Free A Month by the Sea by Dervla Murphy

and any of their family and friends who chanced to be with them when the missile struck. In July 2002 a one-ton bomb dropped on Salah Shehade’s Gaza home killed the target and fourteen of his relatives. Nine months later Ibrahim al-Maqadmeh was eliminated and five months after that Ismail Abu Shanab. His successor, Mohammed Deif, survived a shelling but was permanently maimed. The following year, in March and April, Sheikh Yassin and his second-in-command, Dr Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi , were the targets. Ahmed Yassin was paraplegic, confined by a childhood accident to a wheelchair, and the missile struck early one morning as he was being pushed home from his neighbourhood mosque.
    In January 1996, when the first post-Oslo elections happened, the imprisoned Sheikh Yassin wrote regularly to his followers, advising them to take part in the voting. For some years he had been considering a prolonged truce during which Hamas, converted into a non-violent political party, could work to dismantle Oslo from within. In 2000 he sought a ten- or fifteen-year truce in exchange for a genuinely independent Palestinian state in the OPT (as distinct from the crippled creature born of Oslo). Again, not long before his death he looked ahead to the IDF’s 2005 ‘ withdrawal ’ and suggested power-sharing with Fatah on the Strip. A leader so persistently focused on ‘peace with justice’ could only be a serious embarrassment to governments having a very different agenda. The Bush administration openly approved of the murder of Hamas’ top layer.
    Unlike the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Black September, whose deadly militancy kept the Palestinian cause in the world’s headlines during the 1970s, Hamas has never advocated or defended attacks on third party countries or their nationals within Palestine. No such scruples inhibit Israel from assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists or any other third partiesdeemed undesirable. By now senior Mossad and IDF officers feel free to boast in media interviews that Israel has made assassination ‘internationally acceptable’. Their reasoning seems to be that a crime committed often enough is somehow drained of criminality.
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    When I first met Gaza’s International Solidarity Movement (ISM) team they were still in a state of shock and none mentioned their murdered comrade, Vittorio Arrigoni (‘Vik’), of whom I had heard much over the past few years from mutual friends. Born in 1975 in a small town near Lake Como, he was a freelance journalist, an uncompromising pacifist, a fervent binationalist and defiantly brave – ever ready to take risks in defence of Gaza’s farmers and fishermen. He had spent the 2005 Christmas season in Ben-Gurion airport’s lock-up and been several times beaten and wounded by the IDF though they knew he was permanently on medication for a chronic heart condition. The
Jerusalem Post
repeatedly denounced him as ‘an enemy of all Jews’.
    Every week Vik rang his mother, then mayor of Bulciago, and on 12 April she rejoiced to hear that after an 18-month absence he was planning a holiday. At once rumour blamed his apparent kidnapping on a hitherto unknown Salafist gang calling themselves Tawhid-wa-Jihad (Monotheism and Holy War). They were said to be guaranteeing his release within thirty hours (by 5.00 pm on Friday) if Hamas freed the Salafist Sheikh Abu Walid al-Maqdas and his two sons (detained a month previously). A brief YouTube video showed Vik bruised, bloodied and blindfolded. Early on the Friday morning police searchers found his body hanging in a derelict house in northern Gaza.
    Hamas then allowed the circulation of misleading information, to spare Vik’s family. This fabrication was believed by many – including me, until an ‘insider’ friend reported the facts. Vik, ignoring sound advice, had gone to that house voluntarily andbeen murdered by a Jordanian who, as the police approached, killed himself to avoid arrest. This