This article is not about the risks and opportunities of Donald Trump’s Gaza plan, but about the way in which the Italian left (PD, AVS, and M5S) immediately classified this project as a ploy to evade the real issues opened up by the war in the Strip and to propitiate an outcome favourable to the Netanyahu government.

My thesis is that the Italian left cares about the Palestinian cause in much the same way as Hamas cares about that of the Gazawis: as a humanitarian pretext for a battle, which does not have at its core the defence of the interests and rights of the Arab population, but the condemnation of the scandal represented (as Francesca Albanese explains) by the ‘colonial occupation’ of Palestine by the Jewish population.

For the Italian pro-Pal movement, the aim is not at all to bring an end to the tragedy in Gaza and the war crimes alleged against the Netanyahu government, but to gain legitimacy for the hatred against Israel (not against the Netanyahu government, against Israel). The mobilisation is not against the war going on today in the Strip, but against the usurpation of Arab land by the Jewish state, of which everything that has happened since 1948 until today against Israel, including the pogrom of 7 October two years ago, is considered an inevitable and salutary consequence, because – again to quote Francesca Albanese – “the terrorists have managed to bring Palestine back to the centre of the discussion, they are animating a global revolution, which is making us think not only about who they are, who we are…”

The fact that Hamas’s war and the Italian left’s war on Israel (not on the Netanyahu government, on Israel) are waged by different means – terrorist violence on the one hand, political hate campaigns on the other – does not at all mean that they have different ends. Hamas militiamen proclaim and the pro-Pal squares demand the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea; the fact that they pursue a common goal by resorting to different weapons certainly points to distinguishing criminal responsibilities, not to dissociating political ones.

Neither monsters nor terrorists are the pro-pal activists who, the other day in Reggio Emilia, matching the thoughts of the heroine they had gone to celebrate (guess what: Francesca Albanese), booed the mayor of the city, who, in honouring her and handing her the tricolour, had denounced the kidnapping and demanded the release of the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas.

They are people who sincerely believe that the abductees suffer the just retribution due to the agents of Zionist imperialism. They think the same as Hamas, even if they interpret it morally, i.e. with disdain for those who deny the truth of Israeli responsibility for Jewish bloodshed, and not terroristically, as militiamen who murder Jews to avenge the wrong of the usurpation of Arab land do.

The institutional left is at the mercy of this physical and digital square, just as on the stage in Reggio Emilia, Mayor Marco Massari found himself, amidst a thousand embarrassments, at the mercy of the Special Rapporteur who became famous for his intransigence against the Jewish lobby, against Holocaust guilt and against the criminalisation of Hamas.

That this is precisely the case is demonstrated by the Left’s attitude towards the peace plan for Gaza, which is completely incompatible with the ‘moderate’ position it officially tries to accredit. If the Left really wanted an end to the war, the re-launching of the peace process in the perspective of the “two poles and two states”, the defeat of the project of annexing the West Bank and occupying Gaza, the marginalisation of Netanyahu and the exclusion of anti-Arab supremacists and racists from the Israeli constitutional arch; if the Left really wanted all this, why should it (as it has) have a more sceptical and negative position on this plan than Abu Mazen’s?

As is abundantly clear, this hypothesis of an agreement, if it ever finds application, would save a lot of lives and leave on the field two victims – Hamas and the Netanyahu government – whose sacrifice a democratic left should greatly appreciate. Two victims, who are logically doing everything they can to boycott the agreement that would lead to their capitulation and who are hoping in each other to derail the negotiations from the tracks set by the White House (let us leave aside why Trump has decided to take this step, since it is of no use for the purposes of our discourse).

If the agreement were to get off the ground, albeit amidst a thousand misunderstandings and uncertainties, Gaza would be free of both Hamas and the occupation projects of Smotrich and Ben Gvir; a path, indefinite in time but not in direction, would be reopened towards the establishment of a Palestinian state; centrists would replace the fanatics in the Israeli ministerial team; and the current prime minister, whether or not he remains in the saddle until the next elections, would have to worry more about his own judicial problems than the Israeli government in the next legislature.

Why is the Italian left not in favour of this plan? Because it is not the declared agenda that drives its moves, but that sort of ‘Albanian motion’ with which pro-Pal rhetoric and publicity is littered. Because the end of the war in Gaza and the end of Netanyahu are by no means enough to quench the thirst for anti-Zionist justice shouted from its squares.