The Metamorphosis of Daniele the Zionist

When I first met my partner Caroline and learnt that her father was of Italian-Jewish background, and that he migrated to Australia to escape Mussolini’s black shirts, I expected that, when I get to meet him, we will probably end up arguing about Israel. I wasn’t particularly worried. I had a long experience with my own Christian Lebanese anti-Palestinian family of going into intense arguments about Palestine without having to take it as far as severing family ties. As it turned out Caroline’s father had very little attachment to Israel.

 

It was not until we visited Rome, from where the family originated, and met Caroline’s cousins, that I got to encounter family members with a strong investment in Israel. Some had even done a full pilgrimage, gone there, lived on a Kibbutz, and trained with the IDF, before returning to Rome. Those were seriously committed Zionists. Chief among them was Daniele (not his real name). A tall, softly spoken, chain-smoking man with an incredible knowledge of Rome and its art, Daniele was a seductive character. I immediately liked him. I was also primed by Caroline to tolerate his Zionism for, among all of the family members, he had had the most traumatizing experience of Italian fascism in World War Two: when the Mussolini’s Blackshirts climbed up the stairs of their apartment to round up whoever was left of the family, his grandmother hid him under the bed’s mattress and asked him not to leave until she told him to do so. The fascists took his grandmother away and Daniele remained under the mattress for three days. I’ve never felt it to be good productive politics, and certainly not decent human behaviour, to strongly criticise the investments that people make as a result of such experiences.

 

Nonetheless over the fiteen years or so that I knew him (he died in 2016), Daniele’s views about Israel changed considerably. I like to think that maybe it’s because of my influence, but it’s probably more a growing clash between his political and ethical sensibility and the increasingly reactionary and intolerable social and cultural environment that has become pervasive throughout the country. 

 

I remember the first time I met Daniele, he openly and carelessly told me how worried he was about the son of a relative who was an Israeli soldier fighting in Lebanon. It didn’t seem to bother him that I was Lebanese or that I might be worried about any Lebanese people at the receiving end of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. I was already writing about the relation between victimhood and narcissism at the time, and, thought to myself that he would make a good case study. But what he said did initiate the first of many later arguments we had about the ‘who is right and who is wrong’ of the war. While strongly disagreeing with him, it was through these arguments that I got to like him more and more, chain smoking and calmly making his point without a hint of aggression.

 

Around the mid-2000s I began noticing a very distinct change in Daniele’s attitude. He was feeling increasingly alienated from Israeli society as it was evolving and mentioned a couple of friends that he no longer talked to. While he continued to be invested in Israel, he nonetheless found it hard to justify why he was. He adopted a kind of ‘I don’t like what they are doing but we Jews don’t have much choice but to support Israel’. On one occasion, I told him a story related by Edward Said. I can no longer find the reference so I might have changed the story a bit. I think it was about an intellectual who was a reluctant Zionist, but that Said liked and respected, nonetheless. In explaining why he supported Zionism despite not having any affinities with it, this intellectual said something like this: if your son steals all your money and bets it on a horse, you might not like what you son has done and you might not even like the horse, but would you want the horse to lose the race? Daniele really liked that story. He thanked me for it and said it really captured how he felt.

 

In 2014, however, two years before he died, Daniele surprised me. We happened to be visiting him and his wife in Rome, in the midst of what became known as ‘Operation Protective Edge.’ This operation, in many ways, prefigured the 2023 Israeli invasion of Gaza in its exterminatory deadliness, and its indifference to civilian life. Daniele was upset by it. As we were watching the violence unfurl on the news, he got particularly agitated watching a clip of two Israeli soldiers leading away a handcuffed young boy. He sighed heavily, and turned to me and said: ‘I no longer care if this horse wins anymore. It’s like, as they say in English, “flogging a dead horse”.’ I did not dare say anything triumphant as it would have cheapened the moment, and disrespected what he must have experienced saying this.

 

It was an important moment to me. As I noted above, while I always considered the linking of the Holocaust and Israel’s right to exist as an ethno-national entity intellectually untenable, I nonetheless understood the people who have been traumatised by the Holocaust and who experienced the relation between it and Israel as sacrosanct. I always refrained from engaging  with such people critically. That moment when Daniele referred to Israel as a ‘dead horse’ helped me break the aura of sanctity that surrounded the nexus between the Holocaust and Israel. After all what has happened and has been happening, I increasingly see in the people highlighting this nexus as self-serving ideologues whose collapsing of the idea of ‘being at home in the world’ with the idea of ‘defending an ethno-national state’ is both politically and ethically untenable.