A Long Weekend

“I’d have expected that, on an issue they considered so important, they wouldn’t have called a general strike on a Friday: long weekends and revolution do not go together.” The ill-fated joke with which Prime Minister Meloni tried to dismiss the general strike as a holiday backfired spectacularly, as did transport minister Matteo Salvini’s attempt to prevent the strike on the grounds that the proper notice hadn’t been given.

This was a “long weekend” not of vacation but of mobilization. It was populated by workers who weren’t especially pleased being told how to use their right to strike by people like Meloni and Salvini, who have been career politicians since age twenty. The instant reaction on Wednesday evening was impressive, as has been the consistency with which tens of thousands of people continued to take to the streets, day after day, since the Global Sumud Flotilla was halted.

The movement for Gaza wasn’t born last Wednesday. It wouldn’t exist today without the commitment of those who have kept it alive over the last two years, especially in universities. The mobilizations of recent days mark an undeniable qualitative leap, with workers playing an unprecedented leading role. The grassroots push for solidarity with Gaza has produced unexpected convergences, not least the positive development of a general strike called jointly by the CGIL and many grassroots unions.

Other convergences have been seen in the streets. In terms of composition — with the mobilization shared between trade unions and social centers; the vast world of the social and political left coming together in support of the flotilla; and, in general, a visible expansion of the movement, able to welcome in people from outside of activist circles. And in terms of forms of struggle: with mass action that led entire marches, without divisions, to explicitly violate the government’s security decree, effectively blocking production, deliveries, and traffic. It is striking to see marches of tens of thousands of people blocking ring roads, highways, stations, and freight terminals in the same country where, a few months ago, the climate movement’s roadblocks were criminalized. Meloni and Salvini probably realized this too late.

The legitimacy of forms of struggle is closely linked to the moral force of an issue and those who support it. And what could be more morally powerful than wanting to stop an ongoing genocide?

Generation Gaza

To understand the explosion of mobilization in recent days, we also have to consider the generational factor, which is obvious to anyone who has been out on the streets: that is, the overwhelming presence of the young and very young.

This generation has a higher average level of education than previous ones. It has a much more immediate familiarity with what is happening around the world and the interpretative keys to analyze it. For the first time in Italian history, today’s youth also has a very significant component of second-generation Italians, who have a migrant background or, in any case, are tied by family, identity and personal biography to the Global South. Considering this is essential if we want to understand how anti-colonialism is increasingly central to this generation’s worldview, alongside the wider decline in the credibility of Western-centric rhetoric.

The second factor concerns the previous generations, who have also participated in significant numbers in the demonstrations of recent days. This expresses the pro-Arab and, in particular, pro-Palestinian sentiment that has marked much of the postwar Italian Republic’s history. Until the end of the twentieth century, solidarity with the Palestinian people, recognition of the historical injustice they have suffered, and concrete ties with that reality were a widely shared heritage in Italian politics and society: not only on the Left but also, for example, in much of Catholic Italy. In the last two decades, particularly since the start of the “clash of civilizations” following September 11, 2001, the political and media elite has exerted enormous pressure on this sentiment, shifting Italy’s position decisively toward the US-Israel axis. But deep ties and feelings require more than a few newspaper editorials to change them.

The relationship between this element and the younger one has not been without conflict and tension, just as conflict and tension structure Palestinian society itself. The old internationalism and new anti-colonialism, although closely related, do not always speak the same language. Yet in this sense, too, the urgency of the situation and the arrival of the flotilla have created areas of convergence.

Third, it is impossible to understand the tides of mobilization in recent days without considering the strong frustration that part of the population feels toward the Meloni government’s inaction. The tension between sections of the population who, for the reasons just described, feel strongly about solidarity with Gaza, and a government that, even more than its European partners, has done virtually nothing on the issue — limiting itself to vague words of hope for peace and a few limited humanitarian interventions — has been growing for almost two years.

In every society, especially in times of widespread depoliticization and low participation, a section of the population does not take responsibility for certain issues — first among them major international crises — because it expects someone else, in a position of authority, to deal with them. The widespread perception that the government, the European Union, and the international community are doing almost nothing to stop the massacre has generated a frustration that has found an outlet in the streets in recent days. If no one is dealing with it, the implicit delegation of responsibility to others is withdrawn.

Talking to anyone in the streets, it’s clear: we can’t just do nothing about what’s happening before our eyes. As the Italian soldier played by Alberto Sordi says in the final scene of the 1960 film Tutti a casa, as he takes up a machine gun and joins the antifascist partisans: “You can’t just stand by and watch.”

The Mother of All Injustices

The Global Sumud Flotilla provided a spark for all these energies and sentiments. The unexpressed feelings of solidarity and frustration found something concrete to identify with, in this both humanitarian and political mission to break the Israeli naval blockade against Gaza.

In an era and in a country strongly characterized by distrust of institutions and political representation, and by doubts that collective participation can influence the authorities’ choices, it was difficult for tens of thousands of people to find much point in mobilizing to ask the Meloni government to change its stance on Palestine. The presence of a concrete reality such as the flotilla, which put into practice the widespread desire for direct solidarity, bypassing governmental inaction, triggered something.

Jacobin Italia wrote about this last month, noting the large procession that accompanied the departure from Genoa of several boats headed to join the flotilla. A new sense of urgency has been activated — one that requires immediate, tangible solutions. The flotilla provided such a solution. The humanitarian-aid element of this mission also allowed this mobilization to rally forces who might otherwise have struggled to take a political stance on the Gaza issue. The movement became the flotilla’s “ground crew,” identifying so strongly with the mission’s fate that it simply could not bear the Israeli military intervention against it. “If they block the flotilla, we’ll block everything,” the movement began to say. “If they block the flotilla, we’ll go on a general strike,” the union announced. And so it was.

Added to this is the most interesting, though not unprecedented, aspect of the mobilizations of recent days: Gaza has become a metaphor for everything wrong with the world. People have begun to see the enormous injustice suffered by the Palestinians as an extreme and violent form of the many injustices that mark our society. If Israel is allowed to do something so serious and get away with it, what hope do we have in our battles, big and small? If even a live streamed genocide can’t be stopped, what hope is there of changing anything else? If our institutional representatives are incapable of stopping genocide, why would they be able to defend democracy from the far-right offensive? And ultimately, who’s to say that the boundless violence unleashed against the Palestinians won’t one day target us, too?

The movement for Gaza seems to have become a last resort: If we don’t take action for this, then what will we take action for? The desire to say “enough is enough,” to rebel against the mother of all injustices, is certainly reminiscent of the mobilizations against the 2003 war in Iraq. The perception of an issue whose moral force, particularly in a country like Italy, where politics and religion have strongly rooted opposition to war, surpasses all others and, as a result, compels action.

It is now difficult to distinguish between indignation at the Palestinian genocide and indignation at the blockade of the flotilla or Meloni’s mockery of striking workers. The decision to protest often depends on the perception of a violation of a society’s recognized standards of justice. There is outrage at the idea of a line being crossed, that what is happening is no longer tolerable. This goes for Gaza but, especially for the youngest, it applies in general to a system whose promises no one believes anymore and that has lost all credibility, both in terms of genocide and in the daily lives of many.

Squares, Ballots, Truncheons

In this widespread indignation lies the potential for a generalization of this movement, which today is the main social opposition to the Meloni government. We get the impression of a generative potential, a potential for sowing the seeds of other mobilizations. Still, it would probably be a mistake to expect this movement to become something different from what we have seen so far. The moral force of opposition to genocide is something unique and unrepeatable. If people saw a reflection of their own conditions of exploitation in Gaza, they still took to the streets for Gaza, and there is no reason to believe that they would do the same in protests against exploitation.

In recent years, we have gotten used to great explosions of participation, almost always linked to events characterized by great moral force and a sense of resistance to violence and oppression. Just think of the squares that filled up in Italy in June 2020 with indignation over the murder of George Floyd, under the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” or the feminist mobilizations that periodically respond to cases of femicide. Such moments can have a powerful and enduring cultural impact, especially on younger Italians. More rarely, however, do they build up consolidated organization or even produce a prolonged mobilization.

It is not certain that this will be repeated in the case of the protests for Gaza, which are certainly unique in their significance, but it is always worth warning against easy illusions and the Left’s widespread tendency toward wishful thinking. Gaza is Gaza. The “social uprising” often mentioned by CGIL general secretary Maurizio Landini can certainly be fueled by the activism generated in recent days and the widespread sense of injustice mentioned above, but it must develop along its own path. In short, this is not the time to sit on the fence or try to take control of the movement but rather for social and political organizations to open up to the movement and allow themselves to be fueled by it.

What is for sure is that the right-wing government, reduced to silence by the explosion of a social conflict it is in no way equipped to deal with, has been anxiously awaiting today’s regional elections in Calabria, which it will almost certainly win. Being able to say to the opposition, “You fill the squares, but your ballot boxes are empty,” is certainly what Meloni and her associates most want right now. The liberal establishment has already tried to blame the center-left’s defeat in last week’s elections in the Marche region to an alleged extremist drift and to the candidate’s words of solidarity with Palestine.

These are weak and manipulative arguments, which the Right resorts to because it knows that, on the merits of the issue, the clear majority of Italians are with the Palestinians and the Global Sumud Flotilla. Four center-left parliamentarians (two from the Partito Democratico, one from the Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra, and one from the Movimento Cinque Stelle) also participated in the flotilla, a choice that can only strengthen the (normally only weak) credibility of those political forces for part of the electorate.

More worrying, however, are the calls for law and order that the government has made in recent days. The rhetoric against the flotilla has not had much success; Israel’s voice lacks any credibility in the eyes of millions of Italians. Yet the call to use the truncheon to beat down protests may work. It is no coincidence that the government’s social media is currently steering clear of the issue (Gaza and the flotilla), focusing instead on the disruption caused by strikes and the need to curb social conflict. The attempt is to ride the authoritarian wave coming from the West, the desire for reaction and a strong man that also feeds Trumpism, the violent hunt for the enemy within — perhaps through greater legal restrictions on strikes..

This choice is consistent with the nature of the Meloni government, which still enjoys broad support, making it a strong candidate in the 2027 elections, but which has never had a real hegemonic hold on Italian society. Meloni became prime minister in 2022 largely due to a combination of the exhaustion of other right-wing leaders (Silvio Berlusconi and Salvini), divisions in the center left, and the credibility she gained from being the only visible parliamentary opposition during Mario Draghi’s cross-party government.

Over the past three years, Meloni has managed to maintain support by skillfully navigating between only limited legislative activity and a major propaganda effort, especially on the international stage. But gathering consensus in an Italy where both the streets and the ballot boxes are increasingly empty is not the same thing as having to deal with mass social conflict. This is something that Meloni, at least for the moment, does not seem equipped to do.