From 11 to 16 October, the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre in Reggio Emilia hosted a Reggio Children training course for a delegation of educators from Jewish schools in the United States and Israel, organised by the Paradigm Project network. These are not just any schools. Among the institutions involved are schools that have organised initiatives in support of the Israeli army over the years, while the organising network shares several funders with the US organisation Friends of the IDF. The question we put to the city is simple: what relationship can there be between Malaguzzi’s pedagogy and those who, in practice, support a genocide?
The Reggio Emilia educational system emerged in the post-war period from the initiative of mothers organised in the Italian Women’s Union and from working-class communities. In Villa Cella, local residents built the People’s Nursery School using the proceeds from the sale of a tank abandoned by the Nazis and bricks salvaged from bombed-out houses. This legacy was subsequently taken up by the municipal administration led by the Italian Communist Party (PCI), and Malaguzzi developed a pedagogy based on the relationship between children, families and teachers. In 1993, he wrote: “No child can be well if other children are suffering, whether near or far from us.” Today, this legacy is managed through a three-part structure comprising the municipal institution, Reggio Children Srl and the Reggio Children Foundation, and has also become a brand marketed around the world.
On 6 October, under the slogan “Zionism Out of Our Schools”, we announced a protest outside the Malaguzzi Centre, alongside workers, parents and local residents who reject complicity in genocide. More than 200 parents signed a document submitted to Reggio Children and the local institutions, calling on the visiting delegations to publicly state their position on the genocide of the Palestinian people. The following day, Reggio Children asked the delegations to explicitly distance themselves from the Netanyahu government. The US educators withdrew from the trip, openly asserting their Zionism. The Israeli teachers arrived and completed the training behind closed doors, with police and officers from the Digos (Italy’s political police division), stationed both inside and outside the Centre.
The far right, Salvini and the president of the Jewish Community of Milan, who invoked methods reminiscent of the “Third Reich”, all cried antisemitism. We reject these accusations, made in bad faith solely to exploit the media frenzy generated by the news. Nobody was asked to account for their religion or nationality, but rather to state their position on the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Opposing Zionism and the crimes of the State of Israel is not antisemitism. It is an indispensable act for anyone who wishes to speak about peace in schools.
However, we will not join the chorus of those now defending the municipal administration. The Democratic Party (PD) and Reggio Children would have allowed the whole affair to pass in silence until the very last moment. They only took action following the mobilisation of parents, Communist Front, Communist Youth Front, activists and associations. Subsequently, the municipal administration immediately reversed course, seeking to protect its own political and economic interests and declaring that asking the visiting delegations to state their position on the ongoing genocide in Gaza had been “a mistake”. This is the hypocrisy of those who celebrate 25 April, Italy’s Liberation Day, and demonstrate for peace while supporting European rearmament, sending weapons to Kiev and remaining silent on the genocide of the Palestinian people. It is the same hypocrisy that condemns genocide in the abstract while keeping its doors open to a network that shares funders with an organisation raising money for the Israeli army. Pecunia non olet (money does not stink).
This affair has also revealed something else. The visit was decided elsewhere, without involving the teachers and educators who work in schools every day and are the first point of contact with families. Behind the polished shop window of the “model”, spruced up for Princess Middleton’s visit, lie structures deteriorating both pedagogically and economically. Educational services are increasingly being outsourced, there are salary disparities between municipal employees and outsourced workers, funding is lacking, and educator-to-child ratios are becoming increasingly unfavourable to maintaining the required standards of quality.
In this context, we have supported the initiative taken by teachers and parents, who have demonstrated not only their solidarity with the Palestinian people but also their determination to actively reject any attempt to normalise the genocide of the Palestinian people. They have demanded a clear stance from the organisers and participants of the course.
Workers can throw a spanner in the works of war and genocide, as dockworkers have demonstrated, particularly since last autumn. The mobilisations of recent years have also shown that Italy is home to a broad mass of people who stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and condemn not only Israel’s actions but also the complicity that enables the genocide to continue, starting with that of Italy itself. Examples include military supplies and the licences acquired by ENI for gas fields off the coast of Gaza.
The best support we can offer the Palestinian cause is therefore to fight here against those very same capitalists who, in the name of profit, support Israeli policies on the one hand while attacking our living and working conditions here in Italy on the other. We will therefore continue to fight for recognition of the State of Palestine and the right of refugees to return, and for the immediate severing of all military, commercial and institutional ties with Israel and its machinery of genocide, including at the local level in Reggio Emilia.
