Over this past weekend, two historic squares in the heart of Florence were the sites of political rallies, one organized by Florence for Palestine on Saturday in Piazza Santa Maria Novella, the other organized by the honorary Israeli consul of Florence, Marco Carrai, in front of the iconic Santa Maria del Fiore (also known as the Duomo di Firenze) on Sunday.
During Saturday’s protest, the plight of Palestinians generally and those in Gaza in particular, was front and center, as a crowd of roughly 500 gathered around a giant Palestinian flag placed in the center of the square. The first speaker, a leader in Florence’s Palestinian community, spoke broadly of Israeli oppression under Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu and minister of national security Ben-Gvir: “when this government came into power, attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank increased, as well as East Jerusalem and Gaza.” This indeed tracks with a UN report from last month, which noted a sharp increase in West Bank displacements of Palestinians since Netanyahu’s re-election last year. He went on to frame the impending invasion of Gaza in genocidal terms: “despite everything, we Palestinians know what our oppressors want. They want our land, they want to annihilate us all, and they are doing it with the help of unjust actors around the world.”
Izzedin Elzir, Imam of the city of Florence, took the mic soon after. “Life is sacred,” he declared. “But this sacred life cannot live without freedom, without self-determination.” A native of Hebron, Elzir has been in the media recently for his comments about Hamas’s attack from the week before, in which he interpreted them as a response to the nearly two-decades-long blockade of Gaza. He reiterated the analogy he used in those statements to the press in his speech: “If you have a housecat, and you keep it in a corner, in a prison for more than 16 years, at some point this cat scratches you. Palestinians are not housecats, they are lions. They are human beings.” Throughout the rally, there was scant condemnation of Hamas’s October 7th attack, or acknowledgement of its indiscriminate targeting of civilians.
Sunday’s pro-Israel rally took place less than half a mile away from the pro-Palestine rally the day before, in front of Palazzo Strozzi, the seat of Tuscany’s regional government, across from the iconic dome of Santa Maria del Fiore. The chosen site implied the backing of government, which appeared to be the case.
Police were present around the stage, and the mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella, attended and gave a speech. While both Saturday’s and Sunday’s rallies billed themselves as peace protests, there was little rhetorical similarity between them.
Around two hundred demonstrators gathered in front of Palazzo Strozzi, many draped in Israeli flags, as a star of David made of candles was lit on the ground in front of the stage, in memory of those killed by Hamas the week before. First to speak was the rally’s organizer, Marco Carrai, honorary Israeli consul to the regions of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. He responded directly to Imam Elzir: “I turn to the words of our friend the Imam of Florence, who indirectly stated that Hamas is some poor soul. Hamas is terrorism, no more or less than ISIS.”
The importance of denouncing Hamas was the most consistent point made across all the speakers, while any perceived attempt to place it in a broader context was lacking, or refuted, as Carrai did in closing his speech: “What happened last Saturday was inhuman, it can’t be human, and so must be condemned with no ifs or buts. There shouldn’t be anything else to add, the rest is smoke kicked up to confuse people.”
Nardella echoed this sentiment: “we cannot be ambiguous in condemning Hamas’s terrorism clearly. We cannot resort to explanations, because oftentimes terrorism feeds on divisions, ambiguities, and anguish, which cause people to fail in the face of such violent acts.”
A handful of counter protesters briefly interrupted Nardella’s speech with chants of “Murderers!” before being dispersed.
The general framing of Palestinians was as “victims of Hamas,” as Nardella put it, while Carrai went further, stating Hamas was “playing with the lives of two million Palestinians, telling them not to flee Gaza in the face of a legitimate reaction from the state of Israel.” At no point was the decades-long Israeli occupation and blockade of Gaza acknowledged, which prevents Palestinians from fleeing, nor was Israel’s bombing of the only road out of Gaza into Egypt five days ago.
While all the speakers acknowledged the humanity of Palestinian civilians as distinct from Hamas, however briefly, none mentioned the bombing of Gaza this week, or the impending Israeli invasion.
A UN expert has estimated that nearly as many bombs have been dropped on Gaza in a week as were dropped in a year at the height of the US invasion of Afghanistan. Indeed, Carrai justified the Israeli response by comparing it, albeit cryptically, to the War on Terror: “In proportion to population, the attacks from last Saturday were as if 14,000 people were slaughtered at the Bataclan in Paris, where 130 were killed. It’s as if during the harrowing attacks on the Twin Towers, 121,000 people had been killed, 3,000 were murdered. Do you remember what followed? Should I remind you? Perhaps I shouldn’t.”
