Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has announced that she will soon be visiting Israel, repaying a three-day visit that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made to Italy in March. Save for Viktor Orban of Hungary, Meloni is the most pro-Israel leader in all of Europe. Like such other Italian politicians on the right as Matteo Salvini and Silvio Berlusconi, Meloni has repeatedly expressed her support for Israel. In 2022, during the campaign for Prime Minister, Meloni spoke movingly her of previous visits to Israel, including to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, which she described as “a conscience-shaking experience.”
“Israel represents the only fully-fledged democracy in the broader Middle East, and we defend without any reservations its right to exist and live in security. I believe that the existence of the State of Israel is vital, and Fratelli d’Italia will make every effort to invest in greater cooperation between our countries,” she said during the campaign.
Meloni did not say anything about a “two-state solution,” nothing about the Palestinians’ “right to a state,” none of that Bidenite repetitive prattling about how Israelis and Palestinians deserved “equal measures” of “peace, security, and prosperity.”
In a 2020 video, Meloni also promised to defend Israel’s right to exist “without the shameful ambiguity of the Left.”
During the 2022 campaign she told Israel Hayom she planned to return to Israel soon, hoping to focus on joint collaborations and strategies, starting with those for the supply of natural gas through the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
During Netanyahu’s visit to Italy in March, Meloni summed up what she hoped a closer relationship with the Jewish state would achieve:
“We have known each other for a long time, we have exchanged opinions on a number of issues. Relations between the two countries are very good,” Meloni said. “We want to increase cooperation between the countries in the areas of cyber technology, security, defense, culture, or the water crisis,” she had added.
“The friendship between Italy and Israel has existed for a long time and continues to grow, but I think it is about to take on an even greater dimension,” Netanyahu had said after their meeting at the Chigi Palace. “I think there is room for considerable collaboration and improvement,” he continued.
Netanyahu has hinted that, as a kind of quid pro quo for Israeli collaboration with Italy on a host of matters, including “cyber technology, security, defense, culture, water management,” and for furnishing Italy with natural gas from Israel’s massive offshore fields – Tamar, Leviathan, and Karish — in the eastern Mediterranean, possibly Italy will now find itself able to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and will move its embassy from Tel Aviv to that capital.
That embassy move has been enthusiastically endorsed by Matteo Salvini, the Deputy Prime Minister of Italy and the head of the League – La Lega – Party. So far, Giorgia Meloni has been unwilling to do so; she has said it’s a “complicated” issue, no doubt fearing economic retaliation by Arab states, including, for Italian companies, a loss of business in the Gulf. But when the Americans moved their own embassy to Jerusalem in 2018, despite some dire predictions, there was not the slightest effect on American business dealings with the rich Gulf Arab states. Much of Europe now has become more sympathetic to Israel, partly as a response to the millions of Muslim migrants who have caused such turmoil and expense in the countries where they have appeared, uninvited and now definitely unwelcome, as so many live ungratefully off the largesse paid for by the very Infidels whom they are taught to regard as “the most vile of created beings.”
In 2022, Salvini, who was then running to be Prime Minister, said that if elected he would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the Italian Embassy to Israel. He is now Deputy Prime Minister in a coalition government headed by Meloni. He has repeated his eagerness to see the Italian Embassy moved. He, and other rightist politicians, including the powerful former Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who has been staunchly pro-Israel since the beginning of his political career, can put pressure on Meloni to move the Italian embassy to Jerusalem. She needs the support both of Salvini’s Lega (“League”) party, and of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, both now part of the ruling coalition, if she is to successfully govern.
Meloni and her supporters have repeatedly supported Israel’s right to defend itself, condemned the antisemitic BDS movement, and spoken harshly about those Italian politicians espousing antisemitism and anti-Israel causes. Unlike some European leaders, they have never attacked Israel’s campaigns of self-defense in Gaza.
However, during her 2022 campaign, Meloni appeared to break with other right-wing leaders, including her future coalition partner Salvini, indicating she would not likely move Italy’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
“This is a very sensitive issue, on which I think the next Italian government, like all those before it, will have to act in synergy [sic for “concert”] with our partners in the European Union,” she said.
Now, however, Giorgia Meloni has had more time to think about that possible move. A 36-year-old Italian tourist in Israel, the young lawyer Alessandro Parini, was murdered in a terror attack – a car ramming – on April 7. That brought home to Italians the perils Israelis live with every day. And the Muslim invasion of Europe continues unabated, with boatloads of economic migrants from North Africa disembarking nearly daily at Italy’s island of Lampedusa. Perhaps in Israel she will post a written prayer between the massive stones of the Western Wall, visit a few high-tech companies to learn of Israeli engineers’ latest advances in a dozen fields, visit a hospital to see what prodigal feats Israeli doctors are performing, tour a waste water treatment plant to see how Israel leads the world in recycling of water resources, visit a solar farm (solar energy being another area where Israel leads the world) and perhaps take a look at an Iron Dome battery. Would it not be fitting, as Italy binds itself ever closer to Israel, for Giorgia Meloni to announce her intention to have the Republic of Italy formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and to proclaim that Italy would now be moving its embassy to Jerusalem, the “eternal capital of the Jewish people”?
Eddiethed says
I Love this woman more every time I read about her.
Pray Hard says
She has more testosterone than the entire democratic party of the US.
krauser robert says
andreotti g. (not sic ) must be turning in his tomb !