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Italian authorities shut down an anonymous online effort that asked the public to report the locations of Israeli tourists, Italian Jews and businesses believed to have ties to Zionism, drawing condemnation from senior government officials and Jewish leaders who compared the initiative to fascist-era persecution.
“I think we’re going back to the 1930s, to hunting Jews,” Walker Meghnagi, president of the Jewish Community of Milan, said after the Google form began circulating on social media and messaging platforms.
The questionnaire said it was intended to “map Zionist tourism,” property purchases and what it described as “Zionist neo-colonization” in Italy, according to reports. It asked users to identify Jews, Israelis and people believed to be connected to Zionism at hotels, vacation rentals, businesses and other public places.
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“The online mapping of so-called ‘Zionist tourism,’ rightly denounced by the president of the Jewish Community of Milan, Walker Meghnagi, is an aberrant initiative, in direct violation of fundamental human rights and the constitutional principles on which our nation is founded,” Italian Senate President Ignazio La Russa wrote in a statement, as translated to English.
“No form of cataloguing of persons on the basis of their religious belief or their connection with Israel is acceptable or justifiable. Behind all this lies a profound anti-Semitism that must be unanimously, firmly, and determinedly rejected,” he added. “We cannot remain motionless in the face of such serious facts that recall the ghosts of the past. To the Jewish Community all my closeness.”
The form was removed following the intervention of Gen. Pasquale Angelosanto, Italy’s national coordinator for the fight against antisemitism, according to Italian and Israeli media reports.
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“This form is intended to record cases of Zionist tourism, property purchases, and, more generally, Zionist neo-colonization in Italy,” the questionnaire stated.
It said the information collected would be received by the Global Sumud Movement, an activist network associated with flotilla efforts to reach the Gaza Strip, and would remain confidential. Respondents were asked to provide sources so the reports could be verified and used to coordinate unspecified “initiatives.”
The Global Sumud Movement denied commissioning the form or knowing about it before the controversy erupted, according to The Jerusalem Post.
“Zionism is one of the issues we work on, but we do not hunt Jews, and we know nothing about this questionnaire,” the group told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. “We did not commission it and had not even seen it before it was taken offline.”
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The organization said it learned about the questionnaire through news reports and reserved the right to take further action, including issuing a formal statement.
According to La Repubblica, later sections of the form asked respondents to name locations where Jewish or Israeli visitors had been seen and to indicate whether local organizations or activist groups were already “managing the phenomenon.”
Meghnagi warned that collecting and circulating such information could encourage extremists to target Jews and Israelis.
“What is happening today shows that there are unbalanced individuals out there, and if this kind of message spreads widely enough, you are certain to find someone willing to act on it,” he said. “For this reason, mapping where Jews are is extremely serious.”
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Alessandro Morelli, an Italian deputy secretary of state, ripped the form as “abhorrent” and said those responsible should not go unpunished.
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