The Tent Intifada has arrived in Italy. Excited by the images that bounce back from the USA, unimaginative as only sectarians can be and mobilized by the calendar that offers imminent opportunities for “conflict” (elections and sessions of academic bodies), the self-styled Italian “students” call it exactly that: “Intifada student”.
And who knows if they know, that the revolt they shamelessly evoke in recent years has translated into murderous and terrorist actions aimed against innocent people: families, women, children. And who knows if they think about it, that the barbarity of October 7th, orchestrated and sadistically documented by the Nazi-Islamists of Hamas, was precisely the culmination of that Intifada that they want to import into Italy too. «Against the University and the government» they rave. And against Israel, obviously, whose boycott they are calling for.
In Bologna, which led the way, the tents were pitched two days ago, and tomorrow a lunch is scheduled with the Egyptian activist Patrick Zaki. The other squares will follow suit: the contagion will be rapidly facilitated by social media and the tom-tom of the most extremist collectives. Pulling the strings is «Change route», a group that boasts the title of «Communist youth organisation», boasts nuclei in every university in Italy and on its profile displays phrases and profiles of Lenin and Mao, not exactly a libertarian wave but to revolutionary impulses. Then the usual social centres, the basic trade unions, the veterans of the old, and never scrapped, extra-parliamentary militancy. Other than “students”.
The enemy is always the same: it is the USA, it is Israel, it is “Zionism”. The Middle Eastern question, in their minds, no longer has anything to do with the territorial dispute. Palestine is a global ideological myth. The Islamists want to drive out the Jews, the far left wants to fight the West. They find themselves united in anti-Zionism, a socially acceptable version of an otherwise unspeakable anti-Semitic reflex.
They are delirious. They dream of protests against the war in Vietnam: “We will fight from one generation to the next” proclaim the militants of the Roman group on an Instagram profile in which the outline of a Kalashnikov stands out. «We cannot fail to notice how internationalist solidarity towards Palestine is having a politicization and radicalization effect in a similar anti-imperialist sense» observe the comrades from Turin seriously, next to the portrait of Ho Chí Minh
The enemy is not dictators, it is not liberticidal regimes or fanatics. They never were. Indeed, they are allies: the enemy is the West, the same one that raises them good-naturedly, tolerates them, often pampers them.
Already protagonists in recent months of episodes of intolerance and violence (sometimes not only verbal) in Rome and Turin, the militants of the student protests have not received a single note of blame from the left. And now they are importing from America the “fashion” of tents pitched on university lawns to besiege the authorities and fuel protests which in the USA have reached the point of making campuses inaccessible to Jewish students and professors – and threaten to be odious in Italy too . Rome has left. «From Columbia to Bicocca let’s organize the academic boycott together», they say in Milan. «Permanent agitation in view of the Academic Senate on May 21st» they promise in Tor Vergata.
“But what intifada do you want to do, if you can’t rent a studio apartment with all the comforts 20 meters from the University, you’ll get anxious?” someone comments disenchanted.
