Anti-Semitism and the Arab-Israeli Question: The Italian Left in the First Ten Years of the Republic

In the aftermath of the Second World War, socialists and communists shared a theoretical viewpoint deriving from Marxism and the bipolar line that emerged from the Cold War. In that time, they took a position of harsh criticism against the United States, against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and against the Christian Democrat government that in Italy led the inclusion of the country in the Western bloc. The two parties of Marxist tradition failed to elaborate a statement or a historiographical reflection on anti-Semitism, as demonstrated by two authoritative sources: the party press and the contribution of intellectuals who in that first decade of republican Italy had had a role and visibility of great importance. In both cases, the interpretation of anti-Semitism was crushed onto that of anti-fascism: concerned with presenting themselves to the public and the world, as the protagonists of the anti-fascist struggle and the rebirth of democracy, socialists and communists, and above all the latter, did not deal with the reasons for, causes, or the outcomes of the persecution of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s or the anti-Semitic demonstrations in the USSR of the 1950s. In some cases, the theme fell under the ax of silence, in others it was presented in an ambiguous way, as one of the many forms of Nazi-fascist violence. In this way, talking about concentration camps meant dealing with places of detention for the persecuted, without dwelling on the fact that the reason for the persecution and the Shoah was racial rather than political. This difficulty in analyzing anti-Semitism, in recognizing its specificity, without including it in the great container of anti-fascism, was expressed in the same years in which left-wing intellectuals and politicians spoke about the Arab-Israeli conflict.