Gaza

Vittorio Arrigoni was an internationally-renowned human rights activist who served as a volunteer with the pacifist International Solidarity Movement, and worked closely with fishermen and farmers in Gaza from 2005. During the Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip in 2008-9, Arrigoni acted as a human shield while working with the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances. Working as a freelance journalist for the Italian daily, Il Manifesto, Arrigoni’s daily dispatches, written between bombing raids and patchy internet access, ended with the plea, ‘stay human’, which became the motto of the anti-Israeli peace protests in his native Italy. His authoritative and deeply-moving eyewitness account was later published in 2010 in Italian, French, German and English, which the historian Ilan Pappé described as the ‘account of an everyman and a true humanist’. On the 14th of April 2011, Arrigoni was tragically kidnapped and brutally murdered by militants in Gaza, which caused an international outcry and was unanimously condemned by Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority.

Daniela Filippin is an Italian national educated and resident for many years in the UK. Currently living in Rome and working as a linguist and freelance translator in book and magazine publishing in Italy, Britain and the US, she has also worked in the editorial department of a London travel book publisher in the past. She is a mother of two.

Ilan Pappe was born in Haifa in 1954 is currently a Chair in the Department of History, the University of Exeter and a co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. He was the academic head and founder of the Institute for Peace studies in Givat Haviva Israel (1992-2000) and the Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa (2000–2008). Pappe is both a Professional historian and a human rights’ activist who believes that commitment and professionalism do not necessarily clash, but rather reinforce each other. He wrote extensively on the 1948 Nakbah, Modern Middle East, multiculturalism and historiography.