Yesterday, two Maltese authors who live abroad (important detail which will become relevant later on in the article) wrote a letter condemning the European Parliament President, Roberta Metsola for her silence on the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The letter was passed on to academics at the University of Malta and left-wing activists including Moviment Graffitti, for signing.
We were not forwarded the letter before it was published, and probably this was done intentionally to circulate the letter specifically to a group of people who regularly criticise the President of the European Parliament. The letter included several noteworthy Labour Party supports including Aleks Farrugia (a government executive), Charles Flores and others. We are known to have a supportive bias towards President Metsola.
I agree in principle that the President of the European Parliament should be condemned for refusing to denounce Israel for its genocide in Gaza and its ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank. You can read one of our editorials about the subject here. The Maltese Herald is regularly documenting and reporting about Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. However, unlike the signatories of the letter, we don’t make a comparison between the suffering of different people’s. As we have explained multiple times, the President of the European Parliament is more vocal on Ukraine because it is a European issue directly related to the continent’s security: unlike Palestine, which is regarded at the European level primarily as a foreign policy matter.
The President of the European Parliament is not alone in failing to condemn the genocide in Gaza: the political party which she is a member of, the European People’s Party has taken a very favourable position with regard to Israel, and the German Chancellor, is also disregarding the International Criminal Court after having invited Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu to Germany. Nonetheless, this is not a justification for President Metsola’s silence.
There is, however, a certain irony in the signatories of the letter accusing the President of the European Parliament of sitting on the fence.
I am not going to rush into a battle against the President of the European Parliament for her failure in doing the right about Palestine. Writers like myself who are actively engaged in the local battle against organised crime in politics, are fully aware of the high importance of President Metsola to our work and our very own existence. Roberta Metsola, until this day remains the biggest political voice in Malta that advocates for the free press and government critics. Those who are not engaged in the battle for rule-of-law in Malta, don’t appreciate her importance and find in her an easy target: a powerful political figure that can be criticised to make a virtuous point.
Only an exceptional and handful number of academics at the University of Malta are actively engaged in Malta’s most difficult and riskiest battles. Being engaged in this battle even puts you at risk of being condemned by the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and other top-officials of the University of Malta.
This is why the majority of academics at the University of Malta have chosen to remain cowardly silent on the country’s most difficult issues, because engaging with them carries significant risk. The easiest thing one can do is to live a petit-bourgeois life as a lecturer, fully sponsored by the state, and occasionally sign letters of condemnation that regard foreign affairs to prove a virtuous point. Some academics at the University of Malta have spent their entire careers speaking about no political issue other than Israel and Palestine.
For the Labour Party, Gaza is a good smokescreen for its corruption and association with organised crime. For university academics, it is the issue through which they project performative and virtuous stances, while alienating themselves from their surroundings, which are being decimated by organised crime in politics
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Historian and Publisher
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