Keeping Israelis out: The new antisemitic boycott reaches Italy’s airports

There is a pack of fanatics in Italy that wants to take control of airports for the purpose of excluding Israel from international air routes.

They organize protests so that Israeli men, women and children arriving for an innocent vacation encounter a hostile and aggressive presence designed to frighten them and, ultimately, discourage Israelis from coming to Italy at all.

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Israelis? Well, of course, the message goes further. It is meant to discourage Jews in general from traveling—those hated Zionists. Let them stay home. Better yet, let them remain shut inside their homes.

According to the familiar antisemitic narrative that now pursues Jews at school, at university, on vacation and at work, they are all part of a clique of genocidal murderers who carry out ethnic cleansing and shoot children for fun.

One can imagine where the activists get their information: antisemitic social media and television panels that take their news from the Qatar-based television network, Al Jazeera.

A group called Giovedì Bianco (“White Thursday”) has for some time been active at Cagliari Airport, where tourists arriving from Tel Aviv are greeted with shouts of “Free Palestine” and followed by hateful chants as they collect their luggage and make their way through the terminal, while children tremble.

Israelis adore Italy. Yet today, Thursday, Giovedì Bianco is calling for protests at the airports of Verona, Cagliari, Milan Linate, Rome Fiumicino and Venice, targeting Israeli travelers and denouncing the government for insisting on the “maintenance of air routes with Israel.”

The times and descriptions of the planned actions are public. But the objective goes well beyond airports. It is part of the effort to erase Israel from the international arena—from sports, culture, music, medicine and now travel—and, ultimately, to make Israel and Jews disappear from public life.

They are not the first to try.

Targeting air travel attacks something fundamental: the freedom of movement, education and exchange on which the free world is built. Apparently, however, those freedoms are not meant to apply to Jews.

Airports have already been transformed by decades of Palestinian and Islamist terrorism, subjected to stringent security measures intended to protect travelers from attack. Now comes another form of aggression against Jews, violating a basic principle of international coexistence.

And one final question: The boycott website lists telephone numbers connected to these activities. Might those numbers perhaps make it possible to identify the people behind this brilliant idea?

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