On Oct. 7 a year ago, Hamas' pogrom against Israeli villages in the Negev

not only triggered the war that runs through the Middle East but also

produced the most violent and extensive campaign of anti-Jewish hatred

that Diaspora communities have endured since the end of World War II.

Understanding why what happened is crucial to enable democracies-where

the majority of Jews live-to defend themselves against a form of

intolerance that assaults the cardinal principles of the Rule of Law.

The campaign of anti-Jewish hatred begins in the days immediately following

Oct. 7, 2023 when, in the face of Hamas violence, two phenomena occur:

pictures with photos of Israelis hostages are ripped in the streets,

from New York to Paris; the pogrom is legitimized by an offensive on

social media describing it as an "act of resistance against the

occupation" by pointing to villages that have been within Israel's

borders since its birth in 1948 as "occupied lands." Lack of pity for

the victims and delegitimization of Israel's existence are the initial

building blocks of a disinformation campaign to support Hamas'

fundamental intent: the Jewish state must disappear and all Jews must be

eliminated.

It is the overlap between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that dates back

to when, a few days after the start of the 1967 war, a Soviet diplomat

at the UN announced the reversal of Moscow's Middle East policy by

equating Zionism with "colonialism" and "racism" in order to push Arab

countries to side with the Kremlin in the Cold War. From then on,

anti-Zionism entered the Soviet propaganda narrative in the West,

penetrated pro-Urss political forces and spread to more nations, with an

intensity that followed the course of conflicts in the Middle East:

after the Yom Kippur War, the UN General Assembly in 1975, led by the

pro-Russian majority, calls Zionism "racism"; with the 1982 war in

Lebanon, the writings equipping Stars of David and hooked crosses also

reach Italian cities, and a two-year-old boy, Stefano Taché, is killed

in the Arab-Palestinian attack on the Synagogue in Rome; with the Cold

War over, with the second Intifada of 2000-2005, when Hamas was

detonating suicide bombers on buses, street demonstrations sweep across

Europe triggering violence that in 2006 led to the kidnapping and

killing of 24-year-old French Jew, Ilan Halimi.

Such precedents testify that hatred against Israel leads to attacks on

Diaspora Jews, but it is only after Oct. 7 that this phenomenon takes on

unprecedented dimensions: from the United States to Germany, from

Britain to Italy to Australia, every democracy registers dizzying surges

of intolerance and attacks of all kinds-even physical ones-on Jewish

individuals and property. In some cases, these are individuals and

groups wanting to show solidarity with the high number of Palestinian

civilian victims of Israel's military intervention in Gaza, singling out

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the one responsible for the war,

but the battle cry "Palestine will be Free from the River to the Sea"

confuses criticism of the Jerusalem government with Hamas' campaign to

wipe Israel off the map. There is an important part of Israeli society

that, every Saturday night, takes to the streets against Netanyahu

demanding his resignation, but the pro-Hamas' cry "Let's free all

occupied Palestine" means denying even the existence of those who oppose

the government led by the Likud leader. That is why, whatever political

criticism of a government of Israel may be, it should never lead to

denying the state's right to exist.

It is when this difference disappears that the wave of hatred we are

witnessing is generated, where the hunt for the "Zionist" becomes an

anti-Jewish act: Jewish students on many American campuses insulted as

such, public events in Manhattan in support of the Hamas pogrom, a

statue of Anne Frank in Holland daubed with the words "Free Gaza," the

cry "out Jews from the borders" shouted on the streets of Milan, and a

multitude of synagogues attacked on multiple Continents, up to the one

in Rouen set on fire. Those who attack Jews accuse them of being

"Zionists" just as a far-left group did in the week before Oct. 9,

1982-the day of the attack on the major synagogue in Rome-when it posted

on the gates of a minor synagogue, also in the capital, a white banner

with the red inscription "We will burn the Zionist hideouts." As French

philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy observes, "the indiscriminate hatred of

Israel present in the democratic societies of our day is reminiscent of

what the French had for the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus," who was

wrongly convicted in 1894 for pro-German espionage before being

rehabilitated.

It is this wave of intolerance that has turned the lives of millions of

Diaspora Jews upside down in the past 12 months, raising questions of

security, personal and collective, that no one after 1945 had asked.

This explains why the Holocaust survivors' pain in witnessing the

reawakening of the worst ghosts of the past, when hating Jews was

legitimate. The words, simple and courageous, spoken on several

occasions by Liliana Segre, Sami Modiano and Edith Bruck are there to

testify to the reopened wound. To which the intolerant reacted with

horrendous insults, even to the point of calling Segre a "Zionist

agent."

All this also wounds our republican democracy, which, however, has

important antidotes in its DNA. It was Jan. 27, 2016, when the President

of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, chose Memorial Day to affirm that

"anti-Semitism sometimes screens forms of anti-Zionism." Just as it was

his predecessor Giorgio Napolitano, on January 25, 2007, who said, "No

to anti-Semitism even when it disguises itself as anti-Zionism because

this means denial of the inspirational source of the Jewish state." For

about twenty years, the major political forces in Parliament, both

majority and opposition, have shown that they share this thought of the

last two presidents. But today the most extreme voices, on the left as

well as on the right, too often suffer the allure of a generalized form

of intolerance against Israel that attacks Jews but actually threatens

every Italian and European citizen. Because when the rights of a

minority are attacked it is the freedom of all that suffers.