Opinions differ on whether the last two months of fighting in Gaza have breathed unexpected life into the long-awaited two-state solution, or have been simply the last nails in its coffin. Either way, it’s interesting to look at another conflict in the same region where the same issue arises, with some important differences.
Politico has an interview with Ersin Tatar, the president of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, in which he dismisses the long history of efforts to reunify the island – to find a “one-state solution”, if you like. Instead, he says, the international community should accept the existence of two states. He’s happy with the idea of reconciliation with the ethnically-Greek south, but on the basis of mutual recognition.
The occasion for the interview was last week’s visit to Greece by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. After a near-death experience in last May’s presidential election Erdoğan has been mending fences, and appeared to get on well with Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The Turkish Cypriots always have a nagging fear that their patron will do a deal with the Greeks over their heads.
There are some clear similarities with Israel/Palestine. In each case two ethno-religious groups lay claim to the same territory, or at least to as much of it as they can get hold of. Despite some deep historical animosities, the groups are much more similar than either wants to admit. And although the origins of both disputes go back centuries, their recent acute phases date from about the same time: the Six-Day War of 1967 for Israel/Palestine, and the Turkish invasion of 1974 for Cyprus.
An obvious difference is that the Turkish Cypriots actually have the state that the Palestinians are still fighting for. Although the north, paradoxically, has less diplomatic recognition than Palestine, it has control of its own territory (albeit with the assistance of Turkish troops). What it’s seeking is not the creation of a state but the recognition of one.
But the more fundamental difference is demographic. In Israel/Palestine, the two groups have a rough numerical parity over the whole of the territory. A one-state solution, in which the two groups have equal rights, would make it difficult for either to exert full control – which is why neither of them is keen on the idea.
In Cyprus, however, the Greeks form a large majority, something of the order of three to one. They have no fear of ever being put in a minority if the island were reunified, and they would like that to happen under simple majority rule. The Turks, on the other hand, have always demanded elaborate constitutional safeguards if they were to be part of the same country, with guarantees against the Greek demand for union (or enosis) with Greece.
So when Britain gave the island independence in 1960 it was with a constitution providing for ethnic quotas and power sharing. That broke down completely within four years, leading to intercommunal violence and de facto partition, which became entrenched following the invasion of 1974 and Northern Cyprus’s declaration of independence in 1983. No country other than Turkey has recognised it; the international community regards the Greek Cypriot government as the legal government of the whole island.*
Despite the partition, both sides have paid lip service to the goal of reunification. Extended negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations produced in 2004 a plan to that effect, which was put to a referendum in each state; the Turkish Cypriots voted almost two to one in favor, but the Greek Cypriots were almost three to one against, believing (not unreasonably) that it had conceded too much to Turkish interests.
A further round of talks broke down in 2017, and in 2020 the Turkish Cypriot president who had pursued them, Mustafa Akıncı, was defeated for re-election by Tatar, his more nationalist-minded prime minister. Although Tatar has not closed the door unequivocally on the one-state solution, his remarks make it clear that it is not his preferred option and that getting the Turks back on board for reunification will be an uphill task.
The Greek Cypriots, on the other hand, who this year also elected a more nationalist president, seem to have no intention of offering terms that the Turks are likely to accept. Although they constitute the large majority, they do not enjoy the sort of military superiority that Israel does, and world opinion would be unlikely to let them incorporate the Turks by force even if they had the capacity.
Because Cyprus did previously exist as a single independent state – whereas Israel/Palestine did not – the international community has an aversion to partition in one but not the other. Unfortunately, the place that it is resistant to partitioning seems destined to stay partitioned for the foreseeable future, whereas the land it would like to partition poses obstacles that currently seem insurmountable.
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* Turkey also encouraged its own citizens to settle in the north, replacing displaced Greek Cypriots: those settlements are illegal under international law for exactly the same reason as the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
The World is Not Enough 
Every death over the past two months, Palestinian and Israeli (and also Thai, Nepalese and many others), is the direct result of Hamas’s decision to launch a deadly terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October, and to kill more than 800 civilians (mostly Israelis), and also to rape and torture hundreds of them before killing them. Hamas committed these atrocities knowing full well what Israel’s response would be. Hamas knew that thousands of people in Gaza would pay with their lives for its crimes. This was a planned and calculated strategy, designed to generate more “martyrs” for Hamas’s propaganda machine, and to persuade the UN, world governments, NGOs and media that “Israel is the real terrorist.”
(Not that they needed much persuasion, sadly.)
Every time Israel finds itself in a war with its various enemies, we hear talk of “proportionality.” Israel, we are told, must respond in a proportionate way to terrorist attacks made on its population. This term is never clearly defined, but it is always clear to Israel’s critics that its responses to being attacked are “disproportionate.” Apart from showing complete moral blindness, this criticism also shows great historical ignorance. Wars are not and never have been governed by any law of proportionality. Modern wars, in particular, have been marked by massive disproportionality. The German Luftwaffe’s blitz against Britain in 1940-41 killed 40,000 people – the allied bombing of Germany killed 600,000, mostly civilians. The Japanese killed 2,400 Americans at Pearl Harbor – the US air war against Japan killed well over a million, mostly civilians.
Following the 7 October attacks, Israel set itself the objective of destroying the ability of Hamas to launch any further such attacks. That requires the physical destruction of Hamas’s military infrastructure, and also the demolition of its command structure and its ability to organise in Gaza. Because Hamas chooses, as a deliberate strategy, to embed both its military infrastructure and its command structure in the civilian population – in schools, hospitals, mosques and apartment blocks – achieving this objective will inevitably cause a large number of civilian deaths. Those deaths are entirely the responsibility of Hamas.
That does not mean that Israel has a licence to kill as many people as it likes in Gaza. While Israel is not bound by a law of proportionality, it is bound by the ethical principle of not causing unnecessary deaths in the course of waging war. That principle applies even when fighting to achieve a legitimate military objective, even when military action has been forced on it by the actions of its enemies, and even when (as in this case) its enemies are bound by no ethical restrictions at all. Israel has acted in accordance with that ethical principle.
All the deaths suffered both by Hamas itself and by the population of Gaza under Hamas’s control are the consequence of actions taken by Hamas, in full knowledge of the likely consequences. Hamas acted with complete disregard for the inevitable deaths of many people in Gaza as a result of its actions.
The deaths sustained by the IDF, on the other hand, are a voluntary sacrifice by Israel, made in order to reduce the number of civilian deaths in Gaza. Israel did not have to launch a ground invasion into Gaza. There were voices in the Israeli government arguing against doing so. Israel could achieve its objectives in Gaza, they said, without risking the lives of its soldiers, by confining itself to an air campaign.
Israel has one of the world’s most powerful air forces. Gaza is a densely populated urban area with no air defences and no bomb shelters. Israel could have bombed the whole of Gaza to rubble, destroying every building in the territory, within a week or two, had it chosen. That would have achieved Israel’s military objectives. But it would also have killed hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps a million or more. Israel judged, rightly, that this would not have been ethically justifiable. (It would also have placed a severe strain on its alliance with the United States.)
Instead, Israel chose to sacrifice the lives of its precious soldiers – young men and women in their teens and 20s – with a ground campaign: a campaign in difficult terrain against a ruthless, fanatical and well-armed enemy. Israel did this knowing it would probably lose several hundred soldiers before the campaign was over.
Every day I see accusations that Israel is engaged in “indiscriminate bombing,” “carpet bombing,” “targetting civilians” and “collective punishment” in Gaza. These allegations mostly emanate from the Hamas-Iran-Qatar propaganda machine (principally al-Jazeera), amplified by anti-Israel UN agencies and NGOs, the extreme left and the extreme right, and lazy and credulous media organisations all over the world. Israel is also routinely accused of deliberately bombing hospitals – a claim which contradicts the accusation of indiscriminate bombing, since bombing a hospital is of course highly discriminate.
Apart from being demonstrably factually false, these accusations fail elementary tests of logic. First, Israel has no motive for indiscriminate bombing in Gaza. Since Israel has decided to achieve its objectives with a ground offensive, indiscriminate bombing would bring no military advantage, while bringing even more political odium on Israel. Second, even if we believe Hamas’s claim that 17,700 people have been killed in Gaza (which I do not), that figure actually proves that Israel is not engaged in “carpet bombing,” because if it was, the figure would be ten times as large. Recall that the 10 March 1945 USAAF air attack on Tokyo killed 100,000 people in one night. That is what real carpet-bombing does.
We are now seeing encouraging signs that Israel is close to achieving its objectives. Hamas’s command structure appears to be breaking down, and increasing number of Hamas terrorists are surrendering to the hated Zionists rather than joyfully offering themselves up as martyrs as Hamas ideology requires. There is a real prospect that the war will end within the next month or so, with the defeat of Hamas, the liberation of the hostages (those Hamas has not murdered) and the end of Hamas’s fascist rule over the people of Gaza.
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Do read Arieh Avneri’s “The Claim of Dispossession: Jewish Land-Settlement and the Arabs 1878-1948”. In an exhaustively researched study, Avneri shows that the narrative of “Palestinian dispossession” is false. Zionist land purchases were of two types.
1. Unproductive land, mainly in the coastal strip between Gaza and Akko, which was mostly swamp or sand dunes. Jewish settlements in these areas did not displace anyone.
2. Productive land, mostly in Galilee, mostly bought from absentee landowners such as the al-Khalidis and other leading Arab families, as well as Ottoman Turks. Here there were sometimes Arab tenants. These were (legally) evicted as Jewish labour was brought in. They were compensated either with land elsewhere or with cash – usually the equivalent of 10 to 20 years’ income as tenant farmers. In most cases the tenants were happy to take the cash compensation and escape from the poverty of peasant life. In fact some peasants offered land for sale which they didn’t actually own, knowing that the Zionists would pay anyway.
This all shows that the popular Arab/leftist narrative about Zionist settlers driving out the Palestinians and seizing their land has little basis in fact. Neither the Ottomans before 1918 nor the British after 1918 would have allowed this.
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1. There is no world government and hence no world law binding on all states. States are bound by treaties and conventions they have ratified, not by “international humanitarian law” as determined by the UN or anyone else. (You will recall Australia went through this at great length over refugee issues.)
2. Israel has ratified the Geneva Conventions and is bound by their terms. It is not bound, as Ed Husic seems to assume, by “international humanitarian law” as defined by him or anyone else.
3. The Geneva Conventions prohibit “murder, cruel treatment, torture, outrages against personal dignity, and degrading or humiliating treatment for civilians and for combatants who have been captured or wounded.” So far as I know, Israel has not been credibly accused of any of these things. (Hamas of course is guilty of all of them.)
I don’t believe that any of Israel’s operations in Gaza contravene the Geneva Conventions. I need not have to tell you that the Geneva Conventions are about states so the Turkish settlers in Northern Cyprus are illegal transferees but the West Bank and Gaza have not been part of any legal state since the fall of the Ottomans in 1918 and as such the convention on population transfer does not have any legal force, whatever the terrorist PLO/Fatah and its useful idiots in the Islamic world and the west might propagandarise.
4. Israel has determined that to defend itself against a repetition of the 7 October attack (which Hamas continues to proclaim as its intention), it must remove Hamas from military and political control of Gaza. Because Hamas his militarised the whole of Gaza, this must entail civilian casualties. That is entirely Hamas’s responsibility.
5. Israel is not focusing its military operations on Gaza’s hospitals. it is focusing its operations on destroying Hamas. But because Hamas has militarised Gaza hospitals, Israel must occupy them and remove Hamas from them.
6. I don’t accept that Israel is bound by any law of proportionality. Israel is entitled to do what is necessary to achieve the legitimate objective of destroying Hamas, no more and no less. That is what it is doing.
7. You should understand that, relative to its military capacity, Israel is acting with remarkable restraint. It is sacrificing the lives of its soldiers in a ground operation that it need not have undertaken, when it is quite capable of killing every living thing in Gaza from the air.
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On Tuesday the UN General Assembly passed a resolution on the situation in Gaza. The resolution has three substantive clauses:
The General Assembly
1. Demands an immediate humanitarian ceasefire;
2. Reiterates its demand that all parties comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law, notably with regard to the protection of civilians;
3. Demands the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, as well as ensuring humanitarian access;
Australia voted for this resolution.
The Albanese government has been condemned for this vote. Shadow Foreign Minister Simon Birmingham said: “If Israel just adopts the ceasefire that Anthony Albanese has now voted for, it will just give Hamas opportunity to rearm, regroup and repeat the terrorist atrocities all over again.”
This is a serious misunderstanding (and probably a deliberate misrepresentation) of both the resolution and of Australia’s decision to vote for it. The resolution does not call for a permanent ceasefire or an end to Israel’s military operations in Gaza. It calls for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire.”
Australia’s UN Ambassador James Larsen said: “Australia welcomed the humanitarian pause agreed by the parties in November and brokered by the United States, Egypt and Qatar. This resolution, calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire, is the world urging these pauses be resumed, so urgent humanitarian aid can flow. Australia is part of that call and we support this resolution.”
Foreign Minister Penny Wong said: “Australia voted with 152 countries on a UN resolution on the protection of civilians and upholding legal and humanitarian obligations. It calls for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire so urgent humanitarian aid can flow and hostages be released.”
So Australia’s position is that there should immediately be another “humanitarian pause”, similar to the one in November, so that aid can safely be sent to the civilian population of Gaza.
That is not the same thing as demanding a permanent ceasefire. The November pause did not hamper Israel’s ability to pursue its objective of destroying Hamas, and nor would another such pause do so.
While Israel is obviously disappointed by Australia’s decision, I don’t accept that supporting this resolution amounts to a betrayal of Israel. In her statement on the UN resolution Penny Wong said: “Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and to harming the Jewish people. Hamas has no place in the future governance of Gaza.”
Since the only people who can ensure that Hamas has no place in the future governance of Gaza are the Israelis, that amounts to a statement in support of Israel’s continuing operations against Hamas, after a suitable “humanitarian pause”. Penny Wong is a very experienced politician and chooses her words very carefully, so I’ve no doubt that phrasing was deliberate.
The UN resolution also demands “the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.” I’m not holding my breath waiting for Hamas to comply with that demand, nor for all the NGOs who have been denouncing Israel to start insisting that Hamas comply with it.
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Who was it who said that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity? Abbas and Shtayyeh definitely missed the opportunity to disavow and discredit Hamas and “armed resistance” at the same time, which Hamas’s aggression presented to them.
Even before the full scale of Hamas’s attack had become apparent, it was completely obvious that such an unprecedented attack would result in an equally unprecedented and devastating response by Israel of a magnitude not seen in decades. Hamas had stung the sleeping dragon so painfully that it awoke with a furious roar, spouting a fiery breath of destruction around him.
Pointing out the folly of what Hamas has done may not have been very popular on 7 October itself, when Palestinians were busy celebrating that “Gaza just broke out of prison”, but could have made Abbas seem reasonable, both to his own people and Israel, in the weeks and months to come, when it became clear what the actual result of Hamas attack was going to be.
Because even if brainwashed by decades of “resistance” propaganda, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to realize that starting a gunfight when you only have a knife is not the wisest of ideas.
(Should that be rephrased as bringing an RPG to an air campaign?)
By condemning Hamas’s attack, he could also have set up Hamas as the perfect scape goat for any lack of progress, at the same time recalibrate the unrealistic expectations he and his predecessor had created over the years, and paint his opponents as a threat not only to himself, but to the survival of his people.
Gaza razed to the ground? Hamas’s fault, because they provoked the dragon.
Economic crisis in the West Bank? Hamas’s fault, because they provoked the dragon.
Settler violence? Hamas’s fault, because they provoked the dragon.
“Right of return” gone forever? Hamas’s fault, because they provoked the dragon.
Palestinian statehood set back for decades? Hamas’s fault, because they provoked the dragon.
Inevitable territorial concessions during future negations with Israel? Hamas’s fault, because they provoked the dragon.
Better keep your distance from Hamas and their “resistance” and follow the cautious guidance of himself instead, if you don’t want things to get even worse.
Remember, it’s not defeatism, when you’ve actually been defeated.
He could have offered his condolences to the victims of Hamas terror and to Israel. He could have been honest about that there were zero chances to convince Israel to not reconquer Gaza and then demonstrably worked towards alleviating the outcome of the process, cooperating with Israel and Egypt for evacuation plans, raise aid from international donors, showing himself as the one who actually can achieve something, while Hamas wastes Palestinian lives and livelihoods and prospects on unrealistic aspirations.
He could have upped the pressure on Hamas by calling on them to surrender, to not waste any more Palestinian lives, and then blame Hamas for the following losses for failing to follow his advice.
Whether it would be enough to overcome the well-deserved unpopularity he has gained among his people over the last two decades, is impossible to say, but at the very least, it could have demonstrated the importance of having a more reasonable alternative than Hamas to those of his people whose life aspiration isn’t to die as a “martyr” for a hopeless cause.
But alas, instead he chose to accuse Isreal of “aggression”, because its people weren’t willing to let themselves get slaughtered without a fight, and put Palestinian unity against their external enemy Israel over common sense. “And the rest is history”, as future historians will likely say.
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I have been resident in Northern Cyprus since 2004. I do not believe for one second that the island will ever find a solution. The solution is to stay as it is at the moment.
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KCV, the Megali Idea and Enosis were and are only ever a Hellenic analogue of Lebensraum, IMO
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