At the Roots of Western Hatred for Israel Is Envy for Those Who Know What They're Fighting For

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The animosity that four-fifths of European public opinion harbors toward Israel wears the mask of humanitarianism, but underneath it lies a deeper hatred: that of a frail, frightened, senile society that cannot bear the sight of anything young, self-confident, indomitable. Especially in Italy, where the birth rate is zero and everyone's whining about the state, it becomes almost physiological to take it out on Israel, where children are still being born and the state manages to mobilize a population that has not stopped believing in it . Anti-Zionism is the formula for expressing mass resentment in a socially acceptable way. The book “The Culture of Hate: Media, Universities, and Artists Against Israel” by Nathan Greppi (Lindau, 2025) shows it clearly. Forget neo-Nazism: today hatred for Israel is nested in cultural festivals, in university departments, in the circles of the post-Third World Left. It is there that hatred for the West has been cultivated for decades, now turned against Israel, its latest champion. Too strong, too resolute, too little inclined to self-flagellation to be tolerable to those who drag themselves forward between guilty memories and the wait for twilight.

Zionism wanted to imagine a new Jew, no longer a pogrom and a victim, but a builder . Making its way through a natural and human environment that was more than hostile, Israel prevailed and, eighty years later, it is still here. Zionism is the only intellectual avant-garde of twentieth-century Europe that did not crash into a wall. Hatred for what Israel does comes from a lack of understanding for what it has managed to accomplish. And whoever is its enemy, we immediately promote to friend. Greppi quotes the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “If we were at war with Pakistan, no one would have heard of me”. Interest in the cause of Palestine is often only a mirror of the intolerance we feel for Israel .

The counterexample, in Italy, is the total absence of anti-Russian sentiments despite Ukraine. We have always considered the Russian people cuckolded and beaten, designated victims of power, unhappy and grumbling, for this reason they inspire in us an instinctive and mimetic sympathy that extends to their leaders, including Putin, no matter what they do. We recognize ourselves in the circuit of humiliation between governors and governed, in the patriotic proclamations addressed to a submissive and distrustful audience. The Israelis, on the other hand, irritate us more than the "krauts". In our inner forum we do not forgive the existence of a nation that, while we waste away in an eternal debate on what we do not want to be, has the courage to know what it wants , and to act without demanding the approval of the world. Even at the cost of committing the tragic errors that every people with a destiny sooner or later takes on. At the root of the hatred for Israel is the resentment of a civilization that is bloodless and resigned to its own end, towards those who, in the desert, resist and grow.

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