Letters
Letters to the editor •
It is wrong to demonise all settlers; punishing extremists is absolutely right
Who wrote to the editor, Claudio Cerasa
20 AUG 26
Translated by AI
Photo: LaPresse
To the Editor – I have read Anna Maria Lorusso’s response to my article “Eco’s “eternal fascism” is a myth; eternal totalitarianism is alive and well”. I note that you agree on at least one point: communism was anti-democratic. I fear, however, that Lorusso has missed the main point of my criticism: the fact that Eco claims to label as ‘Ur-fascism’ any phenomenon exhibiting certain characteristics, some of which are certainly reprehensible, whilst others are not at all so. The point, in other words, is not the legitimacy of condemning certain tendencies within fascism, but rather of considering those tendencies to be typically ‘fascist’ – that is, the very essence of fascism. And this is where Lorusso is mistaken, and in being mistaken he implicitly proves my point. He does so when he states that, for Eco, ‘the word “fascism” encompasses traits in varying combinations, which, when combined, generate anti-democratic forms’. This is precisely the point. Eco does not say this; that is to say, he does not subsume fascism under one of many anti-democratic forms, but claims that it is ‘the’ anti-democratic form. And it is precisely this that prevents us from clarifying what the quintessence of totalitarianism is; in other words, it risks implicitly justifying other phenomena that also exhibit similar tendencies, or creating a great deal of definitional confusion, such that even communism and, say, Islamism are forms of fascism. In short, it ends up lumping everything together. And his definition serves no purpose whatsoever. The objection that Eco, in other writings, has passed a negative judgement on communist regimes is, from this point of view, entirely irrelevant. Of course he has. And here Lorusso attributes to me a thought I have not expressed, namely that Eco would endorse a defence of communism. This is a way of digressing and avoiding the very heart of my criticism. Eco’s approach, however, is not merely mistaken. It is also flawed. And this, indeed, is an ideological manoeuvre. Namely, when he regards the cult of tradition as the quintessence of Ur-fascism. And when, in the name of traditionalism – ‘the first characteristic of Ur-fascism’ – he goes so far as to equate ‘Catholic counter-revolutionary thought’, ‘reaction’ in the late Hellenistic period ‘to classical Greek rationalism’ and, finally, ‘Nazi Gnosticism’, he engages in a muddled exercise which has no theoretical justification other than an attempt to attach to the stigma of fascism currents that underpin a certain conservative right. When, finally, he sees an example of syncretism (which, it would seem, is another typical trait of Ur-fascism) in the interweaving of multiple cultural roots, as ‘a section of the Italian right’ would do, he is no longer merely engaging in an ideological exercise, but in a banal act of political delegitimisation.
Giuseppe Valditara, Minister for Education
To the editor – “Limes, whose side are you on?”, asked Il Foglio yesterday, addressing the geopolitical magazine edited by Lucio Caracciolo. But that was a rhetorical question, wasn’t it?
Luca Rocca
To the editor – “Few people fill me with such horror as Jewish supremacist settlers. Mad fanatics, cruel criminals. I pray that the October vote will corner them, and those who protect them, and that both will be made to pay for their violence. I pray that Israel may redeem itself from this immense shame”. The author of this post on X (16 August) is Giorgio Gori, a Member of the European Parliament for the PD. He is considered a friend of Israel. Yet, for him, the settlers are the scum of humanity. It is a cliché typical of certain friends of the Jewish state: before defending its right to exist and to defend itself, one must make a point of expressing one’s horror at Netanyahu and, indeed, at the settlers. Yet, as Filippo Piperno observed, the term ‘settlers’ encompasses very different realities (InOltre, 19 August). In the large settlements near the Green Line – the 1949 armistice line – live families driven more by the cost of housing than by messianism, in areas generally earmarked for Israel in peace plans through territorial swaps. Elsewhere, the settlers are the descendants of communities expelled by force: from Hebron following the 1929 massacre, from Gush Etzion and from the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem in 1948. To lump together those who have returned to these places under the same label means treating 1967 as the starting point of history and slavishly conforming to the most shameless Arab-Palestinian propaganda. Admittedly, the term also encompasses the inhabitants of outposts deemed illegal even by the Jerusalem government, messianic militants and groups responsible for violence against Palestinians. However, the pensioner from Ma’ale Adummim, the descendant of those expelled from Hebron and the fanatic who sets fire to an olive grove do not belong to the same moral, legal or political category. Treating them as interchangeable figures serves to construct a collective culprit. In short, Gori implies that anti-Israeli hostility is primarily the product of the crimes of Netanyahu and the settlers. I won’t go so far as to call him the ‘scapegoat of the hypocrites’. I shall simply point out that hatred for Israel did not begin with Netanyahu and will not disappear when Netanyahu is no longer in power. If a friend of Israel is unable to understand this, that is their problem. We shall come to terms with it.
Michele Magno
Settlers are not all the same, are they? And when speaking of settlers in general terms, we should bear in mind that there were also Israeli settlements in Gaza and that, following the Israeli withdrawal in 2005, Gaza has sadly become the most dangerous breeding ground for anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. There are, however, settlers who go out of their way to give settlers a bad name; we see evidence of this time and again, and I do not think that the indiscriminate defence of all settlers is the decisive factor in understanding who is genuinely committed to defending Israel and who is not. Seven days ago, in Qusra in the West Bank, to give just one example, dozens of extremist settlers illegally occupied an area in front of Palestinian homes, trapping a family there for days. The Israeli army attempted unsuccessfully to clear them out and subsequently sent in a battalion. This is a fact worth bearing in mind even for those who love Israel: in the first half of 2026, as the Times of Israel reported a few days ago, citing security force data, serious incidents of ‘nationalist crimes’ committed by extremist Jewish settlers rose by 63 per cent. It is wrong to demonise the settlers by treating them as a single entity. It is a duty not to turn a blind eye to the extremists, even for those who love Israel.