Europe marks 80 years since the end of the Second World War on May 8, but Italy celebrated that anniversary as part of its annual Liberation Day celebrations – the day Allied Forces completed their task of repelling German armies and defeating their Italian collaborators on local soil – on April 25.
Sadly, pro-Palestinian radicals continue to politicise a moment when Italians should be uniting in their commitment to democratic values and anti-fascism. The radicals use the commemoration to deny Jewish and Zionist contributions to the country’s liberation and conflate the heroic Italian resistance with Hamas and the Palestinian cause.
This year, numerous public events have celebrated Hamas fighters as the modern equivalent of Italian partisans fighting the Nazis and equated anti-fascism to anti-Zionism. Liliana Segre, an Italian senator and Holocaust survivor, has been publicly labelled as a “Zionist agent.” Efforts to commemorate the Jewish and Zionist contribution to the country’s liberation have been under attack by brazen historical revisionists and required police protection.
Yet history starkly contradicts this attempt to compare Hamas to the partisans and Israel to the Nazis. Hamas’s predecessors sided with the Nazis and absorbed much of their Jew-hatred. This was not just an individual choice of a few, or a case of Arab leadership under British colonial rule flirting with the Nazis on the realpolitik principle that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
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Arab leaders such as the Palestinian Haj Amin El Hussein expressed admiration for Nazism and hoped that the Nazis could enact the Final Solution in the Middle East, had they ousted the British from the region. Haj Amin Al Husseini not only led the Great Arab Revolt against the British Mandate before the Second World War; once he had escaped to Iraq, in 1941 he plotted a pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad that was preceded by an anti-Jewish pogrom. When he failed, he escaped to Nazi Germany, where he coordinated Arabic language Nazi propaganda and actively promoted the establishment of a Muslim Waffen-SS brigade. Their blood curling Jewish hatred and a totalitarian mindset remain central to the ideology of those whom some Italians today compare to the resistance fighters who freed their country 80 years ago.
By contrast, in the 1940s, those Jews who took up arms to join the war efforts, invariably sided with the allied forces. Jewish fighters, individually across allied armies and resistance movements, and as part of an embryonic, future Jewish army that prefigured the IDF, greatly contributed to the allied struggle, including, critically, Italy’s liberation.
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Her Majesty’s 5,000-strong Jewish Brigade played a central role, fulfilling the vision expressed by Yishuv leader, David Ben Gurion, that the Jewish settlement in the British Mandate would fight the Nazis as if there was no White Paper – the British 1939 policy that blocked Jewish migration on eve of the Holocaust – and would fight the White Paper as if there was no war against the Nazis. Establishing a combat force made of Yishuv Jews would provide critical training and combat experience that would go on to become the backbone of a future, independent Jewish army.
Despite initial British reluctance to train Jews who could later fight against British colonial policy, the Jewish Brigade was finally formed and deployed for combat duty in the Italian campaign starting in 1944, while auxiliary units of the British Army’s Palestine Regiment provided logistics and support in the Italian theatre since 1943.
The Jewish Brigade saw active combat in multiple theatres during the Italian campaign and lost more than 1 per cent of its fighting force, mostly during the battle of the River Senio, near Ravenna, when in the spring of 1945 the allied finally smashed Germany’s defensive Gothic Line and swept through Northern Italy. Many of them are buried in the small town of Piangipane’s military cemetery – young Zionists who donned the British uniform but carried a Jewish flag and wore a yellow Star of David as a badge of pride on their insignia.
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Alongside them – including some Italian Jews like Vittorio Dan Segre, who was embedded with the Jewish Brigade as a war correspondent and afterwards serving in the Palestine Regiment, and Piero Cividali – almost 1,000 Italian Jews fought the Nazis as members of the Italian resistance. Another was Franco Cesana, Italy’s youngest partisan, assassinated by the Nazis when he was 13.
Seven Italian Jews earned gold medals for military valour, and hundreds took part in combat operations – a disproportionate contribution to the resistance effort. While Jews were approximately 0.1 per cent of Italians, nearly 2.5 per cent of them joined the resistance in various roles – as fighters, liaisons and political leaders of the underground.
Their contribution to freeing Italy from the Nazi-fascist yoke, as individuals fighting in the ranks of the resistance and as a fully formed Jewish combat force bearing the future flag of Israel and Jewish insignia, deserves its pride of place in our commemorations. Seeking to distort history by erasing that memory and comparing anti-fascism to those who are inspired by yesteryear’s Nazi collaborators not only desecrates memory. It serves the purpose of excusing those who wish to justify the murder of Jews today.
Emanuele Ottolenghi is a Senior Adviser with 240 Analytics, a risks analysis platform focused on mapping terrorist and terror finance networks
