Italy shut down the crowdsourced “Mapping Zionist Tourism” form within days. But we have seen this exact sequence before—and we know what came after it.

Sometime this month, someone in Italy opened Google Forms—the same free tool your office uses for the holiday potluck and your kid’s soccer league uses for snack duty—and built a questionnaire called “Mapping Zionist Tourism.” It asked ordinary Italians to report where Jews, Israelis, and people “connected to Zionism” could be found: which hotels, which vacation rentals, which businesses. The stated goal: documenting “Zionist neo-colonization” and coordinating “future actions,” left helpfully unspecified.

Potluck signups. Snack duty. Where the Jews sleep.

The form circulated on social media until Italy’s national coordinator for fighting antisemitism got it taken down. By then, Italian Jews had already read it correctly. Livia Ottolenghi of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities called it “a new yellow star.” Walker Meghnagi, president of Milan’s Jewish community, said it evoked “hunting Jews.” Even Italy’s Senate president condemned it as “an aberrant initiative” built on “profound antisemitism.”

Nearly everyone reached for the same year: 1938, when Fascist Italy passed its racial laws. I’m a litigator. When the whole room cites the same precedent, my job is to pull the file. And the file says 1938 is not a metaphor. It is........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)