Italo Calvino (Italian writer, 1923-1985) on Israel: dramatic for Europeans that the persecuted have become oppressors

“For us Europeans, the drama of the persecuted Palestinians has a special resonance because their current persecutors have suffered – in themselves or in their families – some of the most atrocious and inhuman persecutions under Nazism and even much earlier, for centuries and centuries”: word by Italo Calvino who, in a letter dated 10 October 1968, responded to a letter from Issa Nouri, a Jordanian journalist who was looking for an Italian publisher for some Palestinian poets.

What traumatizes Calvino, was that "the persecuted of the past have turned into oppressors". And this, he continues, "is for us the most dramatic fact, the one on which we feel it is most necessary to leverage".