Rome's mayor Gianni Alemanno has said he would go shopping at Jewish-owned stores in the city's center with leaders of the Italian Jewish community to denounce a proposed boycott of these stores by a small left wing trade union launched as a protest against Israel's military operation in Gaza. The appeal to boycott Jewish-run shops created a storm in the country and was condemned by politicians from both the left and the right. The small Flaica-Uniti-Cub union linked to the retail and food sectors issued the boycott call last week on its website, saying: "Do not buy anything from businesses run by the Jewish community as a sign of protest."
"We cannot remain silent about what is happening in Gaza. We had thought of drawing up a list of businessmen who have links with Tel Aviv because people do not know who they are," said Giancarlo Desiderati, the union's secretary who was behind the initiative. On Friday, Rome's right-wing mayor visited the city's ancient Jewish quarter known as the Ghetto and firmly condemned the "mad and criminal" proposal which he said echoed the race laws under fascism in the 1930s.
"The people who came up with this horrible idea are not new to such initiatives, which are a throwback to similar ones in the mid-1930s which set the stage for Italy's anti-Jewish racial laws," Alemanno, who is a member of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's coalition, said.
Piero Marrazzo, governor of the region of Lazio, of which Rome is the capital, said that ''the idea of boycotting shops because they were run by Roman Jews is blood-curdling. This is certainly no way to support the Palestinian cause nor help the residents of Gaza,'' the center-left politician said. Italy's three main trade unions denounced the boycott proposal as "shameful" and suggested that Rome shopkeepers throw the Flaica handbills – which they said listed streets dominated by Jewish shops under the slogan "sales dirtied by blood" – in the trash.
Riccardo Pacifici, the head of Rome's Jewish community, said he would be suing the union under Italian anti-racism laws. "I am an Italian citizen and it infuriates me that people don't differentiate between the mentality and opinions of an Italian from what is happening in Israel," Giuseppe Livoli, a Jewish Italian shopkeeper, told 'Repubblica' newspaper. Claudia De Benedetti, vice-president of the umbrella group Union of Italian Jewish communities told EJP that such things "never happened in the past." She welcomed the fact that all political parties had come out decisively against the proposal.
