Outrage used to require invention; now it runs on autopilot.

The episode involving Michele Gamba should not be dismissed as a moment of excess. A local official of the Italian Democratic Party (PD) in Monza, Lombardy, Gamba has publicly called for the “annihilation” of Israel. Gamba’s wording carries weight. It is charged. It is revealing. It belongs to the grammar of eliminationist movements, not to democratic politics. Once such terms enter ordinary circulation, the boundary between argument and incitement begins to erode.

The trajectory is visible. Parts of the PD’s youth milieu have drifted into a militant anti-Zionism that borrows tone and cadence from Islamist propaganda. The progression has been gradual but consistent: from moral absolutism to delegitimization, from delegitimization to open endorsement of destruction. The lexicon now overlaps with that used by Hamas and by the Iranian regime. That overlap is the problem. Political language has been hardened into something closer to agitation than debate, and repetition has stripped it of any sense of gravity.

Milan offers the institutional counterpart to this shift. The push within the local branch of PD to suspend the twinning with Tel Aviv is telling. Tel Aviv stands as the most secular and progressive city in Israel, a hub of civil liberties, dissent, and cultural pluralism. Maintaining ties would serve any plausible strategy aimed at dialogue or influence. Severing them achieves nothing of the sort. The move reads as a gesture emptied of rationale, sustained only by hostility.

These two developments point to a broader condition. The Italian left has, in large measure, relinquished its historical relationship with Israel. The underlying difficulty lies in reconciling older habits of thought with present realities. Jewish vulnerability once fit comfortably within a framework of proletarian anticapitalistic solidarity. Jewish sovereignty unsettles that framework. Antizionism resolves the tension by recasting Israel as a permanent object of accusation.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. When states consolidate authority, restore order, and generate prosperity, they tend to attract suspicion from the same ideological quarters. Argentina, El Salvador, Costa Rica, each, in different ways, departs from the expectation of stagnation. That departure complicates a worldview that relies on fixed hierarchies of power and grievance.

Israel disrupts that worldview more than most. It embodies autonomy, resilience, and continuity without external patronage. It operates as a state that protects its citizens and defines its own limits. That posture places it outside the categories the contemporary radical left finds natural to champion.

The result is a rhetoric that escalates because it cannot persuade, and gestures that sever because they cannot shape. What remains is a politics increasingly detached from reality, sustained by the comfort of its own certainties and the repetition of its own slogans.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)