The war in Gaza, now approaching its second year, has left an appalling toll: tens of thousands of dead, the vast majority civilians, entire neighbourhoods razed to the ground, a humanitarian crisis that UN agencies call one of the worst in recent history. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu, supported by a coalition of nationalist and religious parties, has conducted the military operation with a harshness and systematicity that many international observers and NGOs qualify as war crimes. Gaza is a place of almost total devastation, with consequences that are foretold to be irreversible for at least a generation. But whose responsibility is this and how can it be ended? You know how we think, here at L’Europeista.

It is in this context that the Democratic Party has decided to take a symbolically strong step. On the eve of the Italy-Israel match scheduled to take place in Udine on 14 October, the Italian Democratic Party’s national sports director, Mauro Berruto, together with 44 members of the party’s parliament – from the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, and the European Parliament – signed an appeal addressed to the Italian members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the CONI president, and the FIGC president. The aim is to ask Italy to promote, with the IOC, FIFA and UEFA, the suspension of Israel from all international sports competitions.

The document is not presented as retaliation, but as an ‘act of responsibility‘ in the face of what the signatories call a ‘policy of annihilation‘ in the Gaza Strip. The appeal cites figures provided by the Palestinian Olympic Committee: at least 636 Palestinian athletes killed, more than 90 per cent of the sports infrastructure destroyed, fields, gyms and training centres reduced to rubble. According to the promoters, Palestinian sport has been wiped out for at least a decade and this destruction is not a side effect of the war, but part of a strategy to strike at the morale and hope of an entire people.

To support its proposal, the PD recalls historical precedents: the suspension of Germany and Japan after World War II, the exclusion of Iraq and Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the 24-year isolation of apartheid South Africa and, more recently, the suspension of Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

Yet it is precisely this parallelism that represents the initiative’s most fragile point. To compare Israel to Putin’s Russia is to ignore the difference between unprovoked imperialist aggression and a war unleashed in response to an unprecedented terrorist attack. On 7 October 2023, Hamas killed civilians, took hostages, and attacked the heart of the Jewish state in a planned action to destabilise the entire region. From there began the Israeli operation, which, while degenerating into a humanitarian catastrophe, remains perceived by the vast majority of Israelis as a war of survival.

Hitting Israel in sport would not strike at Netanyahu’s political line, but would only risk fuelling an even deeper sense of isolation and loneliness in Israel, which would end up consolidating its political position at home. The effect would be to reinforce the narrative that ‘the world is against Israel’ and to stifle any room for internal dissent.

If the goal is really to stop the war and push Israel to respect international law, the way is not total isolation, but critical involvement. Sport, like culture and diplomacy, can be a space for contact even in the harshest conflicts. Exclusion, in this case, would not open glimmers of peace: it would end up being a gift to Hamas propaganda, which would draw strength from the idea of a global encirclement of the Jewish state.

Even those who harshly condemn Netanyahu today should see the risk: delegitimising Israel as a whole does not serve to stop the bombs, but to harden positions. Rather, what is needed is political and cultural work capable of distinguishing between the legitimate defence of a state and the questionable or criminal conduct of a government. This is the only way to create the space, inside Israel and outside, to build a future in which the security of one people and the freedom of the other can finally coexist.