Palladio in Palestine
David Swanson / World BEYOND War

(September 15, 2025) — Every once in a while I come across mention of something that I proceed to forget again, which is that a copy of La Rotonda exists in the West Bank. That is, a near reproduction of a famous Renaissance villa sits on a hill in Palestine. It’s in the bottom right of the image above.

My first thought, when I remember this, is sadness that the US-Israeli war machine will probably blow this building up.

My second thought is that poor Palestine is afflicted, on top of everything else, with billionaires — which suggests deep problems with the whole darn world, regardless of whether the Israeli genocidaires evict and dispossess the Palestinian billionaires. Yes, a Palestinian billionaire built himself that house.

My third thought is that once Israel gets the US military fully into another war, many of the weapons and troops will arrive from a massive military base in Italy that many people, including me, spent a long time opposing the expansion of. See the bottom left of the image above.

We kept it from being even larger, but it’s large. The town of Vicenza, the home of many of the architectural masterpieces of Andrea Palladio, is now overrun 365 days a year with US troops, against the wishes of the local people, and against the wishes of the Italian people; and the troops are sent from there to wars opposed by most people in Italy, the United States, and the world.

My fourth thought is of the original Villa Rotonda, the one by Palladio. It sits just outside the center of Vicenza, the original suburban palace to be imitated by countless lobbyists outside Washington, DC. See the top left of the image above for the original.

For rightwing bigots, including those who would have despised Italians as inferior creatures just a handful of generations back, tourist sites like Venetian villas are part of a Western culture to be defended from evil foreigners, mostly by killing and impoverishing those foreigners in distant lands.

I was an exchange student in the province of Vicenza and got a glimpse of the United States from outside its borders. I highly recommend that to any resident of any part of the world. Once you see multiple perspectives, you can begin to choose your own. Of course I didn’t see the area in the age in which the owners of the fancy villas lorded it over the struggling peasants.

I now live within sight of another Palladian copy, the slave plantation of Thomas Jefferson called Monticello. President Jefferson took elements from numerous pages of Palladio’s book, but there is no mistaking the style. In fact, Jefferson’s house is credited with kick-starting a fashion of Palladian designs across the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.

Later, during his Mussolini obsession, Ezra Pound aspired to move to Monticello, not because a Jew had saved it from ruin, but because a white supremacist had built it (by giving orders to enslaved men).

From 1929 to 2010 La Rotonda was owned by an architecture professor at the University of Virginia, which was designed by Thomas Jefferson and built by enslaved Virginians here in the shadow of Monticello — and which in 2017 was the sight of torch-bearing neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us!”

Earlier this year, Benjamin Netanyahu took a private tour of Monticello, which was noted in the media only after the fact, to avoid unpleasantries, such as a citizen’s arrest. Years back, many of us protested then-President George W. Bush at Monticello, and a surprising number of people protested our supposed defending of a slave plantation (we protested that man at his “ranch” in Texas, and at the opening of his Lie-Bury presidential library, and would have protested him in the George W. Bush sewage treatment plant if possible.

Now, come back around to the Palestinian Palladian villa. Here you have a Western art masterpiece build by a US-educated, fossil-fuel-exploiting billionaire. How many thousands of times have we all been instructed that nations that have McDonald’s do not go to war with each other? But here you have everything the US oligarchy values: a billionaire filling his pseudo-Western masterpiece with actual Western art masterpieces, hoarding his wealth, consuming conspicuously, and doing his bit to roast the planet so that fought-over lands may become uninhabitable. And it’s not enough. It doesn’t matter. Israel still sends tractors and skunk trucks and soldiers and missiles.

As it happens, McDonald’s Israeli franchise felt public pressure not to build in the West Bank, and then caught a new wave of public outrage — and a global boycott — last year when it started giving free food to Israeli troops.

That practice has been halted. But the genocide plows on, destroying great artworks from numerous cultures, destroying things built through exploitation and things built through egalitarianism. The central propaganda enabling the horror is that Palestinians are lowly animals. So, perhaps it’s worth remembering, after all, that there is a Palladian villa on a hill overlooking the olives and the killers of children