Dalia Gubbay had joined Milan’s April 25 Liberation Day march on multiple occasions in the past. Shouts had sometimes erupted when supporters of the Jewish Brigade reached the city center, yet the tension usually stayed limited to one area or a short clash. This year the mood felt markedly different.

The Jewish Brigade, whose members fought with Allied forces in World War II, was honored during Italy’s yearly commemoration of liberation from fascism. Gubbay, vice president of the Jewish Community of Milan, reported that protesters encircled Jewish participants who carried Israeli and Jewish Brigade flags, hurled insults, and ultimately pushed them from the march under police protection.

One woman stared at Gubbay and labeled her a murderer. Nearby, a man wrapped in an Israeli flag sat in the street and refused to budge, declaring he was Jewish and would stay put. Gubbay later said she wept when the group withdrew, not from fear but from anger. “Milan is my city,” she wrote afterward. “I was born here, and my children were born here.” That afternoon the city seemed to have turned against them.

Less than three months later the Jewish community learned of an anonymous Google form that invited the public to report Israeli tourists, Jewish visitors, hotels, businesses, property purchases, and projects tied to what its creators called “Zionist tourism” and “Zionist neo-colonization” in Italy.

The questionnaire spread through social media and messaging groups linked to Milan, though it sought details from across the country. It requested locations, supporting sources, and information about local groups already addressing the issue. The form claimed the data would be shared privately with the Global Sumud Movement, a pro-Palestinian activist network that stated it had not created, commissioned, or known about the form when reports surfaced.

The questionnaire was taken down after Gen. Pasquale Angelosanto, Italy’s national coordinator for the fight against antisemitism, intervened. Its authors remain unidentified.

Publication Draws Widespread Condemnation Across Italy

For Italy’s Jewish leaders the form did not appear in isolation. It followed years of increasingly aggressive campaigns against individuals and institutions labeled Zionist, along with a series of incidents involving Jewish students, tourists, businesses, and public events.

The Google form was not the first recent effort to compile a list of alleged Zionists in Italy.

In August 2024 the fringe Nuovo Partito Comunista Italiano posted a lengthy online document that named Jewish community figures, politicians, journalists, businesspeople, companies, and other organizations it accused of belonging to a “Zionist bloc.” The group noted that its research was unfinished and could be expanded.

The publication drew condemnation from much of Italy’s political spectrum. The Jewish Community of Rome called it a proscription list that exposed individuals by name and professional ties. Senate President Ignazio La Russa cautioned that publicly identifying people in this way could put their safety at risk.

No evidence links the communist organization to the Milan form or shows the two efforts were coordinated.

The initiatives nevertheless followed a similar approach: define people by a real or assumed connection to Israel, record their identities or locations, and urge others to act against them.

The form went further. Instead of focusing mainly on public figures and organizations, it sought details about ordinary travelers, places where Israelis stayed, property deals, and businesses connected, correctly or not, to Jewish or Israeli activity.

Walker Meghnagi, president of the Jewish Community of Milan, warned that gathering such information could aid someone planning violence. Community representatives alerted Italian authorities and contacted journalists and politicians soon after the questionnaire appeared.

Gubbay said the community’s secretary-general shared the form in a board group and told members the matter could not be ignored. Meghnagi used his government contacts while Gubbay reached out to the press. By the next day the form was no longer available.

The swift response reassured community leaders, yet not enough to convince them the deeper problem had ended.

Benjamin Birely, a PhD candidate and researcher at L’Orientale University in Naples and creator of the social media account @holylandspeaks, said he was more surprised by the public reaction to the questionnaire than by its existence. He had already seen the earlier online database of people described as Zionists, complete with names, cities, and business details. “This website was taken down, but there will be another one,” Birely told The Media Line.

His own experience in Naples shows how the language used in such lists can target an identifiable person. Birely arrived in the city in the fall of 2024 to begin his doctoral research. During his first month he found the words “Intifada until victory” painted on the entrance to one of L’Orientale’s main buildings.

The neighborhoods around L’Orientale and the nearby Federico II University were covered with anti-Israel posters and graffiti, he said. Some promoted groups or slogans linked to violent resistance rather than a general call for Palestinian rights.

Birely expected Naples to have a strong left-wing and pro-Palestinian political culture. What he did not expect was the hostility he faced after other students and university members learned he was Israeli.

The situation worsened after pro-Palestinian activist Vincenzo Fullone posted a video that appeared to describe Birely as a “soldier without a uniform” and claimed he had been sent by the Israeli government to shape debate at L’Orientale.

Birely denied both claims and said he has no role in the Israeli military.

'Are you a Zionist?'

Shortly afterward Link Orientale, a student organization active in several university bodies, published material calling him a “PhD candidate in genocide,” according to Birely. He said Fullone’s video and the student group’s posts triggered a wave of hostile messages and threats from people who knew his department and residence. “The only reason I’m being accused of being a soldier and of genocide is simply because I’m a Jew with an Israeli passport,” Birely said.

Before the public campaign Birely had repeatedly faced a question that he said has become central to how Israelis are treated in Italy: “Are you a Zionist?”

He said owners or staff at restaurants, cafes, and stores sometimes asked the question after learning he had moved from Israel. In several cases identifying himself as a Zionist would have led to being told to leave. To avoid confrontation he sometimes replied that he opposed the war, opposed the Israeli government, and supported peace.

In much of Italy’s current political discourse Birely said Zionist is no longer treated as a descriptive term for support of Jewish national self-determination. It has become an accusation tied to murder, racism, and genocide. “When people say ‘Zionista,’ it is just the new way of saying ‘Ebreo,’” he said, using the Italian word for Jew.

Gubbay described a related demand in Milan. Italian Jews, she said, are often expected to distance themselves publicly from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government before being accepted in social or political spaces.

“If I’m not with Bibi, I’m OK,” she said, describing the condition placed on Jewish participants rather than stating her own political view. “But why should I have to say something like this? They don’t ask Russians, Chinese or Iranian people to dissociate themselves from the government of another country.”

Birely argues that Italy’s current atmosphere cannot be explained by the Israel-Hamas War alone. He points to three historical and political traditions that he believes have combined with the anger generated by the conflict.

The first is Italy’s incomplete reckoning with its fascist past. Italy was ruled for two decades by Benito Mussolini’s regime and passed racial laws in 1938 that stripped Jews of basic rights. Thousands of Italian Jews were later sent to Nazi concentration camps.

Birely said postwar Italy built much of its national identity around resistance to German occupation and the heroism of the partisans while failing to fully address the role Italians and Italian institutions played in persecuting Jews.

The second factor, he said, is the persistence of older Catholic imagery involving Jewish guilt. Italy is now largely secular, and the Catholic Church formally rejected the charge of collective Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus during the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Even so Birely said Christian symbolism remains culturally strong.

Birely pointed to religious imagery used during the Gaza war, including a statement he attributed to Cardinal Pizzaballa, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, that “Christ is … buried under the rubble” in Gaza. He also cited Italian nativity scenes showing Jesus wrapped in a keffiyeh and public art presenting him as Palestinian. “This taps into these old cultural ideas about Jews being something sinister,” Birely said. “Just as the Jews killed Jesus, now Jews are killing babies in Gaza.”

The third element is Italy’s political left, which was shaped for decades by a communist movement larger than any other in Western Europe. Birely said some of the language promoted during the Soviet period, particularly the portrayal of Zionism as racism or colonialism, remained part of the country’s political vocabulary. He said those ideas can still be heard in universities, trade unions, and local activist groups, where hostility toward Israelis is sometimes defended as anti-Zionism rather than treated as discrimination.

That conflict now reaches beyond demonstrations and university politics. It has become part of the debate over how Italy should define contemporary antisemitism and whether public institutions should use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition.

Jewish organizations say clearer standards are needed when anger toward Israel is transferred to Jewish communities or individual Israelis. Opponents worry that such standards could be applied too broadly and limit legitimate criticism. Gubbay said criticism of Israel, including criticism of its government, is not in itself antisemitic. The distinction, she said, lies in whether the argument addresses policy or turns a person’s Jewish identity or Israeli nationality into grounds for exclusion.

She cited plans for a luxury resort in Perledo, near Lake Como, involving Israeli architect Yehiel Tsubery. Local environmental groups have raised hydrogeological concerns that remain under review by the relevant authorities.

Gubbay said those objections should be investigated on their merits. Her concern was with activists who described the development as a “Zionist resort” and opposed Tsubery’s involvement by arguing that he was born in an illegitimate state.

A similar dispute arose in Valsesia, a mountainous area of Piedmont where Israeli families have purchased or are considering purchasing abandoned homes through an initiative known as Project Baita.

Gubbay described the families as doctors, engineers, teachers, and parents seeking a quieter life in Italian communities affected by depopulation. Opponents portrayed their arrival as the establishment of an Israeli “colony.”