{"id":93924,"date":"2026-08-21T18:39:05","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T23:39:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/?p=93924"},"modified":"2026-08-21T18:39:05","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T23:39:05","slug":"op-ed-keeping-israelis-out-the-new-antisemitic-boycott-reaches-italys-airports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/op-ed-keeping-israelis-out-the-new-antisemitic-boycott-reaches-italys-airports\/","title":{"rendered":"OP-ED: Keeping Israelis Out &#8211; The New Antisemitic Boycott Reaches Italy&#8217;s Airports"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>By FIAMMA NIRENSTEIN<\/div>\n<div>&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div class=\"ArticlePage-dateAndSource\">(JNS.org)&nbsp; \u2013&nbsp;There is a pack of fanatics in Italy that wants to take control of airports for the purpose of excluding Israel from international air routes.<\/div>\n<div id=\"attachment_93925\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aeroporto_Cagliari-Elmas-scaled.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-93925\" class=\"wp-image-93925 size-medium lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aeroporto_Cagliari-Elmas-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aeroporto_Cagliari-Elmas-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aeroporto_Cagliari-Elmas-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aeroporto_Cagliari-Elmas-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aeroporto_Cagliari-Elmas-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aeroporto_Cagliari-Elmas-2048x1536.jpg 2048w\" data-sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 300px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 300\/225;\" \/><noscript><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-93925\" class=\"wp-image-93925 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aeroporto_Cagliari-Elmas-300x225.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aeroporto_Cagliari-Elmas-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aeroporto_Cagliari-Elmas-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aeroporto_Cagliari-Elmas-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aeroporto_Cagliari-Elmas-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Aeroporto_Cagliari-Elmas-2048x1536.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/noscript><\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-93925\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Cagliari Airport (Photo by lucamascaro &#8211; https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/lucamascaro\/1549381103\/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=12561612)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>They organize protests so that Israeli men, women and children arriving for an innocent vacation encounter a hostile and aggressive presence designed to frighten them and, ultimately, discourage Israelis from coming to Italy at all.<\/p>\n<p>Israelis? Well, of course, the message goes further. It is meant to discourage Jews in general from traveling\u2014those hated Zionists. Let them stay home. Better yet, let them remain shut inside their homes.<\/p>\n<p>According to the familiar antisemitic narrative that now pursues Jews at school, at university, on vacation and at work, they are all part of a clique of genocidal murderers who carry out ethnic cleansing and shoot children for fun.<\/p>\n<p>One can imagine where the activists get their information: antisemitic social media and television panels that take their news from the Qatar-based television network,&nbsp;<i>Al Jazeera<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>A group called&nbsp;<i>Gioved\u00ec Bianco<\/i>&nbsp;(\u201cWhite Thursday\u201d) has for some time been active at Cagliari Airport, where tourists arriving from Tel Aviv are greeted with shouts of \u201cFree Palestine\u201d and followed by hateful chants as they collect their luggage and make their way through the terminal, while children tremble.<\/p>\n<p>Israelis adore Italy. Yet today, Thursday,&nbsp;<i>Gioved\u00ec Bianco<\/i>&nbsp;is calling for protests at the airports of Verona, Cagliari, Milan Linate, Rome Fiumicino and Venice, targeting Israeli travelers and denouncing the government for insisting on the \u201cmaintenance of air routes with Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The times and descriptions of the planned actions are public. But the objective goes well beyond airports. It is part of the effort to erase Israel from the international arena\u2014from sports, culture, music, medicine and now travel\u2014and, ultimately, to make Israel and Jews disappear from public life.<\/p>\n<p>They are not the first to try.<\/p>\n<p>Targeting air travel attacks something fundamental: the freedom of movement, education and exchange on which the free world is built. Apparently, however, those freedoms are not meant to apply to Jews.<\/p>\n<p>Airports have already been transformed by decades of Palestinian and Islamist terrorism, subjected to stringent security measures intended to protect travelers from attack. Now comes another form of aggression against Jews, violating a basic principle of international coexistence.<\/p>\n<p>And one final question: The boycott website lists telephone numbers connected to these activities. Might those numbers perhaps make it possible to identify the people behind this brilliant idea?<\/p>\n<p><em>Fiamma Nirenstein is an Italian-Israeli journalist, author and senior research fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (JCFA).<\/em><\/p>\n<div style=\"padding-bottom:20px; padding-top:10px;\" class=\"hupso-share-buttons\"><!-- Hupso Share Buttons - https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/ --><a class=\"hupso_toolbar\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" data-src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" \/><noscript><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\"\/><\/noscript><\/a><script type=\"text\/javascript\">var hupso_services_t=new Array(\"Twitter\",\"Facebook\",\"Google Plus\",\"Pinterest\",\"Linkedin\",\"Tumblr\",\"Email\");var hupso_background_t=\"#EAF4FF\";var hupso_border_t=\"#66CCFF\";var hupso_toolbar_size_t=\"medium\";var hupso_image_folder_url = \"\";var hupso_url_t=\"\";var hupso_title_t=\"OP-ED%3A%20Keeping%20Israelis%20Out%20-%20The%20New%20Antisemitic%20Boycott%20Reaches%20Italy%27s%20Airports\";<\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/js\/share_toolbar.js\"><\/script><!-- Hupso Share Buttons --><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":93925,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1527,1548,8790,238,8788],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93924"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93924"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":93926,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93924\/revisions\/93926"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}