Italian PM Renzi's ode to Israel

In what he referred to as a “secular pilgrimage” to Jerusalem last week, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi appeared before the Israeli Knesset to deliver a speech. Given that his performance wound up being an extended ode to a state that awards and withholds rights based on religion, however, the bout of bootlicking might have been classified as slightly less than secular in nature.

From the official Israeli viewpoint, a few sections of the ode were presumably in need of some fine-tuning. For example, Renzi could have specified that the recent nuclear deal with Iran was a pact with the devil, which he did not. His calculation that Israel’s existence predated the state’s formal establishment “by centuries” furthermore contradicts the millennia-long history stipulated by Israeli propaganda.

But Renzi more than compensated for these deficiencies with lines like: “Those who think about boycotting Israel fail to realise they’re just boycotting themselves.” Although not included in the transcript of the speech on Renzi’s website, major Italian newspapers have quoted the prime minister as tacking this ending on to the sentence: “… boycotting themselves, and betraying their own future”.

Not only is it safe to assume such rhetoric won’t resonate with the average Italian - who is now contending with rising poverty and unemployment rates as well as other domestic headaches - Renzi’s pronouncement will undoubtedly be news to much of the rest of the global population.

Residents of the Gaza Strip, for one thing, might find it difficult to pin their hopes on the entity that has for nearly 70 years been obliterating Palestinian futures via bombs, bulldozers and blockades.

Another remark absent from the official text of the speech but incorporated into its delivery, according to Italian and Israeli media, involved Renzi’s denunciation of boycott efforts as “stupid”. One could think of better candidates for the S-word, such as his contention in the transcript that “Italian troops are involved day after day” in Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere as part of “operations designed to put a stop to barbarity”. Never mind that international troop involvement in Lebanon was originally necessitated by Israel’s barbaric invasion of 1978, which paved the way for decades of ensuing barbarity.

Resurrecting the tired two-state solution, Renzi informed the Israelis that “you don’t simply have the right to exist, you have the duty to exist… the duty to resist”. This perversion of the concept of resistance - such that brutal power is cast as honourable defiance - opens up a whole new world of creative possibilities: US drones resisting Pakistani civilians, tornadoes resisting cardboard shacks and small animals.

The mantra that Israel is fighting for its very right to exist has, of course, proved impressively resistant to fact over the years. Back in the 1980s, Noam Chomsky called out the New York Times - ringleader of the establishment media - for refusing to mention Yasser Arafat’s offers, from 1984 to 1988, to enter into direct negotiations with the Israelis aimed at mutual recognition.

As the Independent reported in 2008, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy had acknowledged that even Hamas was “ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state in the temporary borders of 1967”. But what’s the fun of sharing?

According to the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero, Renzi’s pilgrimage to the Knesset earned him the following encouragement from Israeli President Reuven Rivlin: “You’re one of the leaders of the new generation, of the future.” How fortunate, then, that Renzi has decided Israel is the future.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meanwhile once again astounded the world by not dropping dead from boredom after listening to himself re-enumerate his list of evils: Iran, the “new anti-Semitism” in Europe, the Palestinians’ rejection of Israel. The Jerusalem Post quotes Netanyahu as asserting that “Israel is a lighthouse of morality,” and thanking Renzi for his opposition to boycotts.

Indeed, in Netanyahu’s own personal version of international law, boycotts and other efforts to “delegitimise” the lighthouse constitute unconscionable crimes - as though a state that regularly massacres civilians requires any assistance in delegitimising itself.

And while boycotts are far less invasive than, say, fragmentation bombs, white phosphorus, and other instruments of Israeli diplomacy, they do take aim at the foundations of Israel’s terrorist state (foundations that were perhaps fortified, to some extent, by a recent history of hefty arms deals between Israel and Italy, among others). For those committed to eternal bellicosity, this amounts to an act of war.

As Israel continues to boycott the very idea of a Palestinian people, a fan club has formed to legitimise the barbarity. Renzi, for one, deserves his own boycott.

- Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. 

Photo: Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold a press conference after their meeting in Jerusalem on 21 July (AA)