Foreign Minister Tonio Borg and former foreign minister President Emeritus Guido de Marco yesterday both concurred there can be no real peace in the Mediterranean region until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved in finality.

Both were speaking yesterday at a two-day United Nations International Meeting on the Question of Palestine hosted by Malta and convened by the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

“While peace in the Middle East does not guarantee peace in the rest of the Mediterranean, there can be no peace in the Mediterranean without peace in the Middle East,” Dr Borg observed when opening the meeting yesterday.

Speaking in the afternoon session, Prof. de Marco, a veteran in Middle Eastern diplomacy, remarked, “We can devise any Euro-Mediterranean process or a Mediterranean Union, and while these initiatives can do many good things, unless this issue is resolved, there can be no peace in the Mediterranean.”

Moreover, the Middle East stalemate is also having a detrimental impact on wider regional relations, many of which are important for Malta, Dr Borg said.

The conference, themed “Advancing the peace process – Challenges facing the parties”, is being held in accordance with the United Nations General Assembly mandate to mobilise international support for the Middle East peace process.

Delivering yesterday’s keynote opening address, Dr Borg observed how initiatives such as the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, the Union for the Mediterranean and the European Neighbourhood Policy “that have attempted to spur intra-regional cooperation are being held hostage as a result of the lack of progress in peace talks”.

Malta, he said, has been an “active and ardent proponent of peace in the Middle East”, supporting the two-state solution. “As an EU member and thus party to the Quartet (European Union, United States, United Nations, Russia) that supports the Middle East Road Map peace proposal, Malta is continuously seeking to advance the quest for peace in the Middle East through its foreign policy agenda,” he added.

Malta, he said, has regularly advocated that the international community needs to extend its diplomatic support to Israel and the Palestinians to facilitate implementation of the Road Map as soon as possible.

He added, “Through its foreign policy Malta has regularly insisted that the EU must spearhead the Middle East peace initiative and adopt an avant-garde policy in the Middle East together with the United States. This is essential if progress in peace talks is to be registered any time soon.

“The European Union and the US within the Quartet must intensify efforts to formulate strategies towards the Middle East that complement reciprocal endeavours to broker a peace settlement in the region,” he urged.

Starting off yesterday’s afternoon session, President Emeritus de Marco gave a moving account of his friendship with former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and of his own efforts to help resolve the conflict during his time as United Nations General Assembly President between 1990 and 1991.

Prof. de Marco yesterday described the late Arafat as a “great leader of the Palestinian people who, through bitter experience gained through failures and mistakes, became a leader for peace in the region”.

Arafat, Prof. de Marco remarked, was a leader who should have been understood better.

Recounting how he had been in regular contact with Arafat up to his final days in November 2004, Prof. de Marco, who was serving as President of Malta at the time, reminisced, “We both knew our phones were being tapped and that everything we said was being registered, we both also knew that there could be no peace in the Mediterranean unless the Palestinian and Middle East issue was solved.

“We can devise any Euro-Mediterranean process or a Mediterranean Union, and while these initiatives can do many good things, unless this issue is resolved there can be no peace in the Mediterranean.”

Prof. de Marco recalled how he had been involved in the peace process since 1990, when he had been instituted as the president of the UN General Assembly.

He harked back to how his decision to visit Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank and Jordan had provoked the ire of the United States, which had seen Palestinians supporting Saddam Hussein against Kuwait in the first Gulf War and which regarded the trip as a “visit to the enemy”.

But, Prof. de Marco argued, both Kuwait and Palestine had an equal right to not be occupied.

Showing compassion for both the “long suffering” Palestinian and Israeli peoples, Prof. de Marco likened the situation to two men loving the same woman.

Referring to the Oslo Accords signed in 1993, a milestone in the conflict, Prof. de Marco, recalled how at the time, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin had all had the “will for peace”.

He added, “We did our best at the time, but it wasn’t enough.”

The point of Oslo, Prof. de Marco pointed out, was to put an end to Israeli settlement activities in Palestine – a goal still not achieved to date.

Prof. de Marco observed how the strategic placement of Israeli settlements bore the sole purpose of ensuring statehood for Palestine would remain a complete non-starter.

But between Oslo and 2000 – Prof. de Marco pointed out while referring to Palestinians as the “worst possible kind of refugee, refugees in their own country” – the number of Israeli settlements in Palestine had not been decreased but rather, had tripled. The situation has worsened more still over the following years.

“Israelis have also suffered so much, less at the hands of the Palestinians than at the hands of we Europeans during WWII,” Prof. de Marco observed, adding that Arafat’s plea in his final days was for Europe to do more to help resolve the conflict.

“My own plea to our fellow EU member states today is to defend and work for peace in the Middle East. Peace: we can achieve it and, I add, we have to achieve it.”

The two-day meeting’s objective is to foster greater support among the international community for a “climate conducive to the advancement of the permanent status negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

Over the meeting, which wraps up this evening, participants – including experts on the question of Palestine, among them, Israeli and Palestinian experts representatives of UN members and observers, UN system entities, parliamentarians, members of the academic community and representatives of civil society organisations – addressed and discussed the impact of the settlement construction on the current political process and the need for the parties to meet Road Map commitments.

They also examined in detail the effects of the construction of the wall in the Occupied West Bank, and the importance of finding a solution to the question of Jerusalem.