Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced on Tuesday that Italy will halt the automatic renewal of a defense pact it has held with Israel for 23 years. Italy has repeatedly criticized Israel’s war against terrorist groups and regimes recently.

• The 2003 agreement involves the exchange of military equipment and technological research. Meloni’s announcement is less about tech and more about isolating Israel.

The announcement legitimizes claims that Israel is the warmonger of our day that needs to be restrained. It adds fuel to an inferno of European hatred toward the Jewish people. Israel is being cornered by its supposed allies.

On Monday, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, demanding that Israel refrain from the “annexation of the West Bank.”

• Apparently, Merz believes he can dictate where Jews can and cannot live. He thus also rises as a defender of Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank who seek to erase Jewish life.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich rebuked Merz, stating:

On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the German Chancellor should bow his head and apologize a thousand times on behalf of Germany, rather than daring to preach morality to us on how to conduct ourselves against the Nazis of our generation. … Mr. Chancellor, the days when Germans dictated to Jews where they were permitted or forbidden to live are over and shall not return.

Israel is again facing an existential threat, this time from Islamic terrorism. But the Bible warns that the growing hatred within Europe is a worse threat.

• It’s not just the Holocaust, in which Italy was also complicit. European history holds countless examples of Jews being burned or tortured to death during inquisitions and pogroms.
• Some Europeans view that history in light of what Israel is doing today and feel it was justified.

European leaders’ words and actions are reviving the spirit of the Holy Roman Empire, which has always led to the slaughter of the Jewish people. And a prophecy in Psalm 83 reveals that the greatest threat to Jewish life is yet ahead.