The article signed by the 22 members, enraged by the line taken by director Paolo Pombeni on Gaza, was published this morning on the website of the magazine Il Mulino, after two days. Some also lament the shift to the right on domestic politics, towards Meloni. Critics, in particular, were not happy with Sandro Delle Pergole's article dated July 17, 2025. The scholar, who lives in Jerusalem, had justified the civilian deaths in Gaza as"collateral damage" .
The 22 members' response was sent to Mulino on the afternoon of July 23, but has been available online for a few hours. Yesterday, the site prioritized a remembrance of the historic television program Campanile sera. While print and digital newspapers commented on the images of starving people in the Strip, the magazine offered an online journey back to 1959, returning to black-and-white RAI, keeping the article on Gaza in the freezer. Today, it's online with Pombeni's dig at the 22:"Without taking into account what I wrote, a group of Mulino members felt it necessary to take a stand on the Gaza tragedy, dissociating themselves from Della Pergola's article, but also, implicitly, from our decision to publish it. We offer it below." The piece follows, titled:"Gaza, a continuing horror , not collateral damage." Signed Raffaella Baritone, Paolo Bosi, Raimondo Catanzaro, Enzo Cheli, Roberto Escobar, Emanuele Felice, Guido Formigoni, Elena Granaglia, Piero Ignazi, Giuseppe Marotta, Enrica Morlicchio, Manuela Naldini, Valeria Ottonelli, Francesco Ramella, Mario Ricciardi, Chiara Saraceno, Roberta Sassatelli, Rocco Sciarrone, Francesco Strazzari, Carlo Trigilia, Luca Verzichelli, Gianfranco Viesti.
Forget about"collateral damage": the 22 from Mulino cite "an endless horror. A dehumanizing regression where starving people become rabbits on which to practice target practice. Forced, planned, and implemented starvation is not enough. Wanton, mass murder must also be imposed on the inhabitants of the Strip." They support the arguments of those who contest the genocide. They denounce war crimes, according to Article 50 of the 1907 Hague Regulations and Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention:"The occupying Power may not subject the entire population of the occupied territory (i.e., the Gaza Strip, in this case) to collective punishment or punishment for an act committed by some of its members."
The 22 academics found Pombeni's article on July 22nd not enough to balance Delle Pergole's article on "collateral damage." In another interview at the end of 2024, the pro-Israeli intellectual had defined Tel Aviv's reaction to the Hamas-led massacre of October 7th as"more than proportional," comparing it to the Anglo-American bombing of Dresden between February 13th and 15th, 1945. On July 21st, the excerpt on"collateral damage" was pilloried on the X profile of Professor Gianfranco Viesti. The post was immediately relaunched by two other Mulino members: former director Mario Ricciardi and professor Emanuele Felice. Viesti is disheartened:"What a miserable end for a historic Italian magazine." Felice publicly distances himself, and Ricciardi draws a comparison with Ehud Olmert's words. The posts are read by tens of thousands of people. Other prestigious figures echo the criticisms of Il Mulino, such as Juan Carlos De Martin of the Polytechnic University of Turin.
On July 22, Paolo Pombeni's article should have calmed tempers, but instead it inflamed them by dismissing the Gaza controversy as a matter of timing. The article by the pro-Israel professor, writes the editor of Il Mulino,"was written before the crazy and dramatic phase of the last week, the one that, to be clear, prompted the Vatican's harsh stance and that of Trump's own staff." As if dismissing the Gaza deaths as "collateral damage" were acceptable.
Pombeni expresses the magazine's stance on the Palestinian question: the"two peoples, two states" solution, a world away from the policies of Netanyahu, compared to the"senseless" millenarianism of Putin and Hitler. Moreover, Della Pergola's article was meant to counterbalance that of Massimiliano Trentin , published on June 23. The political science researcher accuses Israel of wanting to defeat Iran to take over the Strip, with millions of Gazans displaced towards Arab countries. Tel Aviv risks the"extremes of the legal and scientific definition of ethnic cleansing," according to Trentin. Della Pergola, on the other hand, takes the opposite view: Iran is an existential threat and Israel must defend itself.
Political science professor Donatella Della Porta, on her social media channels, slammed Pombeni: “Over the past two years, the quality of the magazine has rapidly declined, leading to the publication of an article on Gaza that was so low-quality and highly racist that it sparked widespread disbelief and outrage.”
Some members criticize the magazine's conduct, pointing the finger at its director, Pombeni. Gianfranco Pasquino notes"the lack of discussion, never a debate on Gaza; the last one I remember was on Renzi's constitutional reforms, and the disaffection is evident." Pombeni was elected by 32 votes to 30, a close call: out of 96 members, over a third hadn't voted. Among the 22 critics, some denounce a shift to the right: a balancing act between the Democratic Party and Brothers of Italy. This is indigestible for those who boast of Il Mulino's progressive history: rooted in socialism, liberalism, and democratic Catholicism. Getting too close to Meloni would be too much.
