IHRA is the instrument, not the army. The army is a Zionist power structure that runs through governments, NATO headquarters, donor networks, and newsrooms. Its present work is simple: make Zionism identical with Jewishness, then treat every attack on the first as an attack on the second. Hasbara is the method — the daily weather of talking points, renamed maps, and moral blackmail. The Italian bill is one theater. New York is another. Occupied Palestine is the ground, and the ground is being renamed in real time.
On September 9, in front of the Italian Parliament at Montecitorio and in more than forty other Italian piazzas, the slogans were still the what the law is written to kill: criticizing Israel is not antisemitism, anti zionism is not anti semitism. Inside the Chamber, a text already passed by the Senate waited. The amendment vote slipped a week. The floor date is October 2. The bill’s official name is Disposizioni per il contrasto all’antisemitismo e per l’adozione della definizione operativa di antisemitismo (Provisions for Combating Antisemitism and for the Adoption of the Operational Definition of Antisemitism).
On March 5 the Senate approved it, 105 to 24, with 21 abstentions. At its core it takes the 2016 working definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance — a non-binding paper whose principal drafter, Kenneth Stern, has warned should never be turned into law — and writes it into the Italian legal order “including the related indicators, necessary for the application of this law.”
Those indicators are the weapon. Of the eleven examples attached to IHRA, seven concern the State of Israel. Calling Israel a racist enterprise. Denying a so-called right of self-determination that in practice means the right of an ethnocracy to rule. Applying to Israel a standard not demanded of every other “democracy.” Comparing its conduct to Nazi Germany. Treating the state as a Jewish collectivity. The definition’s own caveat — that criticism of Israel similar to criticism of any other country is not antisemitic — is the clause governments never operationalize. What they operationalize is the list that makes anti-Zionism the new face of Jew-hatred. Zionism becomes Semitism. The ideology becomes the people. The occupation becomes a synagogue. After that, enforcement is administration: banned rallies under the 1931 public-safety law if they present a “serious potential risk” of slogans or symbols deemed antisemitic under IHRA; training in schools, universities, the armed forces, the police, the magistracy; monitoring of platforms; a national coordinator; a fund of ten million euros a year. Officials say there are no new prison terms. They do not need them. A denied hall, a frozen career, and a police file will do.
This is not Italy inventing a doctrine. It is Italy joining a doctrine already in use against the Palestine solidarity movement from London to Minneapolis to New York. Britain put Palestine Action on the terrorism list for targeting the machinery of the arms trade, then used the designation to raid, charge, and jail people for speech and protest that would once have been ordinary dissent. The U.S. State Department has followed the same script, stretching “terror” over solidarity networks and, in a separate act of discipline, sanctioning Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur, for naming the occupation and the genocide. Italy’s antisemitism bill is the legal cousin of those lists: declare the movement an enemy of civilization, then let the police, the campus, and the newsroom finish the job.
Zohran Mamdani took office as mayor of New York on January 1. On day one he revoked Eric Adams’s executive orders that had locked IHRA into city government and barred city agencies from boycotting Israel. Israel’s Foreign Ministry called the move “antisemitic gasoline on an open fire.” The consul general warned of violence. The ADL, the AJC, and UJA Federation issued a joint denunciation. A petition later asked the governor to remove him. City Hall said it would not replace IHRA with another codified definition of hate. The storm was not about a municipal form. It was to prove that a large American city cannot be allowed to refuse the equation. If the mayor of New York can treat anti-Zionism as politics rather than race hate, the whole apparatus looks optional. So the apparatus answers with the oldest hasbara move: the safety of Jews depends on the immunity of the state.
The same week the Italian piazzas filled, twelve countries — Britain, France, Canada, Spain, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Poland, Portugal — announced they would restrict, or consider restricting, trade in goods from illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. The step is minimal. It does not stop the weapons. It does not halt the siege. It does not name genocide. It is a customs gesture toward a two-state formula Israel’s own ministers are busy burying. Even that was enough to produce fury in Jerusalem and a press that treated trade from colonial settlements as a tragic misunderstanding rather than a war crime with a barcode. Germany and Italy still block anything that would actually bite at the European Union level. The twelve-country note is the outer edge of official courage. The Italian bill is what the inner core prefers: punish the naming, not the occupation.
Listen to the spokespeople. They are not only dropping “West Bank.” They are dropping the language of occupation itself. In official speech the stolen land is Judea and Samaria — the biblical map laid over the living country, as if Oslo, the Green Line, and the Fourth Geneva Convention were clerical errors. The Knesset has moved to strike “West Bank” from legislation and replace it everywhere with Judea and Samaria. American statehouses have been lobbied to do the same. Ministers speak of sovereignty, of “normalizing life,” of “encouraging migration” from Gaza and from Judea and Samaria. The cabinet deepens land registration and building control in the occupied territory and calls it housekeeping. Annexation is practiced first as vocabulary.
The more extreme line does not stop at the 1967 border. In that sermon the whole of historic Palestine is already the inheritance: not a state called Israel beside a people called Palestinian, but a single biblical estate in which Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the land taken in 1948 are chapters of the same title deed. When government voices use Judea and Samaria as if that name covered occupied Palestine as such — and when they refuse “occupation,” “settlement,” and even “West Bank” in the same breath — they are not describing geography. They are interpreting Greater Israel. A press on the take, or simply under the discipline of the State Department and of Israeli briefers, repeats the names as if they were neutral. Hasbara does not always invent. Often it only refuses the word that international law still uses.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, has described the shops that keep this discipline in place: Mossad, the CIA, and MI6 as overlapping trades; Israeli intelligence inside the Pentagon’s policy office in the Iraq years; a lobby that owns large parts of the American Congress and the White House; covert work that runs whether or not the president is in the room. Washington, London, Berlin, Rome and Paris, he has said, participate in the same lies. Mark Rutte, secretary general of NATO, performed the part when the United States and Israel went to war on Iran: the president, he told American television, was doing it “to make the whole world safe.” That is the envelope. Ukraine and Israel inside “the West.” Gaza a complication. Solidarity a virus.
The newsroom is not outside the envelope. Israel’s post–October 7 influence spend, reconstructed by the Quincy Institute, passed a billion dollars in public diplomacy, with U.S. foreign-agent outlays on track to make Israel the largest FARA spender. Firms, pastors, influencers, chatbot seeding. A prime example in Italy is Maurizio Molinari: not a reporter who happened to cover Jerusalem, but a Zionist propagandist and Atlanticist mouthpiece. Hebrew University; years as correspondent from New York and Jerusalem; a shelf of books on Israel, America, and “radical Islam”; Bilderberg and Davos. He is married to Micol Braha, an Italo-Libyan Zionist lawyer; they wed in New York and raised four children there. He ran La Stampa and then la Repubblica on an unflinching pro-Israel, NATO-Italy line until his own newsroom voted no confidence, 164 to 55, after he pulped a hundred thousand copies of a supplement that dared to mention occupation and genocide. He left the chair in 2024. He did not leave the circuit. In 2026 he became editorial director of Gruppo SAE — Sapere Aude Editori — charged with the group’s expansion, including in the United States, after SAE bought La Stampa.
The revolving door does not stop with him. The same types of propagandists move from state media RAI to La7, from Corriere della Sera to La Repubblica: a handful of voices, a single brief, the occupation spoken as security and the resistance spoken as hate. When Naples students stopped Molinari’s campus appearance with “Zionists out,” the scandal, for the establishment, was the interruption. When students stormed the offices of La Stampa in Torino and threw some papers on the floor and spray painted some graffiti against the media escorts to Genocide, they were deemed as thugs and hoodlums, leading to persecution by the state and the eventual suicide of two highschool student activists.
From New York to Rome the sequence is the same. A movement names occupation, apartheid, genocide. The power structure answers that the naming is hatred and even terrorism. IHRA supplies the checklist. Hasbara supplies the talking points. The ambassador calls the protest terrorism. The minister calls the land by its biblical name and waits for the caption to follow. Twelve governments nibble at colonial goods and call it resolve. The Italian parliament prepares to make the equation law. What remains is the refusal: Zionism is a political project, not a people. Judea and Samaria is a sermon laid over a theft, not a map of a country that has stopped existing under another name. Occupied Palestine is still occupied Palestine. A press that cannot say so is not a press. A solidarity that accepts the gag is already finished.
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