Commentary
When it’s too much for Crosetto, it’s too late
The “red line” that the Italian government claims the Israeli minister has only now crossed by tormenting imprisoned men and women has, in reality, been trampled countless times. One might say it has been shattered 73,000 other times.
It is a well-known fact that to face the monsters outside, we must first confront the monster within. How else can one make any sense of the fact that Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto – out of all the arguments he could have used to criticize the horrendous figure that is Itamar Ben-Gvir [translator’s note: for his treatment of Flotilla prisoners on camera] – chose to boast that Italy does not arrest people at sea but actually “rescues them if they need it”?
Crosetto knows perfectly well that this is not true. He is part of a government that recently approved a naval blockade and is gearing up to introduce yet another decree to cut migrants off from ports and rescue. Crosetto’s approach to “defense” is to hand over corvettes to a so-called Libyan “coast guard,” which then uses those ships to fire on NGO vessels while the latter – unlike the Italian government – are actually rescuing shipwreck victims.
Crosetto saw the effects of these policies just five days ago on May 17, when a tiny baby girl, born just a few weeks earlier to a woman from the Ivory Coast, died of exposure after being left at sea for too long. Meanwhile, the ships that could have saved her were kept far away or impounded onshore due to government decisions. But evidently, Crosetto was not actually talking about migrants at all.
That also goes for the wave of outrage that – for once – has swept through the ruling majority and the government: it was not about the Palestinians. The government went so far as to summon the Israeli ambassador after Ben-Gvir’s macabre display, which was a stunt identical to dozens of others where the backdrop and the victims were Palestinian detainees.
And the brutality staged for the cameras is merely the tip of the iceberg compared to the brutality that takes place behind closed doors – horrors we are all familiar with by now, after hundreds of testimonies. Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani knows about them too, and he is now justifiably outraged by Ben-Gvir, that epitome of cowardice. Yet just ten days ago on May 12, Tajani's “no” proved decisive: along with his German counterpart, he blocked not only the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement but also the push to sanction the most sinister members of the Tel Aviv government who back settler violence. The first name on that list was Ben-Gvir himself.
The “red line” that the Italian government claims the Israeli minister has only now crossed by tormenting imprisoned men and women has, in reality, been trampled countless times. One might say it has been shattered 73,000 other times – matching the official death toll in Gaza – without a single reaction or actually valuable initiative from the Italian government.
For example, while the government expresses its outrage now, it still has not greenlit the letters rogatory requested by Roman magistrates, who want to identify the Israeli soldiers who illegally abducted the crews of the previous Flotilla at sea. At the time, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni sided with the attackers. But changes of heart are welcome, even those arising from sheer opportunism – provided they are at least somewhat credible.
Otherwise, instead of the minister’s outrage today, we will continue to remember the moral decrepitude of yesterday: such as the claim that “if the Flotilla is lucky, they will stop it for three or four hours at most, and they can cry ‘torture’; that is the most they aspire to.” That was not Ben-Gvir talking. That was Italian Senate President Ignazio La Russa.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/quando-e-troppo-e-troppo-tardi on 2026-05-21