Malta MEP demands freeze on Israel ties: ‘No business as usual with genocide’

‘No business as usual with a country that commits genocide’: Agius Saliba

Valletta – The midday sun bouncing off the Grand Harbour was still warming the sandstone balconies when Alex Agius Saliba strode out of the European Parliament’s local office on South Street and straight into a thicket of microphones. The Labour MEP had just landed from Strasbourg with a message that is already ricocheting across Maltese Facebook groups and parish WhatsApp chats: Malta must freeze its commercial ties with Israel so long as the war in Gaza continues.

“Trade agreements, tourism accords, even that €3 million Israeli cyber-security contract floated last month—everything must be suspended,” Agius Saliba declared, flanked by activists holding Palestinian flags stitched in the same shade of red-and-white as Malta’s own banner. “There can be no business as usual with a country that commits genocide.”

Strong words, but in a country whose national anthem prays to the “Mother” whose “children weep and plead for help,” they land on fertile ground. Malta’s collective memory still carries the 1565 Great Siege, the WWII blitz and the 1989 hijack of an EgyptAir jet on these very bastions. We are a nation that knows what it feels like to be cornered, bombed and ignored—and that empathy is now translating into action.

Within minutes of Agius Saliba’s press conference, the Malta-Palestine Solidarity Network announced a candle-lit vigil in front of the new Parliament building, the one Renzo Piano designed to look like a stone ship setting sail. By 7 p.m. the steps were packed: pensioners who once marched against the 2003 Iraq war, Eritrean refugees who recognise the scent of displacement, and dozens of Maltese teenagers clutching hand-painted signs that read “Għall-ġustizzja, mhux għall-għanqbut” – “For justice, not for profit”.

The cultural resonance is impossible to miss. In a town where every niche houses a plaster saint and every festa ends with a petard-studded sky, the imagery of Gaza’s rubble jars against our own skyline of baroque domes. “We light fireworks for saints; they light flares for survival,” observed 24-year-old ceramist Leanne Borg, who has started glazing traditional Maltese tiles with the keffiyeh pattern. Her Etsy store crashed twice this week under the weight of overseas orders. “People want to wear their conscience,” she says.

But the call to boycott is also testing Malta’s economic tight-rope. Israeli tourists made up 0.8 % of arrivals last year—small numerically, yet vital in February when northern Europeans stay home. More tangibly, a Tel-Aviv start-up was due to pilot a desalination micro-unit in Gozo this summer, a project that promised 50 local jobs. “We’re not heartless,” sighs Gozitan farmer Joe Portelli, “but water can’t wash blood off our hands.”

Government sources told Hot Malta that Foreign Minister Ian Borg has quietly asked Brussels to clarify whether individual member states can legally suspend bilateral agreements without breaching EU common commercial policy. The answer, expected next week, could open the door for Malta to become the first EU country to enact a unilateral boycott—an unprecedented move for a state that usually punches below its weight.

Back in Valletta, the vigil ended with a chorus of “L-Innu Malti” merging into the Palestinian anthem, voices echoing beneath the Triton Fountain. Elderly nuns clapped time while TikTok influencers live-streamed tears. In that swirl of candle smoke and sea salt, the message was clear: Malta’s tradition of neutrality is not the same as indifference. When the Knights welcomed Napoleon’s fleet only to rebel days later, they taught us that pragmatism has limits; when Dom Mintoff defied Nixon over the Sixth Fleet, he showed us that a rock in the middle of the sea can still rock the world.

Agius Saliba left the crowd with a parting shot aimed as much at Labour’s grassroots as at the Nationalist opposition: “If we can stop a Russian trawler for Ukraine, we can stop an Israeli tech fair for Gaza.” By midnight someone had already spray-painted the same sentence in English and Maltese on the corrugated fence of the old Royal Opera House ruins. By dawn, no council worker had dared scrub it off.