Rome’s Pride parade bars Jewish LGBTQ float over refusal to call Gaza war ‘genocide’
Roma Pride has has become “itself an instrument of exclusion,” said a board member for Keshet Italia
Marchers take part in the Roma Pride parade in Rome, June 11, 2022. (Camelia Boban/Wikimedia Commons)
By Simone Somekh May 28, 2026
(JTA) — Organizers of Rome’s annual Pride parade have barred Italy’s only Jewish LGBTQIA+ organization from marching with a float at this year’s June 20 parade, although they are still allowed to participate in the march itself.
In a statement that came out Monday, Roma Pride said Keshet Italia had failed to endorse its political manifesto, which characterized Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide. It also accused the organization of making an “unacceptable lexical distinction,” by refusing to use the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in the aftermath of the Hamas Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Keshet Italia, which has no affiliation with the Israeli government or the State of Israel, called the move antisemitic in a Facebook message posted Tuesday.
“Roma Pride has dropped the mask,” the statement read. “In an unprecedented act of exclusion, Keshet Italia, the only Italian Jewish LGBTQIA+ organization, was first denied access to the coordination and then even the possibility of marching with its own float. Our crime? Being Jewish.”
While Keshet Italia members could still march on foot with flags and banners, the group said that was not a viable option due to safety concerns in the wake of Oct. 7, which is why they had requested a float.
While anyone can march in the parade, a float requires a formal request.
The decision comes one year after Keshet members were attacked at the parade by marchers who called them terrorists and murderers, made Nazi salutes and attempted to rush the float. Police were forced to evacuate the group before the end of the parade.
Roma Pride’s latest decision drew immediate condemnation from Jewish organizations across Italy. The Jewish community of Rome called it “a blatant act of discrimination against Italian citizens solely because they are Jewish.”
The Union of Italian Jewish Communities wrote in a statement, “No one should be required to pass an ideological test to participate in a space born with the goal of inclusion.”
“This is the culmination of years of discrimination, and it hurts us deeply because we helped build Roma Pride,” Keshet Italia President Ariel Heller told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Keshet Italia has been participating in Roma Pride for more than a decade.
“Jewish LGBT people were foundational to this movement,” he added.
The exclusion, Heller said, was the result of a lengthy process that unfolded over the past year, during which Keshet Italia made several attempts to meet with the march organizers to build a relationship and contribute to drafting this year’s annual manifesto.
Those efforts culminated in a meeting with parade organizers on Monday, who told Heller that they had already written the manifesto, and that Keshet couldn’t participate with a float, though they could walk in the parade, according to Heller.
“I told them, ‘You know perfectly well that wouldn’t be safe for us, also in light of what happened last year,’” Heller said. “And they shrugged. They simply didn’t care.”
Roma Pride did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. According to Heller, the organization issued a statement on Instagram announcing the exclusion within 15 minutes of the Jewish representatives leaving the meeting.
Keshet Italia has called on Rome’s mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, not to attend the parade. “You cannot spend Roman citizens’ money to fund exclusion,” Heller said.
The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Keshet Italia board member Dafna Terracina told JTA that after the board heard of the organization’s exclusion, “There was anger, disbelief, and also memories that inevitably called to mind our grandparents’ accounts of the exclusions they experienced during the [Second World] War.”
She added, “Reducing the participation of our organization to a geopolitical stance means turning Pride into a space of conditional belonging: You are accepted only if you think a certain way. That’s not inclusion.”
However, she said she found even more troubling the implicit message that Jewish people must constantly justify themselves, distance themselves from Israel, and prove they deserve a place in public spaces. The climate, she added, risks fueling antisemitism “because it uses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to delegitimize people on the basis of their Jewish identity.”
“When you start deciding which minorities are acceptable enough to be included,” she said, “Pride loses its original purpose and becomes itself an instrument of exclusion.”
Roma Pride’s political manifesto also draws an explicit parallel between the Palestinian cause and Italy’s anti-fascist Resistance, stating, “The Resistance gave life to our country and our Republic,” and that “to deny the Palestinian people the right to resist and exist would be to deny our own history.”
Roma Pride is organized by a cultural circle named after Mario Mieli (1952-1983), a pioneering Italian gay activist and writer whose Jewish father was persecuted by the Fascist regime. Mario Mieli, Alfredo Cohen, Corrado Levi were the co-founders of Fuori in 1971, Italy’s first homosexual liberation movement. It was “the movement that eventually led to the creation of Roma Pride,” Heller said. “Excluding us means excluding a piece of Italian LGBT history.”
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