https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-03-08/ty-article/.premium/the-rome-entreaty-netanyahu-and-meloni-are-partners-in-international-isolation/00000186-c0c6-dd29-a1be-MILAN – Soon after taking office last fall, Giorgia Meloni vowed to visit Israel “in the first months of 2023.” That hasn’t happened, but Italy’s first prime minister to lead a party with neofascist roots is getting something close enough to a state visit.
Benjamin Netanyahu, embattled at home by the massive demonstrations against his government's bid to weaken the judiciary, is coming to Rome. The visit, for which it apparently wasn't too easy to find an El Al crew willing to fly the prime minister and his wife, is scheduled for Thursday.
- Why this rising Italian politician is downplaying her Jewish roots
- The Italian election's real lesson for Israel
- Channeling Meloni in Haaretz
The “scratch my back” logic behind the meeting isn't hard to imagine. Netanyahu gets a bit of face-saving and a photo op with the head of state of a major Western democracy – after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinkenslammed his move to legalize settlements and criticized the judicial overhaul.
Meloni, meanwhile, gets to further polish her credentials as a leader a little less scary than people thought. (In other words: less antisemitic, and old school in foreign policy.)
Followers of Italian politics can see that she has at least two goals. First, of course, she again wants to set the record straight that her party might be “post-fascist,” as it's often referred to at home, but it’s not antisemitic. To be fair, she has already partly won that battle – but she can always use some extra reassurance.
The party she heads and co-founded, Brothers of Italy, was born from the ashes of the Italian Social Movement. That was an openly neofascist outfit created after World War II by former officers of Mussolini’s regime, including the editor of the infamous antisemitic magazine La Difesa della Razza. Meloni herself used to belong to this party when she was a teenager.
Recently, she has gone out of her way to distance herself and her party from the antisemitism associated with Mussolini’s fascism. In last fall’s general election, Brothers of Italy had the former speaker of Rome’s Jewish community on its ticket (she won a seat in Parliament).
In December, Meloni visited Rome’s Jewish Museum and denounced as “a disgrace” the 1938 racial laws under which Mussolini stripped Italian Jews of their civil rights. She also hugged a local Jewish leader and even wept. Earlier this week, her party colleague and Senate president, Ignazio La Russa, paid an official visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem.
Meloni, however, has never distanced herself from fascism itself; instead, she has carefully avoided the subject. So has La Russa, who once admitted to collecting Mussolini memorabilia and whose middle name is Benito. At his Yad Vashem visit, he said he felt “close to the Jewish people.” However, when an Italian reporter chased him to ask if he believed fascism was evil, he refused to answer.
Previously, other Italian politicians with a past in the Italian Social Movement felt compelled to renounce fascism as a prerequisite for major office. The most famous example is Gianfranco Fini, who would go on to be foreign minister. When he visited Yad Vashem in 2003, he denounced fascism as “the ultimate evil.”
But Meloni and her close allies have a different strategy. Rather than distancing themselves from fascism, they subtly distance the movement from its antisemitic component. They send the message that what Mussolini did to the Jews was inexcusable, something Italy should feel ashamed of, but this doesn’t mean Italy should be ashamed of its fascist past as a whole.
To support this point, they can easily argue that while antisemitism was central to Hitler’s worldview, Mussolini introduced antisemitic legislation only 16 years after seizing power.
But with the Netanyahu visit, Meloni isn't just looking for a “not antisemitic” stamp. The trip is part of a broader effort to use foreign policy to rebrand herself as a reliable, if not moderate, partner for the EU.
Meloni's election has made waves in Brussels. After all, she was the first fully fledged far-right politician to lead a Western European nation. Fellow European leaders have viewed her with suspicion, so Meloni has tried to counterbalance her hard line in domestic policy with an image as a reliable partner in international affairs.
She didn’t soften any of her rhetoric on issues like immigration or LGBTQ rights, but she made sure to send the message that she’s onboard with any foreign policy that the EU deems mainstream: good relations with the United States, strong support for Ukraine, tough on Russia.
Even for her domestic audience, Meloni has worked hard to build an image as an atlantista, as the Italians say: U.S.- and NATO-friendly. This provides a tint of mainstream authority that resonates with moderate Italians (a recent poll showed that Meloni has become popular with supporters of centrist parties).
Good relations with Israel is part of that package – never mind that Israel right now isn't on particularly good terms with the United States or on the same page on the Russian invasion. In Italy, being pro-Israel is just seen as a proxy for being pro-American.
Yet despite her efforts to court and reassure European partners, Meloni has still had to endure some snubs.
Last month, she was excluded from a high-profile meeting between France’s Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s Olaf Scholz and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, even though her predecessor, Mario Draghi, would be invited to similar events. In a separate meeting, Zelenskyy reportedly berated Meloni about the pro-Putin utterances of her government’s junior partner, Silvio Berlusconi, the flamboyant billionaire ex-prime minister.
In the end, Meloni and Netanyahu are, to different extents, both struggling with international isolation. It’s no surprise, then, to see that they’re sticking together.
(TP-and they’re co-religionists in the National Conservative cult they each belong to)