An Italian archbishop has joined forces with communists to demand a boycott of a leading Israeli novelist at a literary festival, accusing him of failing to condemn sufficiently the Israeli government’s policies and war in Gaza.
Archbishop Franco Moscone of the Diocese of Manfredonia-Vieste-San Giovanni Rotondo signed a petition issued by the Communist Refoundation Party’s regional secretary, Sabino De Razza, urging the organizers of the Il Libro Possibile (The Possible Book) to disinvite Eshkol Nevo, a bestselling Jewish author, from the literary festival to be held in Puglia from July 8–11, 2026.
“Other people, and even entire nations, have been excluded for much less. The current situation in Israel is no longer sustainable,” Moscone said, calling for the cancellation of the author, who is also the grandson of Israel’s third prime minister, Levi Eshkol. Italian translations of Nevo’s novels have a wide audience.
Boycotting Nevo “seems to me to ignore the reality and importance of the empathy contained in the writer’s novels.”
“It requires an intellectual to tell things as they are. This is something the intellectual in question has failed to do,” Moscone said. The prelate insisted that “the issue doesn’t concern Nevo as an Israeli,” but that the author “lacked the courage to offer a critical and clear contribution.”
The Jewish-Italian marketing and advertising guru Carlo Momigliano responded to Moscone in the newspaper Il Riformista, citing three examples of “strong empathy toward Palestinian Arabs and their plight” in Nevo’s novels: In The Symmetry of Desires, for example, he represents the West Bank’s occupation in an episode of unjustified violence against a Palestinian family watching a television broadcast. In Nostalgia, one of the protagonists is Saddiq, an Arab bricklayer who is forced to leave his home during Israel’s war of independence. And, in Alone and Lost, Naim, the Arab bricklayer building the Mikveh, encounters the arbitrariness of Israel’s army.
Boycotting Nevo “seems to me to ignore the reality and importance of the empathy contained in the writer’s novels,” Momigliano wrote. “Instead, it demands a precise alignment with certain specific formulas,” which reminds him of the “acts of faith” that the Jewish people remember well, he added, alluding to the Inquisition’s judgments and executions of Jews.
Bari’s Mayor Vito Leccese recalled that the Israeli writer has repeatedly criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, even calling for his resignation. “Suppressing speech and censoring culture is never a choice that promotes peace,” Leccese said.
Nevo has affirmed both his Jewish and Israeli identity. “I realized how Jewish I am when I became a writer: Writing in Hebrew, using words with a profound and multifaceted meaning in my language, helps me discover my identity day after day,” he told Bet Magazine Mosaico, the official magazine of Milan’s Jewish community.
This is not the first time Moscone has attacked Israel. In March 2025, during a peace rally in Bari, Moscone said that since 1947, Gaza and the West Bank have been an “open-air concentration camp” and that since October 7, 2023, “they have become an open-air extermination camp, with the silence of the world and Europe.” He added, “What has always struck me is that behind this concentration and extermination camp are the same people who were subjected to concentration and extermination camps until the end of the Second World War.”
“They’re trying to remove a writer from a festival not for what he said, but for what he didn’t say.”
Israel’s Embassy to the Holy See blasted Moscone for “belittling the Holocaust” and “spreading hatred” through antisemitic stereotypes with a “poisonous rhetoric.” Moscone’s diocese said the embassy’s claims were “absurd.”
Bet Magazine Mosaico wrote that Nevo “has long expressed criticism of the current leadership in Tel Aviv [sic] and, in particular, of the radical right represented by figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir,” adding, “Yet, for some of the protest’s instigators, this is not enough.”
“They’ve found an elegant solution. They’re trying to remove a writer from a festival not for what he said, but for what he didn’t say,” Italy’s Antisemitism Observatory commented. “They no longer say ‘Israelis out.’ They prefer to say, ‘those who didn’t condemn enough.’”
The festival’s artistic director, Rosella Santoro, has refused to exclude Nevo, stating: “We cannot equate a writer with the political choices of his country’s government.” Archbishop Giuseppe Baturi, secretary general of the Italian Episcopal Conference, called Moscone’s signature a “personal choice and the exercise of freedom of thought and expression,” and said the Italian bishops would not “intervene on the merits of the matter.”
Nevertheless, such comments by a relatively high-ranking church official are increasingly becoming the norm for the Vatican, especially under Pope Leo XIV.
