The truce of the elephant lasts almost an hour and a half. At Palazzo della Minerva the Italian right finds shelter from the whirlwind of controversy that has been affecting it for days. For the winks at piazza no-vax, for the reluctance to condemn the extremism of Forza Nuova, director of the attack on the CGIL last Saturday.
The noise is far away at the meeting of the Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast, the prayer movement chaired by former Knesset member Robert Iliatov and former US congressman Michele Bachmann . To do the honors in Rome and the Northern League senator Simone Pillon .
But in large ambascias in the Cloister of the Convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva there are above all Matteo Salvini andGiorgia Meloni , side by side with the Israeli ambassador to Italy Dror Eydar . With them the spokesman for the Family Day Massimo Gandolfini , Cardinal George Pell , a group of deputies, from the force fighter Lucio Malan to the Northern League player Paolo Formentini .
Prayer and politics intertwine without interruption between songs and speeches, a must of the “breakfasts” of the American Catholic right of which Salvini and Meloni are frequent visitors. “I pray with you today for a future of prosperity and peace, with the affection and admiration of all time”, the leader of Fdi begins. No words are left to chance. The deportation of the Jews from the ghetto of Rome in 1943, thunders Meloni, is “the work of Nazi-Fascist madness”.
Schiaffo served to nostalgics and revisionists who still crowd a certain right in Italy. It is a necessary clarification, as well as useful, after the storm that overwhelmed the candidate for the municipality of Rome Enrico Michetti, author two years ago of an article that brushes up on the Jewish-banking equation so dear to the anti-Semitic galaxy. The mea culpa was there, “an unforgivable lightness” said the tribune, but perhaps it is not enough to recover the trust of a world – the Roman Jewish community – which knows how to make a difference at the polls.
For this reason Meloni clears the field of doubts, “Israel’s enemies are also in the West”, she says during the prayer breakfast. After all Michetti and above all “his” candidate of him. Next Sunday’s ballot is a bet that bears his signature, the appointment that will partly decide the future leadership of the center-right.
Salvini echoes her, with a speech on the thread of emotion, “the friendship between Italy and Israel is a gift and a flower that must be treated every day”. And he wins the applause, malicious whisper from the League. Thanks to the constant reference of the “Captain” to the capital Jerusalem, the most tense nerve in relations with the Palestinians, on which Meloni instead prefers to fly over. Instead, it is the very heart of that meeting. So much so that Ambassador Eydar breaks the delay: “I have a dream, and it is shared by many: the dream is to see the flag of Italy, this wonderful country, waving in the Eternal City of Jerusalem”.
Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, the Jewish community in Rome repeats relentlessly, are two sides of the same coin. The naked and pure Roman right, which has always been sensitive to Palestinian claims and often inclined to anti-Zionist sirens, is not very popular. For Formentini, who sits on the Italy-Israel Friendship Committee, there is no room for ambiguity: “Hatred for Israel is the most cowardly and slimy form of anti-Semitism there is”.
