The Criminalization of Solidarity: The Global War on Palestinian Voices and Their supporters, From Israel to Italy and Across the Western World

While the Italian government continues to provide political cover and military logistics for the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a silent but brutal judicial persecution is being waged on the home front against the Palestinian community. Italy, under the Meloni administration, has transformed into a razor’s edge of a Western-wide repression of dissent, weaponizing the penal code to try and silence anyone who upholds the right to resistance.

The Source of the Darkness: The Israeli Gulag

To understand the stakes of this repression, one must look at the reality these activists are fighting to dismantle. The persecution in the West is the external layer of the Israeli prison system—a veritable gulag where over 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners are currently rotting. Since October 7th, this system has descended into absolute barbarism, with systemic torture, starvation, and humiliation of detainees becoming the norm. And the noose wearing war criminals like Israeli security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, clamoring to execute them all.

At the center of this darkness sits Marwan Barghouti, widely regarded as the “Nelson Mandela of Palestine.” Imprisoned for over two decades, Barghouti is kept in solitary confinement not because he is a security threat, but because he is a political one: he represents the unity and democratic future of the Palestinian people. The West’s silence on his imprisonment—and the torture of thousands of others—stands in stark contrast to its active persecution of those in the diaspora who dare to speak their names.

The Italian Front: A Dragnet of Repression

It is into this maw of terror that the Italian state threatened to send Anan Yaeesh. Currently held in the high-security prison of L’Aquila, Anan exists in a judicial limbo. While an Italian Court of Appeal refused his extradition to Israel—explicitly recognizing the concrete risk of torture in the Zionist dungeons described above—the Italian justice system continues to hold him in “preventative custody.” His “crime” is purely political: supporting the resistance of his people in Tulkarem against an illegal military occupation.

This repressive net has widened to ensnare Ali Irar and Mansour Doghmosh, victims of judicial theorems that seek to equate national liberation struggles with international terrorism. This campaign of intimidation escalated with the targeted arrests and detentions of activists Tarek Dridi and Ahmad Salem for participating in demonstrations. These figures in the international Palestinian movement have been subjected to the full weight of the state’s punitive machinery, facing dawn raids, prolonged detention, and deprivations of liberty intended to disrupt their organizing and instill fear in the broader community.

Equally disturbing is the persecution of Mohamed Shahin, an Imam who has lived in Torino for over twenty years. Shahin has become the target of an institutional witch hunt for daring to contextualize October 7th as an act of resistance during his sermons. For refusing to kneel to the Israeli narrative, he now lives under the concrete threat of extradition and expulsion, marking a dangerous attempt by the state to police philosophical and religious thought.

Targeting the Truth-Tellers: Albanese and Falk

This strategy targets not just the grassroots, but the highest levels of international law. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur, is subjected to a relentless campaign of vilification. Because she exposes the legal reality of the genocide, she is slandered by Israeli officials as a “witch,” banned from the US, and economically strangled by sanctions. The Italian government’s refusal to defend its own official confirms its complicity.

This harassment extends to other legal giants. Recently, Richard Falk, the former UN Special Rapporteur and a distinguished international law expert, was detained alongside his wife at a Canadian airport. Subjected to humiliating interrogation, this 93-year-old scholar was targeted solely for his lifelong commitment to Palestinian human rights. These incidents serve one purpose: to intimidate the witnesses of Western complicity.

The War on Students: Mahmoud Khalil and Academic Freedom

The repression in Italy echoes across the Atlantic, where the US state has launched a total war on students and academic freedom. A prime example is Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist at Columbia University.

In a chilling escalation of the crackdown on campus activism, Khalil was abducted by ICE agents on March 8th and held until June 20th – without charge, a move widely interpreted as direct retaliation for his leadership in the student movement demanding divestment from Israel. The state is weaponizing immigration status to decapitate the student intifada, threatening Khalil’s future solely for his political speech. In response, Khalil has taken the fight to the courts, launching a lawsuit against the federal administration, arguing that these executive actions constitute an unconstitutional persecution of dissent and a McArthyite style attack on freedom of speech and the first amendment.

Europe’s Descent: Germany and the UK

This is a coordinated, transnational strategy. In Germany, the state’s guilt over the past has metastasized into a totalitarian “Staatsräson.” The police have raided conferences, banned the Keffiyeh in schools, and unleashed shocking violence against peaceful protestors, effectively criminalizing the public existence of Palestinian identity.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the repression has taken a dystopian turn against Palestine Action. While the group is known for direct action against Elbit Systems, the state is now casting a much wider net. Police have arrested hundreds of citizens, including the elderly and the infirm, simply for holding placards expressing support for the campaign to shut down the Israeli arms trade and supporting Palestine Action. By dragging pensioners and disabled activists into police vans for holding signs, the UK government reveals the depth of its desperation to shield the genocide-enabling war industry from public scrutiny.

A Global Architecture of Impunity

This global archipelago of repression—from the prison cells of L’Aquila holding Anan Yaeesh, Tarek Dridi, and Ahmad Salem, to the interrogation rooms of Canadian airports, from the ICE detention centers targeting Columbia students to the arrests of pensioners in the UK—reveals a singular, terrifying truth: everything is connected.

Western governments are constructing a global architecture of impunity for Israel to cover for the ongoing genocide. To maintain this cover, they must dismantle their own domestic civil liberties. The liberty of the detained activists in Italy, the residency of Mahmoud Khalil, the dignity of Richard Falk, and the safety of Francesca Albanese are not separate issues. They are the frontline of struggles for democratic principles, international law and human rights. To defend them against their respective states is to defend the fundamental human right to say NO to genocide. The crackdown is taking place across the western world because the resistance is international. The horrendous hypocrisy and shame of the Western world in shielding Israel’s genocidal, racist, ethno-nationalist and settler colonial rampage from justice has been laid bare.

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