In 2014, during the Israeli assault on Gaza that killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, Giorgia Meloni, then just a member of the Italian parliament, wrote on social media: “Another massacre of children in Gaza. No cause is fair when it sheds the blood of the innocent.”
More than a decade on, that moral clarity is nowhere to be found.
As prime minister, Meloni’s remarks on Gaza have become increasingly cautious and equivocal, marked by the kind of “on the one hand, on the other” tone that frustrates many Italians. Her address on the war against Iran last March captured that ambiguity perfectly. She declared that she “neither condemns nor condones” the conflict, a sentence that managed to confuse many while clarifying nothing.
So when Italy announced earlier this month that it was suspending the automatic renewal of its defence pact with Israel, many observers hailed it as a turning point: Evidence, perhaps, that Meloni’s government was finally bending under the moral weight of Gaza’s destruction. Some hoped this gesture, however cautious, was a rare nod to the conscience of Italians who have marched for months, demanding an end to the war.
Yet it’s impossible to ignore the sequence that prompted the suspension. It did not follow the killing of some 75,000 Palestinians, nor the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, schools and mosques. Meloni only acted after Israeli forces fired warning shots at a convoy of Italian United Nations peacekeepers in Lebanon, a follow-up to a 2024 incident in which two UNIFIL bases staffed by Italian personnel were struck by the Israeli army.
This pattern is telling. It took yet another direct affront to Italian personnel, not a humanitarian catastrophe, to move the Italian government.
The same reflex was visible when United States President Donald Trump insulted Pope Leo XIV. Only then did Meloni issue rare criticism of Trump, calling his words “unacceptable”. Up to that point, she had found his conduct in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela and Lebanon quite tolerable. Once again, calculation intervened: She could not afford to alienate conservative Catholic voters who form the backbone of her political base.
Meloni’s foreign policy follows this script of moral performativity. Italy remains the only Western European and G7 nation to participate, even as an “observer”, in Trump’s so-called Board of Peace, a body that many Italian commentators have derided as cynical theatre, turning Italy into what one lawmaker called “a vassal of the United States”.
A European civil petition calling on the European Union to suspend its association agreement with Israel for “crimes in Gaza” gathered more than one million signatures; Italy ranked second in participation after France. This surge in public protest came after last October’s general strike in solidarity with the Global Sumud Flotilla, when more than two million Italians filled the streets, demanding an end to what many regard as genocide.
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