Israel Play Their Antisemitism Card Again; This Time It's Backfired

Israel Play Their Antisemitism Card Again; This Time It's Backfired

From Kernow Damo by Damien Willey

April 16, 2026 · 15 min

About this episode

The episode discusses the backlash against an Italian magazine's cover photo depicting settler abuse as Israel accuses it of antisemitism.

A real photo of settler abuse got called “antisemitic” — and that tells you far more about Israel’s panic than L’Espresso’s cover. Right, so Italian news magazine L’Espresso has published it’s latest weekly edition and being a news magazine it put a real photograph on its cover as you might imagine it would, hardly unusual is it? And yet that simple act has been enough in and of itself to have Israel wailing antisemitism yet again. Israel’s ambassador to Italy Jonathan Peled has called that cover manipulative and hateful and I would argue it could well be construed that way, though not in the way Peled means. The photograph itself shows an armed Israeli settler grinning inanely while filming a distressed Palestinian woman near Hebron during the olive harvest. That’s it. That is the row. Not a cartoon, not an artist’s impression, not some feverish bit of anti-Israel fan fiction, but a real image taken by Pietro Masturzo, printed under the title L’Abuso – The Abuse – and then denounced as antisemitic once it landed in public on te L’Espresso front cover. Enrico Bellavia, L’Espresso’s deputy editor, has not folded over this either, by now a British mainstream outlet would have…

Topics covered

  • antisemitism
  • Israel
  • settler abuse
  • media coverage

Keywords

  • L'Espresso
  • Pietro Masturzo
  • Hebron
  • olive harvest

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: L’Abuso

Places: Israel, Italy, Hebron

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