They mix Palestinian flags and peace flags, there are many, less than the million counted by the organizers (API, Palestinian Association in Italy, which he invited to the event with the sign: “Stop complicity with Israel. Against employment and genocide, with the Palestinian resistance”), But perhaps even more than the 250 thousand more prudently estimated by the police.
However, many, enough to invade any space and blow up any attempt at the order service by the organization. When they parade in Rome under the Colosseum they force foreign tourists to look out and look at the wave of people who fill every corner: a large movement of transversal square, difficult to label: students, workers, common citizens, families, activists, trade unions, also opposition politicians, but less than other times: A solidarity crowd with the Palestinian civilians and their exhausted children, who feels sympathy for the international movement of the flotilla and for the difficult reflector to ignore that he has turned on the drama of the Palestinian civilian and their hunger, a crowd that wants to make his own dissenting voice heard, in a time when dissent even in many countries of long democratic tradition seems to have lived with discomfort. Among the crowd signs reproach the Italian government positions judged too close to Israel and Donald Trump and the attitude held against Flotilla. Even if it must be said that, although not sharing the initiative, the government followed the flotilla, sending two frigates of the Navy and taking a position against the attacks of civil boats, and is still assisting the return of Italian activists through diplomatic channels.
Among the many souls of a very large and very full square it is not always easy to keep away from contradictions. The unifying and largely major slogans of the fire and express solidarity with the Flotila activists. And among the crowd there are also those who ask for “free hostages, free Palestine”, together with “Download Netanyahu, downstairs Hamas”, but there are also the minority of extreme slogans against the Army of Israel as “death at ITF”. And even the few flags of Hamas objectively reconcile with the many flags of peace.
If the human tide, as was immediately renamed, manifest peaceful, as often happens in these cases, A clear fastery minority is enough to attract attention and to lend everyone’s side to critical readings and perhaps even feed on instrumental: It is the minority of those who, to put it with the square that has tried to isolate them, “ruins everything”: by setting on cars and clashing with the police in Santa Maria Maggiore; raising a banner that praises the massacre of Israeli citizens killed or kidnapped on October 7th; Covering with stickers the stampered stones on the Sampietrini of Rome, smearing and offending the statue of John Paul II.
Gesture, the latter, that the Prime Minister by Assisi, where he is for the day of St. Francis just declared a national feast, defines: “Ignorable act”. No direct reference to the Piazza di Roma, in the words of Giorgia Meloni, but clear between the lines the blow and indirect response with the dissent that the square simultaneously expresses towards the position of the government on Gaza and on the flotilla. Evident in the speech of the premier, in the passage in which it contrasts those who invoke peace to those who build it, the reference on the one hand to the demonstrators on the other to the agreement between Trump and Netanyahu which Hamas replied with a conditioned yes and that at this moment makes the “cease the fire” seem in the nearest strip, while Trump and Netanyahu unbalance optimistic about the rapid release of the hostages and on the speed of the negotiation, observed with caution from those who live in Gaza.
In a context in which Gaza and Flotilla also assume secondary meanings of internal political polarization, Which probably explains the great attention, superior to the rest of Europe, had from the initiative of Flotilla activists, who in Italy has produced several demonstrations in the square in a few days, Even San Francesco, on his day, 800 years after his death, risks ending up pulled for the habitnominated by the premier, as a man of peace never extremist, in his speech in support of the Trump-Neitanyahu plan, but also by many others who, in the square and on TV, replicating to those words, have more or less explicitly recruited him by the side of the peaceful demonstrators, above all the man with the sign: “Today St. Francis would be here”.
At the end of the day it is the prefect of Rome who pulls the balance, dividing the wheat from the Loglio, distinguishing the correct demonstrators from the hooded extremists who infiltrated the procession tail at the end: “It was a very important test,” he explained, “because over 250 thousand people participated in the procession and there were several interesteds only in causing disorders. Despite the presence of these people, also from other cities, the event took place regularly “. “Only at the end – explains Lamberto Giannini – when they reached the tail of the procession they tried to deviate towards the center, probably towards institutional objectives or the station, but with ready movements they were blocked by the police forces”. At the end of the event there were 262 extremists stopped and identified for the clashes.
