[News] The Settler’s Grin: How One Italian Magazine Cover Exposed Monstrosity of Greater Israel Ap

[Anti-Imperialist News]

palestinechronicle.com
<https://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-settlers-grin-how-one-italian-magazine-cover-exposed-monstrosity-of-greater-israel/>
The Settler’s Grin: How One Italian Magazine Cover Exposed Monstrosity of
Greater IsraelAp
------------------------------
The Italian weekly L’Espresso hit newsstands with a cover that has sent the
Zionist apparatus into full meltdown. (Photo: Michael Leonardi)

*By Michael Leonardi
<https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/michael-leonardi>*

The real scandal is not the photograph. The real scandal is the
decades-long project it so powerfully illustrates.

On April 10th 2026, the Italian weekly *L’Espresso* hit newsstands with a
cover that has sent the Zionist apparatus into full meltdown. Titled
“L’Abuso” (“The Abuse”), the image shows an armed Israeli settler — dressed
in military fatigues, kippah on his head, peyot curls dangling — sneering
with sadistic delight as he films a visibly distressed Palestinian woman
with his phone. She stands among olive trees on what remains of her
ancestral land, her face a mask of pain and exhaustion during the annual
olive harvest.

The photograph, taken by Italian photojournalist Pietro Masturzo near the
village of Idhna, west of Hebron, in October 2025, is not staged, not
manipulated, and certainly not AI-generated. When pro-Israel accounts
flooded social media claiming it was fake, Masturzo and *L’Espresso *released
the full video footage.

It shows exactly what the still image captures: a group of armed settlers,
some in army uniforms, descending on Palestinian families trying to harvest
their olives. The settler in the photo mocks the woman by imitating the
sound a shepherd makes to herd animals — treating Palestinians like
livestock on land that Zionist ideology claims as divinely ordained for
Jews only.

Israel’s ambassador to Italy, Jonathan Peled, immediately denounced the
cover as “manipulative” and distorting reality. Zionist networks across
social media launched a coordinated campaign of harassment, denial, and
smears. Yet the more they raged, the more the image spread — because it
does what powerful images sometimes do: it cuts through the propaganda and
shows the raw, everyday face of settler-colonial violence.

This single photograph has become a symbol of the Zionist Greater Israel
project in its most unfiltered form. It is not an aberration. It is the
logic of expansion made visible: armed civilians, backed by the state and
its military, systematically terrorizing indigenous Palestinians to steal
their land, destroy their livelihoods, and drive them out.

Olive trees — ancient symbols of Palestinian rootedness and resilience —
are regularly uprooted, burned, or blocked by settlers. The harvest, once a
time of community and sustenance, has become a season of fear,
confrontation, and ethnic cleansing in slow motion, especially in areas
like Masafer Yatta and the South Hebron Hills.

The frenzy the cover provoked reveals something deeper than mere public
relations damage control. It exposes the fragility of the Zionist
narrative. When confronted with the unvarnished reality — the smirk of the
occupier, the quiet suffering of the occupied — the default response is
denial, deflection, and cries of “antisemitism.”

The ambassador and his allies would prefer that Italians and the world
never see this face of the occupation. They want sanitized images of
“self-defense” and “security,” not the daily humiliation and dispossession
that sustain the dream of a Greater Israel stretching from the river to the
sea, emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants.

L’Espresso’s reporting accompanying the cover goes further, documenting how
the most extreme elements of the Zionist right are actively shaping Israeli
policy: expanding illegal settlements, accelerating land grabs in the West
Bank, and normalizing what amounts to a slow-motion ethnic cleansing
operation.

The settler in the photo is not a lone fanatic. He is the foot soldier of a
state-backed project that enjoys full impunity — protected by Israeli law,
financed by American taxpayers, and shielded diplomatically by governments
in Europe and the United States, including Italy’s own Meloni
administration.

Yet even in Meloni’s Italy, the tides are beginning to shift. This week,
under mounting pressure from the streets and the so-called “Gaza
Generation” — the young Italians radicalized by the live-streamed horrors
in Gaza and the growing grassroots movement demanding an end to complicity
— the Meloni government announced the suspension of its memorandum of
cooperation with Israel.

It is a limited but significant first step: a crack in the wall of
unconditional alignment that has long defined Italian policy toward the
Zionist regime. For the first time in years, economic and military ties are
being questioned from within the halls of power, not just from the piazzas.

The “movement from below” — sustained protests, port blockades, strikes at
arms manufacturers like Leonardo, and relentless public mobilization — has
forced even this far-right government to blink.

This development is no gift from above. It is the direct result of
organized, unrelenting pressure from Italian civil society, particularly
its youth, who refuse to let their country remain a willing accomplice in
genocide and land theft.

While the suspension is partial and reversible, it signals that the
monopoly of Zionist influence in Italian politics is no longer absolute.
The settler’s grin on the cover of L’Espresso has become a mirror that even
Rome can no longer fully ignore.

In an era when Western governments continue to arm Israel, veto ceasefire
calls, and criminalize solidarity with Palestine, *L’Espresso’s *courage in
publishing this cover matters. The real scandal is not the photograph. The
real scandal is the decades-long project it so powerfully illustrates: the
methodical dispossession of an entire people, carried out with rifles,
cameras, and the smug certainty of the colonizer.

The image will eventually fade from headlines, but the olive trees remain —
stubborn witnesses to a crime that refuses to stay hidden. As long as
Palestinians continue to harvest what is theirs, despite the colonizers and
the soldiers, the truth will keep forcing its way onto the front page.

The abuse continues. So must the exposure.


*– Michael Leonardi is an Italy-based journalist. He contributed this
article to the Palestine Chronicle.*
The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial
position of The Palestine Chronicle.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20260419/612a9b1a/attachment-0001.htm>