When Conflict Spills Over: Identities, Memories, Politics and Representations of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Italy— The 1960s

Abstract

This essay investigates the manifold ways in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spilled over in Europe in the 1960s, with a focus on Italy. The 1960s proved a crucial decade in the consolidation of juxtaposed memories, narratives, and identities for Israelis and Palestinians and the same happened in the Diaspora for Palestinians and Jews. Several factors shaped such a consolidation: memories of recent individual and collective traumas, the Eichmann trial, youth politics between 1967 and 1969 and obviously, the Six Day War. Using hitherto unpublished primary sources collected in Italy, the UK, and the Netherlands, and oral history interviews with Palestinians in Italy and Italian Jews, I analyze how during this decade the Israeli-Palestinian conflict interlocked with local and national politics, and with perceived or real anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. This chapter suggests that Europe too was one of the theatres of this war, in terms of identity politics, collective traumatic memories of the Holocaust, grassroots mobilization, and also terrorism.