In the end, Vittorio didn’t make it. His lifeless body was found yesterday evening by Hamas security forces, chocked by his kidnappers. Sadly, what all of us were warding off and deemed totally senseless, humanly and politically, came true. This murder is an act against the Palestinian people and an unexpected favour for its sworn enemy, the Israeli state, now advantaged in showing to the world the alleged fanaticism of the Palestinians of Gaza.

The unbearable thing is that today we will be listening to sweet empty words and crocodile tears shed by people which detested Vittorio. What hurts the most is his becoming martyr by Palestinian hand. Anyone who knew Vittorio also knew how much was he “prepared” to death, if one can be prepared to it at all. He lived with it daily, by visiting and helping the victims of the many Israeli raids, hearing close to him the whistling Israeli bullets that the snipers of Tsahal fired for fun against the peasants and the shepherds that Vittorio and other international human shields accompanied in their outings.

Who killed him is an enemy of the Palestinian people. It is being stated for hours by the posts that on the web, on Facebook and the other social networks, testify the love that the Gazan people, along with many other men and women around the world are showing for Vittorio, acknowledging him as a precious comrade and an irreplaceable witness. The most common phrase you could find in these posts is this one: “Vittorio was more Palestinian than who kidnapped him”.

The courage and the humbleness that distinguished him were as far as you can get from the celebratory and sterile holography of the fearless hero. In his tales, in his precious accounts he did never hide the traumatic and terrorizing effects of living besieged in a war-ridden land. He reported with great simplicity the fears and the tensions of being a mobile target for Israeli snipers, or a statistical victim of a bomb fallen from the sky. His very physical frame, the tone of his voice somewhat were a living and concrete account of the horrors carried out by Israel against the Palestinian people. He did confess without false modesty the fear of the body which trembles under the bombing and the condition of being chronically affected by disturbs of post-traumatic stress, the “normal” one for the Palestinians of the Strip. A most human account, that of Vittorio. “Let’s stay human” was in fact the seal which marked the end of each one of his posts.

Beside the greatness of the man, we would like to remember here his political greatness as well. Vittorio defined and identified himself in the practice of non-violent resistance. But this choice of conduct and discipline by him was as far as you can get from the comfortable role of many types – which adopted that vest to endorse, in the end, two wars out of three. He was light-years away from the moralizing pacifism, that of self-interested and inconclusive solidarity that around here goes so well along compliance. First and foremost, Vittorio was uncompliant with a world that allows tragedies as the ones endured by the Palestinian people happen. His own was not a moral choice, pretending to lecture or preach to those who practiced other forms of struggle and opposition to the Israeli crime. Not a single time from his mouth came a word of condemnation or an insufferable “equidistance”. Vittorio always knew who were the victims and who the murderers. His choice, even imbued with a thick code of ethics, was above all the political option which he deemed the better and more appropriate to carry on his daily work. No trace of presumption or moral self-importance was to be found in his action.

Today the Palestinian people and all of us lose a travel mate, a collaborator, a precious friend. His death is as heavy as a mountain, the first to know it are the men and the women of the Gaza Strip that in the upcoming hours will pay him a tribute as few others. Even if politically the opposite should be said, everyone of us know just too well that his death leaves an irreplaceable emptiness right now.

Goodbye Vittorio, may the earth be soft under you

The staff of Infoaut.org