In 1946, the new government offered a wide-ranging amnesty for both fascists and partisans for crimes committed during the war, elevating national unity over justice for complicity in the Holocaust. Throughout the 1950s, leading fascists were mourned in high-profile, public funerals. In 1954, the funeral of fascist military leader Rodolfo Graziani – the “butcher of Fezzan” who led Mussolini’s invasions of Libya and Ethiopia, authorising the massacre of thousands in the process – drew more than 100,000 people to the church of Saint Bellarmino in Rome.

In 1957, former dictator Benito Mussolini’s corpse was finally interred in his family’s crypt at Predappio, with his widow dressed in black and surrounded by a forest of Roman salutes. The crypt is now open all year round for visitors, and the tourist website makes no mention of Mussolini’s many crimes but does carry a terrifying quote from Il Duce himself: “Freedom without order and without discipline means dissolution and catastrophe”.

Meanwhile, the Italian state set about rehabilitating many other fascists. The lawyer and virulent antisemite Gaetano Azzariti had chaired Mussolini’s “tribunal for the race” in the 1930s, used to determine people’s racial identity, Jews especially. The postwar government invited him to be justice minister, and he ended his career as the president of Italy’s constitutional court.

Alongside this forgetting, there was also an effort to build a new political culture that was explicitly anti-fascist. The start of allied occupation was celebrated as “liberation day” (festa della liberazione). A new constitution was designed to severely curtail the power of the state. Streets were renamed after martyrs like Giacomo Matteotti, the secretary of the Unitary Socialist party kidnapped and assassinated by Mussolini’s secret police. Openly fascist parties were kept out of power in Italy for decades.

“Active neutrality.”

As part of this effort to rebuild the Italian state, successive governments attempted to establish an independent foreign policy, including an autonomous approach to the question of Israel and Palestine. Aldo Moro, former prime minister of Italy and one of the leading Christian Democrat politicians from the 1940s through to the 1970s, described this approach as one of “active neutrality” (equidistanza attiva). Throughout the 1960s, Moro campaigned to bring international attention to the conditions faced by Palestinian refugees displaced by Jewish militias during the Nakba. This was never a purely humanitarian effort: Moro insisted on the importance of a political solution, travelling to Morocco and Egypt in 1970 in an attempt to build support for regional negotiations. After the Yom Kippur war in 1973, Moro shifted closer to the Palestinian side, attempting to draw a line between Italian and American foreign policy and calling for a Palestinian state on pre-1967 borders.

There was a powerful element of realpolitik in Moro’s policy. Bettino Craxi, leader of the Italian Socialist party and another key politician of the period, saw the reformed Italian state as a regional power and was determined to maintain friendly relations with all nations around the Mediterranean basin, including the Arab states of the Middle East. Alongside these diplomatic efforts, the Italian state was also willing to work with the Palestinian resistance movement itself. After a Fatah attack on Rome’s Fiumicino airport in 1973 left 34 people dead, Moro approached the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) to offer Palestinians freedom to traffic weapons through the country in exchange for no longer targeting Italy with hijackings and bombings. It’s a bitter irony that this pact only came to light as part of a retrospective investigation into weapons deals between the PLO and the Brigate Rosse, the leftwing terrorist group who kidnapped and executed Moro in 1978.

Over the following decades, this pro-Palestinian culture became deeply embedded in Italian politics. As late as 2006, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, an elderly Giulio Andreotti, leader of the Christian Democrats’ right wing and seven-times prime minister of Italy, took to the senate floor to claim sympathy for Hezbollah, saying: “I believe that any one of us, if we have been born in a concentration camp and for 50 years had had no prospect of giving our children a future, would be a terrorist.”

But by then, the old Christian Democrat elite that Andreotti represented was on the way out, its legacy claimed by a new figure: the media tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi’s flamboyant ascent to power in the early 1990s was premised on “modernising” Italy’s centre-right. And despite the odd joke about Hitler and the Holocaust, an important part of this reinvention was to pivot towards Israel and abandon any claims to a foreign policy beyond American interests. Berlusconi would go on to form a close personal relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu and to campaign for Israeli membership of the European Union. But he also broke the anti-fascist principle that had been laid down in 1945, inviting the biological and ideological descendants of Mussolini – the Italian Social Movement – into his coalition and laying the foundation for Meloni’s triumph in 2022.

The new fascists.

The Italian Social Movement (MSI) emerged out of Mussolini’s Fascist party and, in particular, out of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state established in the closing stages of the war and centred on the town of Salò in the foothills of the Alps. The MSI promised to keep the flame of fascism alive, but much like the regime that preceded it found itself divided on the question of Israel. The majority – led by Giorgio Almirante, former editor of the fascist regime’s key vehicle for antisemitic propaganda, the magazine Defence of the Race – saw the new Jewish state as a bulwark against Soviet and Arab communism, an outpost of the west in a hostile region. In 1948, a leading member of the MSI, Fiorenzo Capriotti, travelled to Palestine to join the war on the Jewish side, helping to found Shayetet 13, the elite commando unit of the Israeli navy, and leading the operation to sink the Egyptian sloop El Amir Farouq as it attempted to reach the port of Gaza. Over the coming decades, senior figures from the MSI would continue to visit Israel, while Almirante became a vicious critic of Moro, Andreotti and Craxi’s strategy of active neutrality, which he saw as a capitulation to the communist east.

But others within the MSI took the opposite approach. Inspired by the fascist mystic Julius Evola (also a favourite of Steve Bannon and Alexander Dugin), this minority was led by Pino Rauti, a rival Salò journalist who would later found the rightwing terror group, Ordine Nuovo. This wing of the MSI was explicit in its antisemitism, drawing on Mussolini’s flirtation with Islamic symbolism to justify a distorted “pan-Arabism” and taking a hard line against the new Jewish state.

Although the Rauti faction was never hegemonic in the party, they often dominated the MSI’s more radical youth sections. Just a few years before a 15-year-old Giorgia Meloni joined the Youth Front, the Rautians at the head of the youth sections published a pamphlet entitled “Stop the Massacre”. Responding to the killings at al-Aqsa in October 1990, it called for a complete economic and political boycott of Israel and the immediate recognition of the Palestinian state.

But this would prove to be the last gasp of the Rauti faction. That same year, the new leader of the MSI, Gianfranco Fini, began a project to break with the party’s fascist past. This was not a rejection of hardline rightwing politics but rather a rhetorical break with the symbols of the 1930s, an effort to avoid having to answer any more questions about Mussolini rather than a serious reckoning with the legacies of fascism. And as the rest of the Italian political system collapsed in the mani pulite corruption scandal, Fini pushed the party further and further from its historic roots. Their reward: admission into Berlusconi’s first coalition government in 1994, a historic victory for a party formed out of the ashes of the defeated Salò Republic.

But Fini wanted more than just national acceptance, and he saw in Israel an opportunity to prove to an international audience that they had finally left the 1930s behind. Initially, plans for an official state visit were thwarted by liberals inside Israel’s Labour government, who were unwilling to do anything that might legitimise European neofascists. But by the early 2000s, times had changed. Fini was now deputy prime minister in Berlusconi’s second government, and a new force was dominant in Israel: the rightwing Likud party. In the febrile, Islamophobic atmosphere of the war on terror, Fini would seize this moment to finalise the transformation of his movement.

Fini’s official visit to Israel in 2003 was a momentous occasion for the MSI (now renamed National Alliance), cementing its new position inside the mainstream, global right. He took the opportunity to denounce fascism as an “absolute evil”, a comment which predictably led to outrage from his own supporters and was carefully qualified on his return to Italy. It also helped to forge a close alliance between the Italian far right and Likud that continues to this day. Fini would go on to defend Ariel Sharon’s “separation barrier” – a 700km apartheid wall through the West Bank – and he was ruthless in using allegations of antisemitism to exclude and attack political rivals in Italy.

A more innocent outfit.

This is the political tradition that Meloni inherited. A member of the MSI youth since 1992, she quickly rose through the ranks, following the party through various names until she took the lead in its reinvention as Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) in 2012. Throughout, Meloni represented a flexible, pragmatic and adaptable strain of fascism, one which was willing to disown its past when it served current interests, and which has fought to make Atlanticism and support for Israel the centrepiece of a new, rightwing European coalition. Meloni’s “Catholic mother” image is the culmination of Almirante and Fini’s project: the dominant force in Italian politics, where she still polls at over 30% after three years in power; fêted internationally for her opposition to Russia and support for Israel; the “Trump whisperer” who has put Italy at the heart of a global network of reaction.

But Meloni is also a deeply cynical political operator. In the summer of 2014, as the IDF rained bombs down on Gaza, she tweeted: “Another massacre of children in Gaza. No cause is just when it spills the blood of innocents”. In 2018, as her rival on the right, Matteo Salvini, was declaring Hezbollah a terrorist organisation, she protested that the Shia militia was a crucial ally in holding back Islamic State. In September this year, under enormous domestic pressure, Meloni finally accepted that the IDF had “surpassed the limits of proportionality” in Gaza.

Israel has been useful for the Italian right. But if this changes, if Israel loses its legitimacy as a beacon of democracy among the barbarian hordes, Meloni may well distance herself from it – not on principle, but in order to preserve her hard-won respectability. As the Italian writer Umberto Eco wrote in 1995: “It would be comforting for us if someone looked out on the world and said: I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the blackshirts to parade again through the squares of Italy! But life is not that easy. Fascism will return in a more innocent outfit. It is our duty to unmask it and to point out its new forms – every day, and in every part of the world.”