Opinion

Western liberalism, Zionism and the wishful thinking of the left’s historical eurocentrism


MEMO
March 15, 2025 

A graffiti on a wall in the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis depicting Palestinian children deprived of education by Israel is viewed, on 14 June 2024 

[Hani Alshaer/Anadolu Agency]

This piece provides commentary on how Western liberalism has approached the topic of Yahya Sinwar’s autobiography. Specifically, it discusses the political campaign led by the Italian and Zionist establishment in early March, which aimed to prevent the book’s presentation at La Sapienza University. This campaign and its controversy impacted various groups on the left and far-left of the political spectrum. The author’s central argument is that this situation highlights a historical trend of left-wing eurocentrism and how that trend influences the international Palestinian resistance movement, particularly within Western countries.

The Union of Young Jews of Italy, Italian Radicals, Left for Israel, Jewish Communities in Italy, young socialists, Forza Italia Giovani, other Catholic associations and associations of the Zionist Hasbara, in early March, appealed for the Sapienza University of Rome to revoke the permits granted to the Palestinian Student Movement.

They aimed to prevent the 5 March presentation of the autobiographical book The Thorns and the Carnation by Sinwar (with the participation of Davide Piccardo of the Islamic-inspired publishing house Editori della Luce, the book’s Italian publisher) from taking place within the Physics Department.

The appeal, titled “Terrorism out of the University”, stated: “La Sapienza, one of the few universities to have opposed boycotts against Israel and to have positioned itself as a bastion of academic freedom, still has the opportunity to prevent it from turning into a sounding board for terrorism,” immediately became a national political issue. The request in the appeal was supported by major Italian liberal democracy newspapers such as La Repubblica, Il Corriere dello Sera, Il Giornale and Il Messaggero. In turn, the newspapers reported the requests by Giovanni Donzelli and Noemi Di Segni for the Faculty of Physics to backtrack and ban the initiative.

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Sinwar’s autobiographical book, written during his twenty-two years in Israeli prisons, is currently censored and banned from publication in many Western and European Union countries, but not in Italy, thanks to an Italian publisher who converted to Islam. It is also not banned in Ireland, whose back cover edition says: “Since Al-Sinwar was martyred while bravely fighting against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the novel emerges as a vital piece of literature for those seeking to understand the ongoing tensions in the Middle East. It is more than just a story… With Al-Sinwar’s martyrdom, his novel represents both a reflection on the past and a prophetic vision of the future of the region.”

The book advances the reasoning behind the oppressed who resist out of necessity, in a written testament by Sinwar, who died fighting, which becomes the legacy of the living who cannot and do not want to give up.

The initiative promoted by Palestinian students at the university sparks reflection on a historical, theoretical and political challenge to Western nations, for whom even the written word of a deceased person is frightening. The university, as Western propaganda—well interpreted by Zionist liberalism—writes, is precisely the place that must honour the values of the Western ideology of democracy and freedom, whose myth is crumbling, causing a deep crisis gripping the West and leading Europe towards its decline.

The editorial operation undertaken by the Italian publisher is influenced by the point of view of Islamism. For Palestinian students, it is the reflection of the need for resistance that did not bow to the genocide in Gaza and is trying not to bow now to an even more bloody ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. Therefore, the revocation of the permits to hold the initiative by the university institutions was given because only the deluded do not understand that at this stage, for the hopes of Western democracy, the genocide of the Palestinian people is a necessary evil, as much of the press writes. Therefore, censorship is a vital reason for democracy. Despite the establishment of political fire and the physical threats received by Zionist groups, the Palestinian students reiterated their will to maintain the initiative.

The Palestinian students, beyond the usual rhetoric about the denied democratic spaces, found largely silence and indifference from a large part of the left groups and left activists who had initially been active in solidarity with Palestine. A silence broken only by the boycott carried out by so-called antagonistic areas of the “far” left, with the motivation that the publisher—an Italian who converted to Islam—is not a person liked by them. Thus, this reinforced the political conditions for which the Campus Student Collective revoked their support for the initiative that the Palestinian Student Movement was organising at that point.

From the rhetorical condemnation of the imposed censorship and the renewed solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, the “far” left student groups have moved on to reiterate: “We would like to point out that despite the ban announced by the university, the decision to postpone the initiative was the result of political considerations linked to the choice, which we consider inadequate, to invite the speaker mentioned above.”

In essence, some with silence and some with open sabotage, the last epigones of left-wing “extremism” inside and outside the university, have bowed to the will of his majesty the establishment. For what reason? Because Piccardo was invited to participate at the end of November 2024 in a conference on “Palestine and Lebanon, from the clash of civilisations to global civil war” promoted by the right-wing neo-fascist organisation CasaPound, which, being a man of convinced Islamic faith, has the illusion of breaking hearts and democratically saving souls. Meanwhile, the neo-fascist right tries to play cards it does not have in an attempt to exploit for the nationalist purposes of an imperialist country, such as Italy, the competing point of view of certain Islamic currents towards Western liberalism.

We do not know Piccardo, nor are we interested in his political and ideological reasons because that is not what this is about. If anything, we should reason why, in all of Europe, only one Islamist-inspired publishing house published Sinwar’s autobiography, immediately earning a ban, while in Europe, the same publication has not found any sponsor in the so-called underground and left-wing publishing, and in Ireland, the book has been published through the free press internet and on-demand platforms. It seems clear to us that it is not because of an incident concerning Piccardo that the Palestinian students’ initiative was deemed inadequate. Surely, there was more than one sigh of relief by the left when it found “impeccable” reasons—against the fascist of the moment—and took the thorny issue out of its hands, throwing away the whole carnation.

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It was, and is, a question of deliberately ignoring a real resistance that isn’t expressed in a way that left-wing “extremism” prefers. We have supported and argued for this need for resistance in several recent articles, a need that Hamas embodies as its unified expression, attracting what remains of the old secular left-wing Palestinian political forces, in contrast to resignation and collaboration with Israel.

The fact, already serious in itself if we consider the context of general and verbal political aggression suffered by an organisation of young Palestinians by pro-Zionist political and institutional forces, is not limited to the low-level political dialectic that the so-called far-left continues to demonstrate. It recalls historical, material and political factors that are much more general, without which such political stupidity, which in any case abounds, is incomprehensible. We are in the presence of how, in the face of the crisis of the West in a composite and articulated way in Europe and Italy, the reasons for democracy, the idealistic anti-fascism and the individual freedoms achieved are worth more than the reasons for the resistance of the Palestinians called by the left to review their priorities.

This is a general dynamic that occurs in every Western country depending on the specific cases and in a differentiated manner with respect to the composite and international mobilisation in support of the Palestinian cause. It was the case in the US, whereby the Arab and Palestinian communities there, as well as African Americans, should have overlooked and voted for Kamala Harris against the “worst evil” Donald Trump, who promised and promises to bring hell into Palestine to annihilate Hamas and its resistance and complete the work of the ethnic cleansing—which is the common objective of Israel and jointly of all Western countries.

It is becoming more pressing in Italy and in Europe, which is struggling with the exhaustion of an ascending historical cycle that has seen it dominate the world for 500 years, so it is a question of supporting all the “non-sovereignist” political forces and the resistance in Ukraine against Russia, defending the democracy in Europe against Trump’s “neo-populism” that attacks it from the outside and European sovereignisms from the inside, counteracting its own fade and continuing to maintain the dividend of colonial and imperialist loot. In essence, the crumbling of Europe, put under pressure, gives impetus to a wave that also propagates to the left in concentric, or rather eurocentric, circles.

Are we exaggerating?

Let’s look at the facts: the left-wing Campus Students’ Collective, instructed by a so-called antagonist far-left group inside and outside the university, decided not to grant Palestinian students the use of the “self-managed” classroom. Left-wing student committees have used this space for decades through an informal agreement between the university and far-left university collectives and the decision was justified by claiming “inadequacy”.

The final result calls for a straightforward question, the answer to which reveals the historical material relationship: by what prerogative can a collective of left-wing university students use a space for themselves inside the campus and by what prerogative can the same collective, however, not grant it by its own choice to an organisation of young Palestinian students and militants? Is it not precisely because of the unequal and dominating relationship that the West has over the Middle East and Palestine?

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Intellectual honesty compels us to acknowledge that the judgement of inadequacy effectively summarises an entire cycle of history and the relationship established by a mode of production between Western workers’ class movements towards anti-colonial struggles and the relationship between European and US imperialist nations and the colonised world. We believe history will present (and is already presenting) the final reckoning for this, and Palestine is merely the tip of the iceberg in this historical process.

To put it briefly: we are at a historical change of phase in the capitalist mode of production where the general development of accumulation of value, even if in a combined and unequal way, grew and maintained a relationship between dominant countries and countries still dominated, and by reflection in the dominant countries tended to consolidate the contradiction between so-called democratic countries and so-called non-democratic countries. For this reason, all the classes of the so-called democratic countries, raised in a cascade thanks to the domination relationship, could rightfully defend “democracy” against the so-called non-democratic countries to be exploited.

Today, that type of relationship is being called into question.

Palestinian resistance cannot have the same forms as Western movements. Therefore, it may not be the type of resistance that “we” like. It doesn’t conform to the material conditions that shaped the workers’ movement and the left in the West. The Western left’s viewpoint, as a social class that exists within the conflictual relationships of a society defined by the commodities market, is expressed through defending the material conditions of democracy in the most powerful nations. These nations have exchanged wealth and resources with the rest of the world, giving in return slavery, racism and war.

Material conditions that have defined the oppression of the working classes and their representative parties in the West are linked to 500 years of colonialism, particularly the last 200 years of the turbulent development of liberal and democratic civilisations in European and Western nations. This historical process enabled these classes to gain political influence and the “freedom to fight,” essentially developing class conflict among workers within the democratic sphere.

Today, Palestinian resistance and the rebellion of the peoples of the Sahel seriously challenge the future of peace, freedom and colonialist prosperity in Europe as a historical cycle ends. Simultaneously, the material conditions of the working classes and left-wing parties in Europe and the West are also being challenged.

Whoever in the West refers to communism as an ideal movement must avoid presenting a vision that may have had material reasons before but that vanishes today. This is the historical truth, consequently theoretical, political, and, therefore, practical. This is why corporate parties, thus nationalist and right-wing, are multiplying throughout the West, and the left, as it has developed, is liquefying. It is the same reason why those in the West today are not capable of making a clear and definitive assessment of the historical phase that is something other than the past and are forced to chase the working classes in the West on a nationalist terrain as Sahra Wagenknecht does in Germany, just to name one that seemed in vogue only until a few months ago, and the German workers have preferred the right-wing original of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the bad copy of the “left”.

Let’s be clear: it is not about condemning the political will of groups, associations or individual militants for certain behaviours, as, unfortunately, the left was historically accustomed to doing. Instead, it’s about understanding the material reasons for the behaviours of people involved in events such as the episode we are discussing here. We are therefore forced to note that while the mobilisation in support of Palestine to reverse the course of the genocide faces evident difficulty, we also note that the prevention of the presentation of Sinwar’s autobiography by the university is the first real political gain that the Western establishment can claim after 15 months of resistance in Palestine and international mobilisation.

After the mobilisations on university campuses failed to hinder universities’ collaboration with Israel and to stop the genocide collaboration, and regardless of whether the reasons for the resistance were silenced and temporarily banned inside one of the most important Italian universities, it means that the reasons for liberal democracy prevailed again, forcing even young, willing leftists to step back.

Obviously, we express to the comrades of the Palestinian Student Movement, as well as to the publishing house, our total solidarity against the pro-Zionist political campaign that has also favoured the conditions of their political isolation among the various left-wing and far-left groups. We know well how to distinguish the strength of the dominators, the weakness of the dominated, and the domination of the corruptor over the corrupted. We hope that the Palestinian Student Movement can realise the initiative of presenting the autobiographical book The Thorns and the Carnation by Sinwar, precisely as initially planned with the publishing house and the publisher himself, in any place, if not inside the university, at least in its near vicinity.

We are prepared to do our part, but not for reasons of democracy or free thought. Instead, we act because addressing the Islamist viewpoint in the resistance against colonialism and the broader crisis of the colonialist system requires fully supporting the needs expressed by this resistance. Therefore, the exact opposite of an opportunistic distancing by alleging idealistic reasons, so that being alongside the Palestinian resistance until victory does not remain as just empty rhetoric and the daughter of a lesser god.



by Alessio Galluppi

by Michele Castaldo

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