Free the Anti-Zionist Activists Mimì, Dario and Francesco! (Naples, Italy)

On Saturday at the Overseas Exhibition in Naples the Police has brutally attacked, beaten and rounded up a peaceful demonstration that with banners, posters and a chanting slogans was protesting at the stand of the Israeli pharmaceutical company TEVA, against the company’s complicity with the genocide in Gaza and its support to the Israeli government’s apartheid policy (e.g. distributing vaccines to colonizers in the West Bank, and not to Palestinians, as denounced by a representative of the network Healthcare Workers for Gaza). When after half an hour the activists were leaving the Exhibition, the police attacked them and arrested five people, of whom three are still being detained: the internationalist comrades Mimì and Dario, and Francesco, a student active in a pro-Palestinian association. Mimì is also a leading member of the combative union SI Cobas, and an organizer in the 7 November Unemployed association.

The attack was apparently a punitive expedition against comrades who in the past two years have been at the head of protests against the genocide in Gaza, as well as against the Italian government’s support to Israel and its rearmament policy and participation in the Ukraine war with the delivery of weapons. In particular, they led demonstrations against a factory of Leonardo, Italy’s major arms producer, and two blockades of the port of Salerno, where Israeli ZIM ships were docking.

In the present situation, TIR is denouncing the neocolonial Trump Plan, in which there is no space for Palestinian self-determination, and the power would be shared between the U.S., Arab monocratic capitalist regimes and European imperialist countries, with the Italian government and big business aiming to have boots on the ground and a share of the reconstruction business through the overexploitation of Palestinian workers.

This police attack and retribution is the implementation of the government’s new Security Act, approved by the Parliament, against which TIR led mobilization in the Free to Fight network. The Security Act further criminalizes non-authorized demonstrations and “resistance” to the police during demonstrations, and anticipates a bill presented by the Brothers of Italy party, which equates anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism, making a criminal offense of any criticism and protest against Zionist racist, supremacist, colonizing and genocidal policies.

This repression pattern is not limited to Italy, but is carried out in U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany, Greece and other countries, and must be opposed internationally to defend the right to protest against pro-Zionist policies, rearmament and militarization of society.

While in Italy we are working to build a broad opposition to political repression, we invite comrades to take protest actions before Italian embassies/consulates in their own countries, where possible, on next Saturday, when a rally is being organized in Naples.