Palestine in every struggle for justice: the active memory of Vittorio Arrigoni

Insight by Adil Mauro

On 15 April 2011, Hamas security forces found the lifeless body of human rights activist Vittorio Arrigoni in a house in Gaza City. The 36-year-old member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) had been kidnapped the previous evening by an alleged group of Salafist extremists.

The murderers of Vittorio Arrigoni were identified a few days later. Two of them died in a firefight, four others were tried. On 17 September 2012, the trial ended with two sentences of life imprisonment for murder, two others to ten and one year for kidnapping and aiding and abetting. The death penalty was not imposed following a specific request made to the court by Arrigoni's family.

The motives behind the activist's murder remain obscure to this day. Although the Salafist organisation dissociated itself from the act, calling it the work of a deviated cell, no thorough investigation was conducted into the Jordanian Abdel Rahman Breizat, who had come to Gaza specifically to kidnap and kill the Italian.

In 2002, Vittorio Arrigoni, nicknamed “Vik”, reached East Jerusalem for a first work camp in Palestine and later returned to the Occupied Territories where, with other comrades, he began to defend the rights of the Palestinian people through peaceful actions of interposition, protecting small schoolchildren in front of Israeli tanks, farmers in the olive harvest, demonstrating with local people against the separation wall, helping elderly people cross checkpoints. Actions that cost the lives of activists like the American Rachel Corrie.

Blacklisted by Israel as undesirable, after two attempts to enter in 2005, where he was beaten and imprisoned, he entered Gaza by sea on 23 August 2008 with the ships Liberty and Free Gaza, thus breaking the sea blockade that Israel has imposed on the Strip since 1967. 

When Israel launched Operation Cast Lead on 27 December 2008, Arrigoni was the only Italian present in the Strip. He recounted the days of the bloody Israeli aggression in articles published by Il Manifesto and later collected in the book “Gaza - Stay Human”.

Back in the Strip in March 2010, Arrigoni continued his mission as a human rights activist and witness, writing and recounting to the end what he saw on his blog ‘Guerrilla Radio’ and for the newspapers - Italian and foreign - willing to host his contributions.

Before Palestine, he did voluntary work mainly in Eastern European countries and sub-Saharan Africa with YAP (Youth Action for Peace) and the ngo IBO. Starting in the second half of the 1990s, Arrigoni helped renovate hospital infrastructures, orphanages, shelters for the homeless and health centres for people with disabilities.

“A journey that more than around the globe can be identified as inside yourself”. In a letter sent to a friend back in 2004, the activist described with these words his idea of volunteering.

"The engine that has driven me to less and less hospitable places, to offer my hand and soul in the service of charitable works, is not philanthropy, nor even the much vaunted pride in being generous, but my naked humility commands that I call it selfishness. Because these experiences give me the pure essence of living, which I can frame in three different purposes or motivations. There is a cultural, elegant and strong-willed motive, and it is the one that mixes the thirst for knowledge with the realisation that only a volunteer experience can give you (from the first to the last day you sleep, work, eat, toil, absorb suffering and rejoice in the sudden joys, always in contact with the local population, always at the centre of events and never on the sidelines). The humanitarian end is essential; one cannot even think of visiting Africa without getting one's hands dirty with all its deadly misery, without feeling one's stomach burn with the thirst for justice, pierced by the pangs of hunger. It is therefore necessary to leave traces of one's passage in the hearts, first and foremost, of the poor people one encounters and the victims of an unjust war, showing them how an alternative West exists, one that knows how to strip itself of its own cultural dictates of pride and arrogance, one that knows how to present itself as welcoming and empathetic, far from every circuit of exploitation and away from the war machine that sucks every reserve of money and human lives. Which extends its hands and does not withdraw them, but rather is able to offer gifts, which blends in anonymity to generate alliance, under no flag that is not an emblem of peace, solidarity, convinced friendship. That is the human motive”.

Over the years, numerous books and podcasts have been dedicated to Vittorio Arrigoni. His words are more relevant than ever, especially in light of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the brutal violence perpetrated by the Israeli army and settlers in the West Bank. 

Carrying forward Arrigoni's ideals of solidarity and justice is a Foundation named after him, established in May 2012 and strongly supported by Egidia Beretta and Alessandra Arrigoni, Vittorio's mother and sister respectively. The aim is to honour his memory “and continue his selfless action of civil commitment in the service of the common good, human rights and justice”. The Foundation promotes and supports humanitarian interventions not only in Italy but also internationally. “Right from the start we looked for projects in different parts of the world that could be in line with the spirit of the Foundation. Some even in the international work camps attended by Vittorio”, Egidia Beretta explains to Voice Over.

Congo, Nicaragua, Haiti, Benin, Ethiopia and of course Gaza. The list of funded projects does not end here. In recent years, the topic of migration has seen the Vittorio Arrigoni Foundation at the forefront in supporting associations that organise refugee camps in Bosnia, on the island of Lesbos and rescue migrants at sea. Indeed, in 2021 the Foundation contributed to the procurement of fuel for a ResQ People search and rescue mission in the Central Mediterranean.

“In 2023 we wanted to support the work of Linea d'Ombra in Trieste”, says Beretta. Lorena Fornasir and Gian Andrea Franchi's association, with their volunteers, welcomes, rescues, medicates, feeds and clothes migrants from the Balkan route every day in Piazza Libertà. On the Foundation's website one can read Fornasir's words. “Beyond the importance of a donation for migrants in transit in Trieste, numerous in this season (a donation that helps them to go where their life project is), it is a gift that this takes place in the active memory of Vittorio Arrigoni, who for all of us is an exemplary reference of the necessary daily commitment against the limitless violence that continues to be exercised on the peoples of the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere”.

Also in 2023, Egidia Beretta and the foundation she chairs supported two projects - one food and the other health - in the Gaza Strip.

“But there is also another important aspect of the foundation,’ says Beretta. "To also implement actions that aim to spread the culture of justice, peace and solidarity. I feel this task as a moral duty towards Vittorio. And I do it above all by responding to all the invitations I receive from schools of all levels”. Beretta tells how his son became the best known Vittorio, the one from the Gaza Strip. It is a story that retraces the path, also a tiring one, taken by her son “to know himself inside out”. According to Egidia Beretta, “this was Vittorio's dilemma: ‘I am in the world, I did not seek life but I must give something back to it’'’.

Beretta explains to the young people that one does not improvise as a volunteer. “I try to make them understand that it is good to have an ideal, a utopia, and that it is necessary to cultivate these feelings from a young age in order to become just women and men, who are not indifferent, but know how to open their doors and windows and find each and every one their own Palestine. For Vittorio, Palestine can also be outside the door. We need to be able to recognise when there are trampled, ignored rights all around us”.

Egidia Beretta's voice cracks slightly just thinking about that night between 14 and 15 April 2011. “But I try not to think about that blindfolded and shot Vittorio. It causes me great anguish. I imagine him alive as I saw him in the images coming to me from Gaza”. The pain that has accompanied her for fourteen years is eased at least in part by the closeness of people. "There is a community around me. I don't feel alone. It's the thing that makes me feel a little better on those days".

For Egidia Beretta, Vittorio's most precious legacy is his passion for human rights (“I wish it permeated so many people”) and the will to “not give in to the indifference that surrounds us”. Beretta ends his conversation with Voice Over by reading a text written in 2008 by his son. “There are existences that are more expendable than others, more dedicated to sacrifice, having tested on their own skin all the suffering in the world, and not being able to shake it off, they strive to prevent it, to alleviate it for those closest to them. Mine is one such existence. It is all about spending it on something priceless, like the fight for justice, for freedom. I am convinced that trying to ease the pain of an entire people oppressed for more than 60 years, if it is a good reason to live, it is also a good reason to die”.