Call the Israeli ambassador. Shelter the flotilla. Say it plainly: Malta will not be complicit

Israel’s calculated attack on the flotilla is a message: even those who try to break the siege nonviolently will be met with force. So what will Malta’s message be?

History may have presented a moment so clear in its moral outlines that silence only means complicity.

The Israeli attack on the Freedom Flotilla, a civilian-led humanitarian mission attempting to deliver aid to a besieged and brutalised Gaza, was not just an assault on activists. It was an assault on the idea that international law still matters, that civilian life still matters.

And here, in the central Mediterranean, Malta is no longer a bystander. A ship under distress, targeted in international waters, is crying out for refuge. The flotilla’s SOS was picked up by Maltese authorities, who are refusing it safe harbour.

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Our silence now would be deafening. A genocide in slow motion is taking place in our neighbourhood. Entire families wiped out. Hospitals, schools, and refugee camps turned into rubble. The dying West has already been judged by history.

Israel’s calculated attack on the flotilla is a message: even those who try to break the siege nonviolently will be met with force. So what will Malta’s message be? What will Malta, the neutral state that claims to be averse to war and violence and an active peace-builder, do?

Neutrality, in this moment, is nothing but passive endorsement of a state that considers itself above the rule of law. If Russia had attacked a humanitarian flotilla bound for Ukraine, our government, together with its friends in the EU and its eager hawks, would rightly be up in arms. There would be statements, sanctions, outrage. Yet when it’s Israel, silence.

That double standard is morally bankrupt and politically unsustainable.

Malta must act urgently, decisively, and vocally. The Israeli ambassador must be summoned, with Malta making it clear that an attack on civilians sailing in international waters is not only unacceptable: it is criminal. The government must demand accountability.

But most importantly, Malta must offer safe harbour to the flotilla. We are a nation that sits at a crossroads of empire and migration. Not that we have never made a secret of our mercenary pragmatism, but surely some moral credibility in the Mediterranean does hinge on what we do when it counts. To turn away a humanitarian mission under siege is to betray our own history, our own values.

This is not just about Gaza. It is about the kind of country we want Malta to be. Do we want to be remembered as a passive outpost that looked away while unarmed civilians were attacked, or as a small nation that dared to stand up when it mattered?

Human rights are political. International law and saving lives is political. It is moral. It is urgent. It is ours to act upon.

Call the ambassador. Shelter the flotilla. Say it plainly: Malta will not be complicit.