Proclaim the genocide and recognise Palestine

The undoubted fact that only the US can stop Israel in its systematic ‘final solution’ genocide of the Palestinian people does not exonerate a European Union from doing nothing.

So many of us have consistently defended both the right of Israel to exist and equally the right of the Palestinians to their own state with both countries living side by side in peace and security. 

Now the world faces an Israel cabinet of ministers within which, in the words former Israel prime minister Ehud Olmert told Newsweek, there is “a group of thugs”. And in that light the issue has shifted: the issue now is how to defend the right for the Palestinians to continue to exist as a people. 

The policy of “leave or be exterminated” to which the Palestinians are being subjected in Gaza, in Christian Taybeh with its now destroyed church of St George and in the West Bank in general, already has an ugly precedent in Nazi Germany of the 1930s and 1940s. 

Defending the right of Israel to exist does not equate to not taking action against the extremists bent on thuggery and murder. 

How can such behaviour not attract the full explicit unequivocal condemnation of the White House? 

Gaza is not a piece of real estate; the Palestinians are human beings equal to all of us. 

A mumb European Union that is even unable to revisit its trade relations with Israel in a clear signal of its condemnation of this abuse by the current Israeli government necessitates the question: 

What do European Union values stand for? For the murder and starvation of children, for the withholding of the supply of baby milk, of the killing of civilians crying for food at the designated food distribution centres transformed into killing zones, for shooting down individuals at the Catholic Holy Family church in Gaza? Or for the targeted assassination of journalists from Shireen Abu Akleh with a shot in her head, or to this latest wiping out of seven journalists in one strike. But then they were all Al Jazeera journalists, and that, of course, made them fair game. All is quickly forgotten. How hypocritical can ‘the West’ be?

The European Union must free itself of the collective historical guilt of its largest member state, Germany, or its former member the UK, once a liberal democracy that treats demonstrations in favour of Palestinians as a subversion to the nation. 

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has taken a first stand on the right side of morality. Much more is needed from today’s Germany. The EU and its leadership need to act decisively, once more irrespectively of what the US does on this issue. We see feeble signs of this now but is it too little too late? 

I hold no sympathy for Hamas and its philosophy, repression of its own people and horrible acts of terrorism and cruel murder not least on October 7. Indeed, as Malta’s foreign minister, I had withheld the opening of Malta’s representative office in Ramallah until after Hamas had left for Gaza. 

The policy of ‘leave or be exterminated’ has an ugly precedent in Nazi Germany- Michael Frendo

But as Benjamin Netanyahu and the “group of thugs” within his cabinet surely do not represent the historically long-suffering Jewish people, or even all the Israeli citizens, so does Hamas not represent the Palestinians or even all the residents of Gaza. 

Gaza was already a God forsaken territory when I visited it with European Parliament and national member state parliamentarians in a delegation led by the Czech presidency of the EU quite some time ago now, in 2009 – visiting Israel, Gaza, Egypt and Jordan. 

The Gaza visit gave me not only a sense of the overpopulation of the area but also sadly many glimpses of poverty and such rudimentary transportation that should have been a memory of the long past. 

Now it is a pile of rubble. 

All that’s left for complete annihilation is to cram the Palestinians in impossible living conditions in a fourth of this already tiny enclave, starve them, force them into exile – just remove this ‘inconvenience’: vacate the land from its inhabitants.

Malta formally recognising (perhaps in practice re-recognising) Palestine with France, Canada and a reawakened UK (the former Mandatory power) and others, at the UN General Assembly in September would be an albeit belated message of significance. 

This genocide must stop. It must be proclaimed, and loudly, by all people of goodwill. The lost respect for international law must be invoked and reignited lest we simply surrender to a doctrine of ‘might is right’. 

As Hanna Nasser, the Christian Palestinian mayor of Bethlehem, once told me, even before the birthplace of Jesus Christ was closed behind high walls, “Israel does not want peace. It wants piece by piece”.

Not all Israel perhaps: prime minister Olmert’s offer of land for peace to Mahmoud Abbas was yet another opportunity not grasped and, therefore, wasted, by the Palestinian leadership. 

For peace to prevail, both nations must stop fearing it.

But the urgency now is to stop the “group of thugs” from prevailing. And to return some sanity to the narrative. Only Uncle Sam can stop all this. That would make America Great Again. 

Michael Frendo is Speaker Emeritus of the Parliament of Malta and a former minister of foreign affairs of Malta.