Lorenzo Maria Pacini
History is full of good people who lacked the courage to oppose. Italy obeys masters abroad, not conscience at home.
A question that remains unanswered to this day
On July 30, 2025, in the Senate chamber at Palazzo Madama, Senator Alessandra Maiorino took the floor during question time to address Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani directly. It was no routine speech. Her statement contained an accusation rarely voiced with such clarity within Italian institutions: that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, faced with the massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, chooses inaction and masks it behind the cautious language of diplomacy.
This episode deserves attention beyond the realm of parliamentary news. It paints a picture of a country in which a segment of the political leadership refuses to accept as inevitable the gap between the government's statements of principle and what is actually happening to the people trapped in Gaza. It is on that gap that the issue of hypocrisy hinges.
At the heart of Maiorino's statement is a concrete question, almost bureaucratic in its precision: How many Palestinians have left the Gaza Strip since the United States and Israel directed their operations against Iran ? The senator stated that she receives daily requests for help from Gaza residents asking to leave the Strip, and that she regularly forwards them to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The response she reports receiving from the ministry is blunt: "No one is leaving from there anymore."
The political power of this statement lies in its verifiability. This is not an ideological judgment on the conflict, but an administrative fact: a humanitarian evacuation channel that should exist and that, according to the senator's testimony, is not functioning. When she accused the minister of coming to the Senate floor "to conceal the truth," Maiorino was not using a rhetorical device: she was challenging the government for failing to publicly state what its own offices communicate privately.
The minister did not respond to the specific question. This silence, in a parliamentary setting, is not neutral. In a system of democratic oversight, failing to answer a specific question about the fate of human lives amounts to a political choice, not a procedural oversight.
One of the most incisive aspects of the speech is the way Maiorino structured his criticism: he did not portray Tajani as a cynic but, on the contrary, acknowledged him as "fundamentally a good person," sincerely distressed by the suffering of the Palestinian people. The criticism is of a different nature: he lacks "the courage to oppose." And he added an observation that serves as a general historical thesis: History is full of good people who lacked the courage to act, allowing horrors to unfold.
Here, the criticism becomes more insidious than a direct accusation. Claiming that a minister is acting in bad faith is easy to refute; claiming that he is sincere but inaction strikes at the very point where Italian diplomacy is most vulnerable. Italy has, in fact, issued an increasing number of statements of concern over time: the government has called on Israel to halt the offensive and, on other occasions, has described the response against civilians as "disproportionate." The gap between these words and the absence of concrete consequences is precisely what Maiorino calls hypocrisy: not a lie, but a clear conscience that absolves itself through its own regret.
Reasoned dissent
The statement on July 30 is not an isolated incident. The same senator had previously been the lead signatory of a parliamentary inquiry regarding the government's position on the U.S. administration's attacks and sanctions against Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (who recently updated her report on Israel's crimes). The response received was interpreted by those who had promoted that initiative as confirmation of the Italian government's substantial alignment with the positions of Washington and Tel Aviv.
Reconstructing this continuity is important so as not to reduce the matter to a mere parliamentary clash. There is a political minority in Italy that, with perseverance and through the ordinary tools of parliamentary oversight-parliamentary questions, question time, and explanations of vote-keeps alive the challenge to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation's (MAECI) conduct. The fact that this minority is numerically small does not diminish its institutional significance: it is proof that the government's inaction is a choice, not an obligation, because there are those-from within the same ranks-who point to an alternative.
Italy's position is not that of a marginal player. Maiorino pointed this out matter-of-factly: Tajani is the foreign minister "of a very influential government," endowed with the "power to do something." It is this premise that transforms inaction into responsibility. A small state lacking leverage can claim powerlessness; a medium-sized European power, a member of the G7 and a direct interlocutor of the United States, cannot.
International law makes this responsibility even more compelling. The obligations arising from the Genocide Convention and the principles cited by the International Court of Justice in the proceedings initiated by South Africa apply not only to the parties to the conflict but to all states called upon to prevent crimes of such gravity. In this context, the decision to limit oneself to expressions of regret while maintaining political and military cooperation with the party responsible for the attacks carries legal, as well as moral, weight.
What makes the senator's speech memorable is the word around which she built it: courage. She did not ask Tajani to change his convictions, but to act in accordance with the ones he claims to hold. It is an uncomfortable question because it leaves no room for the loophole of differing opinions. If the minister is truly grieved, then his inaction contradicts him; if he does not act, then his declared grief remains mere rhetoric.
Maiorino's testimony serves as a rebuttal of a comforting narrative-the one claiming that Italy is doing "everything possible." The evacuation requests that have stalled at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the unanswered question about numbers, and the ongoing, documented parliamentary dissent all suggest the opposite. They suggest that what was possible has not been done, and that someone within the institutions has decided to say so out loud.
No, Italy does not do what is right but what it is ordered to do, because subservience to masters seated on thrones outside the country is now a well-established habit. At a time when the people of Gaza continue to suffer attacks by the Israeli armed forces, distinguishing between those who remain silent and those who speak out is not a partisan exercise.
It is the minimum requirement for the word "responsibility" to retain any meaning.