Bari’s boycott: PD’s hypocrisy on Israel

The exclusion of Israel from the Fiera del Levante is the kind of moral theater that has become second nature to Italy’s Partito Democratico (PD), ever more a far-left anti-Zionist force. In Bari, the mayor Vito Leccese, a PD man to the core, has managed to transform a Mediterranean trade fair, a place meant to encourage cooperation and economic vitality, into a provincial platform for pro-Pal slogans and Israel boycotts. The applause from his comrades in the Puglia regional council, who weeks earlier passed a motion suspending all commercial ties with Israel, makes clear this is no isolated flourish. It is party policy disguised as local governance.

The PD has always prided itself on its cosmopolitanism, but here it reveals a parochialism as old as the hills. Excluding Israel from a trade fair does not advance peace, does not feed a single child in Gaza, and does not bring diplomacy an inch closer. It does, however, flatter the self-image of PD administrators who imagine themselves world-historical statesmen while presiding over potholes and permit offices. This is the pathology of the Italian left: to mistake symbolic gestures for foreign policy, to dress up provincial spite as humanitarian principle, and to use Israel as the convenient scapegoat for demonstrating “values” at no domestic cost.

What makes this spectacle all the more grotesque is the selective indignation. Bari’s fair rolls out the red carpet for delegations from Qatar, Turkey, and China, nations with human rights records that make Israel’s every wartime decision look like a Geneva Convention case study. But the PD does not expend moral outrage there. Israel alone, the lone democracy of the Middle East, the only nation in the region where Arabs sit in parliament and courts judge generals, is singled out as unfit for a fair devoted to trade and exchange. That double standard is not about peace or justice. It is about the enduring reflex to isolate the Jewish state, clothed in the language of ethical purity.

The invocation of Gaza’s children for a Nobel Peace Prize nomination is not compassion but kitsch. It reduces genuine suffering to a prop in the PD’s theater of virtue. The administration of Bari would never dream of proposing Uyghur children, or Syrian children butchered by Assad, or the victims of Hamas’s own child-sacrificing tactics. To do so would require courage. It is easier, safer, and far trendier to make Israel the villain.

Once, the Fiera del Levante embodied Italy’s ambition to serve as a bridge across the Mediterranean, a hub for dialogue through commerce. Today, under PD stewardship, it has become a stage for self-righteous declarations. The real casualty is not Israel, whose economy and diplomacy will hardly register Bari’s tantrum, but Bari itself. The fair shrinks, the city shrinks, the country shrinks, reduced to provincial grandstanding dressed up as moral resistance.

The PD likes to present itself as the guarantor of Italy’s European future, modern, open, internationalist. In practice, it indulges in the oldest European habit: singling out Jews and their state for exclusion, then congratulating itself for its bravery. This is not progressive politics. It is cowardice, adorned in the rhetoric of peace. The real task of Italy’s left, if it wishes to be taken seriously, is not to boycott Israel from trade fairs but to face its own hypocrisy and abandon the self-indulgent theatre that makes Bari’s administration look less like statesmen and more like provincial actors in a play that has already run far too long.