Cyprus from early Zionist colony to military base for Israel’s war on Gaza
Cypriot and Israeli soldiers disembark from an Israeli Air Force UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter during joint military exercises between the two countries on 2 June 2022
Joseph Massad writes in Middle East Eye on 26 June 2024:
Last week, in a major televised address, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened Cyprus with military action if it continues its military cooperation with Israel, whose army has been training in the island nation for an attack on Lebanon.
Nasrallah did not mince words: “Opening Cypriot airports and bases to the Israeli enemy to target Lebanon would mean that the Cypriot government is part of the war, and the resistance will deal with it as part of the war.”
Indeed, the Cypriots have not only become Israel’s close friend but also a major US ally. Cypriot Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos visited the US on 17 June and coordinated with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on whatever role the Americans have assigned to Cyprus in the ongoing situation in the Middle East. In response to Nasrallah, President Nikos Christolides of Cyprus denied any Cypriot involvement in the ongoing Israeli genocidal war on the Palestinians and its war against Lebanon.
Cyprus also asserted that it has no control over the two British military bases in the country, which cooperate militarily with Israel.
However, Kornelios Korneliou, the Cypriot ambassador to Israel, responded more hostilely to Nasrallah. He reaffirmed the close relationship between Israel and Cyprus, which he gleefully concluded must be displeasing to the Hezbollah leader.A ‘love affair’. The recent love affair between Cyprus and Israel has been in the making for more than three decades. Yet the closeness of that relationship did not become apparent until March 2011, when former President Dimitris Christofias, of the communist “Progressive Party of Working People”, went on an official visit to Israel.
Benjamin Netanyahu reciprocated and, in 2012, became the first Israeli prime minister to embark on an official visit to Cyprus. Much more cooperation was to be gained, including Israel’s help in deepening the relationship between the US and Cyprus. While the principal common interests initially appeared to involve the Mediterranean gas reserves lying between Cyprus and the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, much more cooperation was to be gained, including Israel’s help in deepening the relationship between the US and Cyprus.
Cyprus’s leftist leader was not the only leftist member of the EU to foster close ties with Israel. Similar warmth with Israel became the order of the day ever since the leftist Syriza party came to power in Greece in 2015. In 2021, Cyprus and Greece participated in naval exercises with Israel.
But if Cyprus began to cosy up to Israel only recently in its history, Christian and Jewish Zionists have had a much longer involvement in Cypriot affairs. Upon the British takeover of Cyprus in 1878, the London Jewish Chronicle wrote: “Cyprus was once the seat of a flourishing Jewish colony of Jews…Why may it not be so again?”
The article called on the Jews of Palestine and Greater Syria to emigrate to the island, as Cyprus “offers” them “the same tempting attractions as it did to the Jews of old, nay greater. It is within a day’s sail of the mainland. And for the first time in the world’s history the Jews of Palestine have the opportunity of living under the beneficent institutions of the most enlightened and the most liberal of rules [of Britain], without submitting to the pain of migrating to distant climes, and renouncing their oriental mode of life”.
The British annexed Cyprus in 1914 when the Ottomans joined the Central Powers, and Cyprus became a British crown colony in 1925.
A Zionist colony?
The Zionists have always referred to the ancient Hebrew colonies in Cyprus, whose ancient Hebrew name (which is still used in modern Hebrew) is “Kafrisim”, including Paphos and Salamis, as a precedent for future colonisation. It was the British-Israelites, however, who became the most ardent British Protestant group supporting Jewish colonisation.