I never knew Vittorio “Vik” Arrigoni before his tragic death in Gaza City on 15 April 2011. I won’t pretend to piece together who Vik was or what lay behind his passions. But before he slips from the headlines to the footnotes, it is worth attempting to make an accounting of this terrible death that has shocked the Palestinian movement. His death cannot be allowed to pass without considering what it tells us about ourselves, our movement and our collective future.
While it would be premature to draw conclusions before a full disclosure of events surrounding his assassination has emerged, it is evident that Vik’s death raises larger questions of accountability that remain unaddressed by the international community and the Palestinian movement. Without knowing or identifying some of the broader tendencies, decisions and historical junctures that informed Vik’s murder, we are doomed to reach superficial conclusions about what happened.
So who killed Vik?
The straight forward answer is that Vik was killed by a fanatical, religious sect in Gaza; Salafis hate “infidels,” do not value non-Muslim life, and cannot tolerate diversity, democracy, equality and human rights. These forces are said to occupy the realm of the subhuman. This is the logic of the “war on terror” with all its essentialist presumptions, which, in the end, conveniently justify Western imperial and Zionist practice in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and other theaters around the globe.
However the narrative of Vik’s death cannot be left in the hands of the cynical apologists for murder, occupation and war. Power brokers in Washington, Tel Aviv and Brussels commit their crimes on a far larger scale and use far more sophisticated, deadly and sanitized means.
Some believe that the answer to who killed Vik can be found in a conspiracy: Israel killed him because it gains greatly from such a murder. The Palestinians can be tarred with the stain of an Islamic fundamentalist terror so irrational and dangerous that it even targets solidarity sympathizers. Breaking the burgeoning internationalist solidarity linkages between the Palestinian movement and its allies, especially among youth in the West, is seen as critical to Israel’s long-term political buoyancy. This was implicitly acknowledged by the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, which reported on 21 March 2011 that the IDF’s Military Intelligence unit has set up a special wing of to monitor Palestinian solidarity organizations and left wing groups in Europe and America.
For conspiracists, how Israel committed this particular murder is besides the point. Israel in the past has infiltrated clandestine organizations, has kidnapped people, killed people in detention, assassinated leaders, particularly charismatic personalities in the Palestinian movement, has killed non-Palestinians, and even made false propaganda in the name of the Palestinian people as forms of cunning psychological operations. But conspiracy theories also have the potential danger of ridiculousness and obscurantism. Moreover, it is morally and politically unacceptable to rely on conspiracies as explanations because it evades responsibility and further clouds vision for what is to be done to amend the circumstances that brought us to this point in the first place.
How Do We Answer the Question?
Let us begin by recognizing that Vik never would have had to be or chosen to be in Gaza in the first place had it not been for the brutal reality of human suffering and deprivations in the Strip today. Israel’s inhuman siege of the territory and repeated abuses of its inhabitants is nothing less than a crime against humanity. Where else in the world is it tolerable that the occupying power announces that its approach towards the occupied population of 1.5 million entails a policy of starvation – or as Israel puts it, “putting Gaza on a diet”?
The range of horrors that have befallen Gaza is so widespread that many Palestinians are even unaware of their extent. Who today remembers the massacre of Khan Younis of 1956, where more than 500 people were ripped from their homes by Israeli forces, lined up against walls and shot? The Khan Younis massacre is the largest massacre to take place in territorial Palestine in the history of the Palestinian-Zionist conflict, yet one would never know about it from reading most texts on Palestine or Gaza. Repeated horrific violence has cursed this territory since 1948 to the extent that most historians have given up trying to keep up with them all. But somewhere this narrative is recorded, and does factor into the cruel calculus of context.
Behind Israel stands the United States and the European Union, unapologetically sustaining the former’s policies, including its strangulation of the territory through siege, the boycott of the elected Palestinian government there, and the pre-planned Israel massacre of Operation Cast Lead in winter 2008/2009. The morbid routine of suffering in Gaza has been so normalized that the almost daily deaths at the hands of Israeli occupation forces barely makes news. This says nothing of the hundreds who have died because they were denied access to necessary medical treatment, which hardly any newspaper ever covers. The cheapness of human life in Gaza reverberates through Vik’s death here as well, not only contributing to drawing him to Gaza, but also making him a victim of its logic as well.
Aside from these obvious culprits, there are different sets of accomplices whose contributions derive from their passivity rather than their action.
The United Nations has failed as an instrument of protection for the most minimal of Palestinian rights. Vik’s daily work in Gaza focused upon helping the most defenseless in Palestinian society in their efforts to sustain their livelihoods. This is what he was doing every time he went out with Palestinian fishermen to make their daily catch in waters beyond the Israeli-sanctioned 3-mile limit – essentially a naval blockade. If the United Nations cannot even protect the people of Gaza to catch sardines in their own waters, let alone prevent the repeated military forays Israel has launched into United Nations-administered refugee camps, it’s time for the international organization to shut its doors.
But why stop there? Beyond the international order with its hypocritical evaluations of human life stands a secondary layer of informing context. Here, the miserable state of the Arab world and the corrupt, cynical dictators who have ruled there for generations cannot be left off the hook. Palestine has been abandoned as a collective cause of Arab governments in their struggle to free themselves from colonialism. Instead it has been transformed into a political football of internal politicking, megalomania and repression. There is no chance that what happens in Palestine, and Gaza in particular, could have taken place without a fragmented, autocratic and submissive regional order. The resources, wealth and potential geostrategic power of the Arab world have been diverted to personal and sectoral interests. Let us hope the Arab revolutions can do something to begin to amend this pitiful state.
Suffice it to say that the direct collusion of certain powers, or the intolerable passive acquiescence of others, collectively contributes to Gaza’s daily humiliation and violence. If this reality envelopes all Gazans, how can a foreigner living in Gaza be immune from it? Gaza reeks of a horrifying sense of abandonment and isolation, which whistles throughout Vik’s death like a cold wind.
Having sketched some of the most important exogenous factors contributing to Vik’s death, it is equally imperative to discuss the Palestinian sphere of accountability. Here we venture into more complicated waters, where assessing fault lines gets trickier. At the same time, these questions are of paramount importance for a responsible political movement because, in so far as Palestinians have limited influence in the acts and interests of others, they do have say in their own actions and interactions.
Let us begin then with the Fateh movement – the historical and leading current in the nationalist movement. Starting in 1974, Fateh accepted the concept of the territorial division of Palestine on tactical grounds, based upon a reading of the strategic balance of forces in the region. This single political juncture that would later develop into a dominant political tendency throughout the PLO in years thereafter, introduced a particularly cynical element into Palestinian organizing politics. Rights were no longer rights, but rather became devices for manipulation, magical reasoning, and pawns in a skewed marketplace of backroom deals. The ideological, strategic and tactical confusion that this introduced into the Palestinian movement plays a major role in explaining the fractured nature of the Palestinian movement today. It induced a competitive dynamic of self-described purists within the movement, each of who argued that they were “the true defenders of Palestinian rights.” It was a dynamic whose authenticity could never be realized, while diverting the Palestinian movement’s focus from the need to target one’s enemy’s strategy to the self-defeating task of finger pointing –and occasional gun pointing–among Palestinians. In years past, the most skewed manifestation of this political dynamic was the Abu Nidal faction, which went to the full extent of assassinating certain Palestinian political leaders. Today, that mantle might indeed have been passed onto the Salafis.
Needless to say, this is really a question to do with Fateh’s legacy of undemocratic organizing within the movement, which perpetuates schismatism and contributes to the production of victims—Palestinians as well as those from the international solidarity movement.
Then there is Hamas, whose fingerprints are found in the fact that it has substituted or selectively inserted religious criteria and norms into a national movement and its structural framework. The contributions of religious movements into any social or political struggle do not necessarily entail such tragic consequence. Religious movements can play a progressive or reactionary force in political struggles, including nationalist anti-colonial ones.
But what Hamas is guilty of is an iron grip on the Gaza Strip. Ever since taking control of Gaza in 2007, the movement has refrained from creating an alternative political space to the undemocratic ways perpetuated by Fateh, and which have left the movement hamstrung. In particular, the manner in which Hamas dealt with the first major expression of political Salafism in Rafah in August 2009 resulted in 25 people killed. This is intolerable political practice within a national movement trying to win its freedom and defend itself from the ravages of the Israeli military occupation. The oppression of political dissent to the point of internal armed conflict represents a strategic failure on Hamas`s part and its movement should not be able to advance in the people’s name until it can resolve this question constructively.
This juncture represents a new phase of Palestinian politics, which had always featured competing political visions for a comprehensive solution but had never devolved into the fragmented and short-sighted nature of the political debate today. At present the debate pits a socially conservative right wing against a national-religious movement with politically conservative tendencies led by Hamas against a neo-liberal-nationalist movement led by Fateh.
Here the silence of the Left as a force in the Palestinian political arena is deafening. If the Left represented a genuine political alternative to the dominant Palestinian political players, I am confident that Vik’s death could have been averted. The need for a vibrant political Left representing an alternative political vision and organizational practice for Palestinian politics is becoming almost an existential question for the Palestinian movement. The Left plays a particularly important role in injecting not only respect for democratic norms, but also cultivating international alliances with sympathetic forces around the world. Without such elements as part of our movement, we cannot really advance or net much lasting successes.
A debate now needs to take place regarding the building of a genuine Left, uniting Palestinian struggles on a democratic basis, while integrating the international solidarity component both tactically and strategically.
Finally we arrive at the very local setting, where the carnage of Gaza has produced a Salifist sect that indeed places no value in internationalist humanist principles that unite people. That particular worldview of Salfism is a reactionary deformed creation of modern world conditions in all its ironies, hypocrisies, cruelties and injustices. It comes as no surprise that the conditions of Gaza become a site for these contradictions to take form, to the absurdist extent that it fundamentally eschews the very tenets of the nationalist movement and appears willing to do intentional harm to its international solidarity wings. Moreover, the myopic view whereby a potential internal political schism between Hamas and the Salafists can so greatly harm the movement as a whole must be addressed immediately. All the more reason why Palestinian Left and democratic actors must work diligently to intervene politically to ensure that xenophobic, discriminatory criteria and activities have no place in the broader politics of the movement and its goals. This can only be done through patience and civil engagement isolating and delegitimizing such counter productive elements, concomitantly while advancing on the national front in its struggle for liberation and self-determination.
In any regard, there is much to be said about the successive contributing layers that played a role in Vik’s terrible and tragic death. They are the same dynamics that have brought the movement to its current impasse on the ground, with Vik’s death somehow a particularly powerful symbol of their self-defeating nature. While there is no silver bullet to cut this Gordian knot, the first imperative must be to acknowledge its existence, and then to put into action a plan towards redressing these issues in a committed and timely manner. If this cannot be done, how is it that we expect to win our rights and have others convinced and dedicated to supporting our cause?
In this regard, Vik’s death could be an important milestone in our movement to learn important lessons that can hopefully serve to rebuild and reform our movement from within. Here there may be no better teacher than Vik himself, who traversed the Mediterranean to come to Gaza to live there starting in 2008. The grandson of Italian partisans, Vik teaches us the value of dedication to a genuine revolutionary tradition of internationalism and solidarity, which must act as the guiding light of our movement and its moral compass. It is these principles which are the basis of the Palestinian cause to begin with, to which we must return if we are to have a fighting chance of winning.
Goodbye comrade Vik. I am sorry not to have met you in your life, and equally sorry to those who did, for their loss now knows no bounds. Your humanity was too much for us to bear right now. Though nothing can bring you back, and although no explanation for the injustice that befell you can reverse your fate, your untimely passing will bring our movement forward I am sure, because we have a collective destiny with freedom. Rest comrade, and let us mourn, remember and learn. Your work is now over, ours has just begun.