The Israel Air Force and the Italian Air Force conclude an extensive, two-week joint exercise in Sardinia. Photograph Source: Israel Defense Forces – CC BY 2.0

This is written for readers who already know the name of the crime. They do not need a primer on occupation, a debate about whether Zionism is a form of colonial rule, or a paragraph that treats “genocide” as a word still awaiting permission. The record in Gaza is the record. Free Palestine is not a closing slogan. It is the demand the status quo exists to defeat. What follows is Italy’s place in it: a client state, held to an American and Israeli alignment, with no political representation seriously willing to break it.

Italy sits in the middle of the sea that points at the oil of West Asia, and for eighty years it has been used as the flight deck of someone else’s carrier. The bases are American. The nuclear stockpile is American, and the host is not allowed to discuss it. The stay-behind army was built by the CIA and NATO under the name Gladio. The intelligence service Italian magistrates and reporters have been tracing since the 1970s is Israeli. Eric Salerno, in Mossad Base Italy (2010), and Ferdinando Imposimato, the magistrate who ran the early Red Brigades trials in the Aldo Moro case, argued that Israeli intelligence knew the Italian subversive scene from the start and worked inside it. Imposimato wrote that those services had knowledge of the operation from its beginning. Salerno’s reporting put Mossad in early contact with the milieu that kidnapped and killed Moro in 1978. These are investigations, not verdicts. What is documented is enough. Gladio’s fascist cells, the strategy of tension, and the Lodo Moro — Palestinian arms allowed to cross Italy so long as they were not used on Italian soil — are lines of policy and of covert practice. A state that lost its prime minister inside a conflict its own intelligence services had already mapped did not later acquire a voice of its own. It acquired the next set of conditions, and no political force able to refuse them.

Claudio Mutti, editor of the geopolitical review Eurasia, names the present form of those conditions in “Israele in Italia.” Israel is no longer one ally among others. It has become the symbolic and legal reference for government policy, political parties, media, and schools. Atlantic alignment now runs, in part, through Tel Aviv. The prize, the definition, the senator for life, and the lesson plan are the local instruments of an imperial order whose regional form is Zionism. The “special friendship” is older than the bill now in Parliament: a colonial ethnocracy cast as the West’s moral outpost, and a Mediterranean client taught to treat criticism of that outpost as a stain on the Republic. NATO’s rearmament of Europe sits on the same deck. More spending, more interoperability, a continent pointed at a wider war, and an opposition that treats the spending target as a matter for amendment. The PD, the Italian Democratic Party, arrives at weapons, at Ukraine, and at Israel already compromised. Not because a cable from Langley or Tel Aviv is on the table. Because the party has never built a line that could survive one. An anti-imperialist politics would break the alignment. The party that leads the opposition will not.

The country without that voice is not an ignorant country. From September 28th to the 30th, Naza — Israeli soldiers, on camera, describing the killing of unarmed people in Gaza — held first place at the Italian box office: €1.81 million and 243,466 spectators in three days. On the 30th alone it drew 94,970 people, about 40 percent of everything the country’s cinemas took that day. The same day The Bibi Files, Alexis Bloom and Alex Gibney’s film of Netanyahu under interrogation, opened at number two with 22,973 spectators. Halls sold out. The audience has already accepted what the soldiers say. The unarmed were the target. What it cannot find is a defined political opposition that will carry the conclusion, genocide, into a vote.

On March 22nd and 23rd that public defeated the Nordio reform. The constitutional referendum on splitting the careers of judges and prosecutors, a government text passed by a simple majority and signed by the justice minister, lost. No took 53.74 percent. Turnout was 58.93 percent, higher than the 2024 European election. Young and first-time voters leaned No. Elly Schlein,........

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