Italy unveils plan to fight ‘unprecedented’ level of Jew-hatred

JNS) Italy’s government last week unveiled a new strategy for fighting antisemitism following a report that documented a near doubling of antisemitic incidents in 2024 over the previous year. The new five-year strategy focuses on surveillance, with an emphasis on online antisemitism; education; and increasing the visibility of protection for Jews and communication, according to a report on the Moked Jewish news site on Thursday. Gen. Pasquale Angelosanto, Italy’s national coordinator for the fight against antisemitism, unveiled the program last month following the publication of a report that showed documented expressions of antisemitic hatred rose from 455 in 2023 to 877 last year. The annual report by the Antisemitism Observatory of the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center Foundation, a Jewish community watchdog, said that both the increase was unprecedented and the levels that it had reached in 2024. “Antisemitism in Italy has reached unprecedented levels,” the authors of the observatory’s report wrote. About a third of the incidents they recorded last year happened in the “real world,” meaning on the street or in physical interactions. The rest involved threats and hate speech online. Several Western European countries, as well as the United States, Canada and Australia, have seen a surge of antisemitic violence since the outbreak of the Gaza conflict on Oct. 7, 2023. After thousands of Hamas-led terrorists murdered some 1,200 people in Israel on that day and abducted another 251, hundreds of thousands of Europeans took to the streets for rallies and marches against Israel’s retaliation against Hamas. In parallel, acts of violence against Jews, vandalism of Jewish sites and online harassment and intimidation of Jews have increased considerably, numerous Jewish communities have reported. Last month, police in Rome arrested a 33-year-old Egyptian man suspected of assaulting a Jewish boy on the street after ordering him to take off his kippah. The Jan. 29 incident in the Italian capital’s center happened in view of the boy’s mother, the Castelli Notizie news site reported. The man allegedly shouted at the boy to take off his kippah, before hitting him, according to the report, which cited police. Expressions of antisemitism in Italy are something that “is affecting everyone,” Israel’s ambassador to Rome, Jonathan Peled, said in an interview published Friday on the Il Secolo XIX news site.