The positions being taken on Palestine cannot be excused by talk of “common interests” with Israel. They cannot be treated so lightly, least of all by a people like the Cypriots, who have been tormented, and still are, by “interests” and by arguments that try to justify occupation. It is not as simple as those who voice this logic seem to think. It is much like, if not identical to, the absurdity of the situation in Cyprus. It is the same absurdity that tries to explain away the Turkish invasion and occupation with Makarios’s 13 points, or with isolated criminal acts, or to force through the compromise narrative.
The Palestinian ambassador is not wrong to bristle when Cypriot lawmakers, journalists and ministers “justify” the Israeli occupation. These are deeply extreme views. They set a precedent not only for the Middle East but for the Cyprus problem too. They recall what was said twenty years ago about Turkey and the then “European” Tayyip Erdogan, who was all set to help solve it.
To spell out what we are getting at: those who write off the Palestinian people today are cut from the same cloth as those in Cyprus gripped by the “we were no angels either” obsession. That is no laughing matter. Nor is this written to spin a narrative or to tar with the same brush everyone who acts as an apologist for the Israeli occupying forces. It is written to voice the fear this view stirs, a view that pointedly forgets everything said about Cyprus in the name of “interests” and the responsibilities of all sides.
These days, the arbitrary claims of those who say the Palestinians have no right to a state are not just about Hamas and 7 October. They soak up and echo Israeli propaganda whose sources are… biblical, even though the official position of the Palestinian authorities is a two-state solution and Israel’s is not. The most “honest” of them excuse the massacres committed by the Israeli occupying forces, the settlement building, even ethnic cleansing, as self-defence against the Arab threat.
Others, drowning in their obsessions and in defining themselves by what they oppose, drag in the global left as well, as if it were the left being driven out of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron. That is why we set this climate alongside Cyprus. Because in Cyprus, too, plenty of people argue that we have no right to our freedom, and that it “doesn’t matter” if the Turks keep the land and the troops stay, since the Turkish Cypriots feel threatened.
In both cases, the words of the great poet Mahmoud Darwish hold true: “My homeland is not a suitcase, and I am not a traveller.” They were repeated by Abdallah Attari, the Palestinian ambassador, a man of real mettle and now dean of the diplomatic corps in Cyprus, in an interview with Phileleftheros and Kostas Venizelos. In that interview, as ever, he made a point of speaking about the Cyprus problem too, as one that can only be solved when justice is done.
To conclude: failing to recognise and denounce the Israeli occupation of Palestine is suicide for Cyprus. And let those who grandstand about the Middle East try to change our minds. They sound just like the Anglo-Americans who once turned up to do “conflict resolution” on us, while justifying the Turkish invasion.
