Moni Ovadia leaves the direction of the Teatro Comunale di Ferrara. After the controversy of recent days over his positions on the Middle East issue, the actor himself announced it, in an interview with Corriere.it., where he said that he will resign on Friday.
Moni Ovadia has been at the center of controversy for his critical stances on the responsibilities of the Israeli government and Prime Minister Netanyahu on the crisis. "The majority of the Board of Directors and the City Council are against me, so they have all the tools to corner me.
Since I am a free man, I anticipate this but I note that Italy is a regime, it is not a democracy even from a distance," he says.
He has been at the helm of the theater named after Claudio Abbado for four years, appointed by the Northern League mayor Alan Fabbri, who had just snatched the leadership of the city from the center-left for the first time in the post-war period. A choice considered unusual, given that Ovadia has never hidden his left-wing sympathies and sponsored by Vittorio Sgarbi from Ferrara, who in fact was the first to come to his defense after the announcement of his resignation.
The issue was raised by the Ferrara senator of Fratelli d'Italia Alberto Balboni, commenting on the fierce criticism that Ovadia had made of the Israeli government. "I am ashamed - the words of Balboni - to have welcomed Moni Ovadia at the top of the most prestigious cultural institution in the city such as our theater".
"Since 1994," says Ovadia, "I have been denouncing the policies of the Israeli government. I hope that this very small gesture of mine will serve to warn Italian citizens: when you attack opinions, you begin to prefigure tyranny. I have said that the responsibility for everything that has happened lies with the Israeli Government. I didn't say 'Long live Hamas'. I've written much, much stronger things along these lines in the past. Until yesterday I was determined not to resign but to be kicked out, but I don't want to harm the theater and its workers. This is the new fascism: stigmatizing people's opinion by criminalizing them."
Between the FDI from which the attack on Ovadia started and Undersecretary Sgarbi who calls his resignation "a defeat of democracy and freedom of thought", there is the mayor Alan Fabbri (Lega), who was in Sardinia for a series of initiatives and who did not comment while waiting to speak with those directly involved. It will be up to him to try to find a mediation in the coalition that supports him, eight months before the elections where he will seek reconfirmation.
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