Just as on 24 February 2022, 7 October 2023 also handed the aggressor a valuable political victory: that of ever-increasing support from Western public opinion for his cause, coupled with the proven discrediting of his victims.

The large-scale invasion of Ukraine, rather than provoking a reaction against the Russian offensive and its predatory logic, has cast doubt on Ukrainian resistance and on the responsibility of Kyiv and its allies for the outbreak of a conflict fuelled by the alleged and disrespectful Euro-Atlantic encroachment on Russia’s sphere of influence.

Rather than rekindling solidarity with the Jews, who are once again under siege and, for the first time, overwhelmed within Israel’s national refuge, the Hamas pogrom has legitimised the resistance legacy of Sinwar and of ‘from the river to the sea’ Islamism, turning Gaza – the breeding ground of hatred, the laboratory of horror and the planned sacrifice of tens of thousands of women, children and the sick, sacrificed for the greater glory of jihad – into a sort of promised land of universal brotherhood and a moral bastion against ‘Zionist racism’.

Whilst Putin’s hybrid war has gained the upper hand in democratic public opinion, Sinwar’s has literally taken the public by storm, and his plan to drown Israel’s legitimacy and the innocence of all Jews in the blood of the martyrs – that is, the Palestinian victims whom the retaliation for 7 October was intended to claim in Gaza, in order to expose Israel’s wickedness before the eyes of the world.

In Italy, we see evidence of all this on a daily basis. Hatred of Israel and of Jews has officially become ‘righteous hatred’, the humanitarian justification for anti-Semitism in all its most archaic and modern forms is recognised in society, in the media and, above all, in politics, where a law that, prior to 7 October, would have been unanimously endorsed – just as the IHRA definition, on which it is based, was unanimously approved by administrative decree by the Conte Government in 2020 – has now become a law that infringes on civil liberties precisely because it identifies the anti-Semitic nature of expressions that have by now become commonplace and part of everyday language.

As David Grossman had predicted, 7 October also left its mark on the very soul of Israel, provoking hateful and racist reactions that mirrored the most deeply rooted prejudices against the Jewish state and against the spirit of Zionism. This, too, was part of Sinwar’s plan, and it is to be hoped that the elections on 27 October will spell its failure.

What we can be sure of, however, is that even if he were to win, or indeed if the anti-Netanyahu coalition were to triumph, and even if the votes of the Arab parties were enough to send Netanyahu and the supremacist clique of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir into opposition and to install a new government, nothing would change in Italy.

Liliana Segre would continue to live in isolation, deeply unwelcome in the public squares that once revered her and which today applaud Francesca Albanese with orgiastic fervour, whilst violence against Jews would continue to be justified as a reaction to a genocide that does not exist, but which cannot be denied except through apostasy and a lack of democratic integrity.