In the first days of February 1942, Malta was being bombed, squeezed by shortages, and still haunted by the possibility of a successful invasion. In that siege mindset, the colonial administration decided to be more drastic. It stopped treating “pro-Italian” sentiment as just politics or culture and started treating it as a security problem. In this view, the most logical step would be to remove the ‘threat’ from the island altogether, an escalation from detention to exile. T