Without frontier or apology

I was dismayed and irritated when I read press reports of a meeting between the Labour Opposition's foreign affairs spokesman and the Palestinian ambassador early last week. My first impression was that the media had defocused the meeting, thereby distorting, unintentionally or otherwise, what the Labour spokesman had said.

The Times, for instance, put it as follows: "The Labour Party's support for the Palestinian cause should in no way be considered a threat or lack of respect for Israel's security." I do not know what one means, exactly, by 'lack of respect for' another's security.

Presumably the intention was to express a belief that Israel's security should be respected. Nor can I understand why the fact that anyone supports the Palestinian cause could conceivably be interpreted as a lack of respect for (sic) or a threat to Israel's security.

Malta or any of its political parties, powerful though they might feel internally, can hardly be a threat to Israel's security, even if anyone was minded towards some irrational exercise of aggression.

Semantics aside, my dismay and irritation at what at first glance I assumed to be, at best, incorrect reporting, was due to my reading as an old Socialist of the Middle East situation. The Malta Labour Party was one of the first to develop close links with its powerful counterpart in the young state of Israel after it was set up. Dom Mintoff was on personal terms with leading figures in the Israeli Labour Party.

On their part Israel's social democrats were practically the only ones to back and aid the MLP in external fora like the Socialist International when the party was in a stand-off with colonial Britain in the late Fifties and early Sixties, when a supposedly democratic British government suspended Malta's weak Constitution and placed the island back under direct colonial rule.

Delegates from Israel came to Malta, I believe it was in 1961, to demonstrate their backing for Labour's fight for self-determination. They were fired upon for their pains by unknown gunmen in the Zurrieq area.

The Israeli Socialists retained their equanimity. Both when they attended a meeting of the MLP national executive, and also when they addressed a large Labour meeting in Paola, they combined their traditional greeting - Shalom! - with ours - Sahha! - to express the simple, wise message that Peace and Health go together.

Respect for Israel's Socialist fathers and mothers, and backing for the state's right to exist, despite the opposition of its Arab neighbours, did not blunt the MLP's recognition of the injustices that began to be perpetrated against the Palestinian people. And that was when the displacement of the Palestinians was still limited to infancy. The seeds of bitterness had been sewn, but the terrible harvest, ironically modelled on the Israelis' own fight against the British in their determination to gain the right to statehood, had not yet ripened in terribly bloody abundance.

Visiting Arab and Jew, in those days, would speak with regret and pain, but not against each other. Full of resentment for Britain, an Israeli told me, we bought our freedom with our blood.

Carrying restrained anger against the Allies and Italy, a Libyan told me, they turned our country into a theatre of war. The sense of injustice both men carried was symptomatic of their respective sides.

Later, the subjugation of and injustices against the Palestinians worsened. Today's talk of a road map towards a, hopefully, calmer future, has to leave behind the burdens of a bloody recent history from the negotiating table. It cannot jettison the weight of the vicious circle of injustice/repression/terrorism from the mind.

Today only Palestinian and other Arab extremists or indivi-duals and groups terribly scarred by their own losses and perhaps by unconscious guilt over the countervailing deaths they inflict on Israeli civilians deny Israel's right to exist as a state, and to do so within secure boundaries and without threat to them and its people. It is the Palestinians who remain not only stateless, but also suffering extended occupation on their limited territory, deprivation and terrible indignities.

It is they who are not free to select their leaders. It is the Palestinians who have to put up with hypocritical sermons from United States and other western leaders about their shortcomings, and with the heavy-handedness of an Israeli government that has lurched to the far right so beloved of today's American administration and even supported by the so-called new social democrats of the glib Third Way.

Against such a pervasive background, in the context of that continuing reality, whatever gloss is spun upon it by the political cartographers, a meeting with the representative in Malta (or anywhere on earth) of the Palestinian people should, surely, focus on the Palestinian cause without much effort to apologise to the Israelis for doing so. The highlight, at least, should be the Palestinian cause.

My irritation with how the press reported the meeting between the Labour spokesman and the Palestinian ambassador called my journalistic training to get the facts first. I could do so by entering the very well-structured and up-to-date Malta Labour Party Website to read the full party statement on the encounter.

The release had three paragraphs regarding the meeting. The first, I found, was exactly as reproduced in The Times. In fact, the title itself of the statement declared, "The backing for the Palestinian cause should in no way be considered as a threat to the security of Israel". What followed addressed both parties. The Labour spokesman exhorted the "involved parties" (partijiet koncernati, in the Maltese original) "not only to actually demonstrate that they are committed to the obligations of the road map sponsored by the United States, the EU, Russia and the UN, but also to show by their actions a commitment to intensify all those measures that can instil trust which are detailed in the road map itself."

The statement said that while the Labour spokesman augured that a Palestinian state would be created by 2005, "this noble aim could not be reached without an element of rapidity between the parties concerned". He also augured that "the sponsors of the road map would be assiduous in their perseverance and insistence that the clauses in the road map itself are faithfully respected".

Not even the officially authored statement would have fully covered the exchanges that would have taken place. It is also apposite that a spokesman for the alternative government should be diplomatic and take a broad view.

But when the view contains unequal sides, however broad it is, it cannot justify treating them equally. I also find it surprising that there should be so much implied apology to Israel, so much reference to the road map of George W. Bush, now backed by others since no better and more timely alternative has been put forward.

One does not have to be a rabid Socialist or critic of what Israel has come to stand for in the particular context of the Palestinians to recognise that support for the Palestinian cause should be clear and unequivocal. This is one area where balance - or ambiguity, to call it by its proper name - drives the point not home but into emptiness.

I have no doubt that both the Opposition spokesman on foreign affairs and the Malta Labour Party, from its freshest shoot to its highest branch, recognise the unjust plight of the Palestinians and wholeheartedly support their cause. If that is stated without mincing words, without trying to look two ways at the same time, it would be to their and Malta's credit.

Palestinian extremists do undermine the Palestinian cause. While never condoned, they have to be seen for the creation of circumstance that they happen to be. Their actions, always to be deplored for their toll of human life, cannot fudge, as the American administration uses them to fudge, the fact that Israel has not been treating the Palestinians as it ought to have done, in terms of the dictates of humanity as well as of United Nations resolutions still left to gather more dust on the seemingly out-of-reach shelves.

Whatever Malta or any of us in Malta does - from President to columnist, from political party to spokesman - it can only have a symbolic meaning. Symbols, however, are important, depending on how they are presented. Being nice to Arab representatives and sympathising with them, as many of us did on the celebration of Egypt's National Day, impeccably hosted by Ambassador Fatma El Zahra on Thursday, is not enough.

The Palestinian ambassador and other representatives of Arab nations among the guests will have been gratified at the warmth and understanding with which politicians from the three parties and others spoke to them. If I were in their shoes, while welcoming that, I would wish for clearer expressions of understanding of the situation in the Middle East, of the Palestinian cause, of the just role Israel is entitled to have in the region.