14.05.2026

Bent on provocation and violence

Zionists are turning up on leftwing demonstrations in Italy. They want to get excluded, so they can claim to be victims of anti-Semitism. However, as Toby Abse reports, a particular target of the Zionists is leftwing Jews

The last few weeks have been marked by an escalation of tension between the National Association of Italian Partisans (ANPI)¹ and leaders of the official Jewish Community, especially in Milan and Rome.

This started in Milan on April 25 - the 81st anniversary of Italy’s liberation by the Partisans, who drove the Germans out of the main northern cities before the British and Americans arrived. Milan is always the location of the main Liberation Day march: this year it was 100,000-strong - impressive, although smaller than on last year’s 80th anniversary and some other occasions in the past (eg, 1994, when people responded to the victory of Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition, which had brought the neo-fascists into government for the first time since 1945).

For some years, even prior to the Gaza war of 2023-25, there had been some tension about the participation of people claiming to represent the Brigata Ebraica in the march. The Brigata Ebraica (Jewish Brigade) - as it was originally known, and as it is still referred to outside Italy - was set up by the British in north Africa in 1944. It was a successor to the Palestine Regiment, recruited from both Jews and Arabs in mandate Palestine, which had already fought against Italian and German forces in north Africa. The Jewish Brigade landed in Puglia in southern Italy in March 1945, making a very belated contribution to the Italian campaign.

The reason I am going into detail about the brigade’s history is that, while we must acknowledge that these Jews made a serious contribution to the Allied war effort, very few of them were of Italian descent, none of them were part of the Italian resistance and their contribution to Italy’s liberation was minimal. The people who now carry their banner on the Liberation Day marches are Italian Jews with hardline Zionist views. If all they were seeking to do was to identify Italian Jews with the wider struggle against the Italian fascists and German Nazis, one could not reasonably make objections, even though the considerable - given their small number - contribution of Italian Jews to the Italian resistance was actually channelled either through Giustizia e Libertà Brigades (representing the legacy of the Rosselli brothers - Jewish anti-fascists murdered by Benito Mussolini’s agents) or the communist Garibaldi Brigades, not by any exclusively Jewish formation.

Banners

This year, the section of the march led by those carrying the banners of the Brigata Ebraica placed itself (or was placed by the police) at the head of the march, in front of the ANPI, the long-standing organisers of the Milanese liberation marches. Regardless of whether this positioning was deliberate or accidental, it was in itself provocative. More seriously, the contingent led by the Brigata’s supporters included many carrying Israeli flags, as well as people with pictures of Trump, Netanyahu and the late shah of Iran!

The ANPI claimed that the Brigata had made an agreement with them not to carry Israeli flags, in order to avoid trouble with the rest of the march - the Brigata supporters deny this. Brigata supporters also try to make out that the Israeli flags and pictures of Netanyahu and Trump were the responsibility of a group of Iranian monarchists, who were marching with them, but this seems rather disingenuous.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the Brigata contingents were met with heckling. It may well be the case that this was started by a couple of dozen members of the Comitati di Appoggio alla Resistenza per il Comunismo (CARC, an extreme Stalinist-Maoist sect), who had done this sort of thing on previous marches, albeit on a smaller scale and in a far less organised fashion. However, the hostile chanting was taken up by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ordinary marchers totally unconnected with the CARC.

This confrontation held the entire march up for two hours - something guaranteed to irritate and alienate anybody who had come on the march to commemorate the liberation, rather than to confront hardline Zionists. While there were a few isolated instances of anti-Semitic, as opposed to anti-Zionist, chanting, the Zionists have deliberately exaggerated such occurrences in their subsequent bid to brand the ANPI itself as anti-Semitic. Eventually the police escorted the Brigata contingent away from the march in order to prevent any more public disorder.

Walker Meghnagi, the president of the Milanese Jewish Community, subsequently claimed: “We were expelled, kicked out of the march and the ANPI is behind all this. From the beginning it had said, ‘No Jews on the march’”! Gianfranco Pagliarulo, the ANPI national president, has responded by saying that he will sue Meghnagi for defamation.

Stefano Levi della Torre, a writer and architect, and a leading figure in Mai Indifferenti - Voci Ebraiche per la Pace (Never Indifferent - Jewish Voices for Peace) has pointed out that:

The president of the Milanese Jewish Community is very friendly with rightwing politicians, with Fratelli d’Italia, with the La Russa brothers, and says he is a friend of Giorgia Meloni. Therefore, the fact that he wants to make accusations against the April 25 demonstrations seems to be part of his job ... And it does not seem to me a great favour to the Jews. He exposed the Jews to something very serious. It is an enormous historic responsibility that they are taking on.²

It is worth pointing out that Mai Indifferenti and the broadly similar group called Laboratorio Ebraica anti-Razzista also participated in the Milan march, quite separately from the Brigata contingent, and met with a very different reception. As Bella Gubbay of Mai Indifferenti emphasised, “We were applauded by people on the pavement. Many of them said to us, ‘Bravi, bravi, finalmente’.”

Rome

Whilst the Milanese dispute between the Zionists and the ANPI remains a verbal one, in Rome matters have taken a different turn.

On April 25, two ANPI members in their sixties were attacked in Rome, where the ANPI was celebrating the anniversary of the liberation. The attacker wounded both of them with pellets from an airgun. They were wearing ANPI handkerchiefs around their necks, so the motive was quite obvious - a terrorist attack on random ANPI sympathisers. For days it was generally assumed that the gunman was a hardline neo-fascist, but on April 28 the police, following up on a variety of video camera leads showing the number plate of the scooter he has escaped on and so forth, located him.

The terrorist proved to be not a member or supporter of any of the hardline neo-fascist groupings, but a 21-year-old Roman Jew called Eithan Bondi. Immediately after his arrest, Bondi claimed to be a member of the Brigata Ebraica. The Brigata’s leader, Davide Romano, was quick to point out that this was not true: not only was Bondi not a member, but the Brigata was a purely Milanese organisation anyway.

The Roman Jewish Community was eager to present Bondi as a ‘rotten apple’ or ‘lone wolf’. For example, Victor Fablun, the current leader of the Roman Jewish Community, dissociated himself from “any form of violence”, and said Bondi’s use of the name, Brigata Ebraica, was “an outrage”. Ricardo Pacifici, the previous leader of the Roman Jewish Community, and current vice-president of the European Jewish Association, said, “I am ashamed. Why he did it is something he will have to say. We will have to ask ourselves even inside our institutions as to how it was possible to arrive at such a gesture.”

This statement is hypocritical and unconvincing. Despite his name, Pacifici is not a man of peace, but a man who has endorsed, even if he has not necessarily participated in, violence. Pacifici was definitely present at two violent incidents in recent years. On April 25 2024, he witnessed (or perhaps was part of) a group of mask-wearing Zionists who threw tins full of food at demonstrators with Palestinian flags - a gesture designed to mock the starving civilians of Gaza. In October 2025, he was around when a group of students and teachers holding a peaceful assembly for Gaza in Monteverde was assaulted by Jewish men from a neighbouring synagogue.

Apart from these two episodes, there have been a number of occasions when people on their way home from marches and pickets for Gaza have been surrounded and beaten up by helmet-wearing Zionists, carrying chains, iron bars and bottles. More carefully planned and targeted actions have also been mounted against Roman universities. In short, the claim that Bondi’s terrorist attack had no wider context is complete nonsense.

The hardline Zionists seem to have no hesitation in targeting dissident Jews - not just non-Jewish supporters of the Palestinians. Gad Lerner, always an outspoken and combative Jewish leftist, who had no hesitation in calling Bondi “a Jewish fascist”, has been a particular target. After the publication of an appeal entitled ‘No to ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank’, Lerner received a warning from the ministry of the interior that he was in need of protection. However, he refused to accept such protection, since in the past he had received many threats from fascists, and some Lega supporters, and said he was not now going to be intimidated by Zionists.

He was sent a WhatsApp message on April 28, a few hours before Bondi’s arrest, by a Zionist responding to his attempt to explain the real history of the Palestine Regiment and the Jewish Brigade. The troller, whom he chooses not to name, said: “Gad, do they pay you, or are you a drug user? There were Arabs in the Jewish Brigade? … You are stirring up hatred against the Jews with your historical revisionism. The Palestinians were allies of Hitler.” The elderly Jewish historian, Anna Foa, received such a level of abuse after the publication of her book Il suicido d’Israele³ that she left the Roman Jewish Community and took up membership of the Torinese one instead.

An attempt is being made to present Bondi as an irrational lone wolf - something which seems to be encouraged by his lawyer, who has acted for official organisations of the Jewish Community in the past, and at the moment of writing the charges against Bondi seem to have been downgraded from attempted murder to something roughly equivalent to ‘actual bodily harm’.⁴

However, what the episode reveals is the way the statements of Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir (faithfully relayed by hardline local Zionist leaders) seem to be pushing some young Italian Jews into an equivalent of Rabbi Kahane’s Jewish Defence League. This path is actually the most dangerous one diaspora Jews could take at a time when Israel’s actions are creating increased anti-Semitism everywhere.

1. Originally the ANPI was entirely made up of veterans of the Italian resistance, but some years ago the organisation decided to admit younger people sympathetic to the resistance legacy, as there were fewer and fewer survivors of the 1943-45 resistance still alive.↩︎

2. Ignazio Benito La Russa is the president of the Italian Senate, and was a co-founder of the FDI, whilst his brother, Romano La Russa, is involved in Milanese local politics - both have been active neo-fascists all their adult lives, and their father was an official in the fascist regime prior to the Allied landing in Sicily,↩︎

3. This book could be seen as liberal Zionist, rather than anti-Zionist - arguing that Zionism went off the rails with the post-1967 occupation, rather than being flawed from Israel’s birth in 1948.↩︎

4. It seems rather unlikely that Bondi’s attack was some irrational moment of madness, since the police found no less than seven different guns, three pistols, three rifles and a revolver in his home. In addition, his father has a criminal record, and his most recent arrest, in July 2025, was for a robbery aggravated by racial hatred. He and his accomplice had attacked three ‘extracomunitari’ (people from outside Europe), whom they racially insulted.↩︎