Le oscillazioni della politica italiana in Palestina, 1933-1938

Until the first decades of the 20th century, Palestine occupied a marginal role in the politics of a united Italy, becoming the subject of parliamentary debates solely to safeguard Italian prestige in the Holy Land and the rights of its compatriots residing there. Although following the First World War, Palestine took on a more prominent role in the political agenda of the Foreign Ministry, it was only in the 1930s that it began to play a central role in fascist politics in the Middle East. Through the study of Italian funding to local periodicals and the analysis of diplomatic relations between 1933 and 1938, the aim is to explain the precarious balance on which Italian action in Palestine was based up to the proclamation of the Racial Laws. In this period the Italian policy in Palestine was full of discrepancies and anything but homogeneous, often influenced by the individual positions and ideas of the protagonists of the political and diplomatic scene of the time. Moving between Zionists and Arab nationalists, pandering to both communities in alternating phases, Italian politics in those years did not follow a linear direction but continued to oscillate between two poles, trying to follow the path that, even in an anti-British policy, most favored Italian interestes in Palestine.