Fifty years ago this month on 20 July 1974, Turkey launched an invasion of the island of Cyprus. The invasion drove an estimated 150,000 Greek Cypriots from their homes and cost the lives of at least 1,500, many of them victims of summary executions. Another 1,200 are at this time still unaccounted for.
Turkish troops occupied the north-eastern 36% of Cyprus. Since then Turkish governments have set up the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (recognised only by Turkey) in the occupied territory and filled it with settlers from the Anatolian mainland. President Erdogan has made it clear that the occupation is not up for negotiation.
On 19 July, the UN’s top court, the ICJ, delivered its advisory opinion that Israel’s presence in Judea-Samaria (West Bank), the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem is “illegal”. This ruling comes despite the facts that (1) the Six Day War of June 1967 was a war of self-defence for Israel against an imminent attack from Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The non-sovereign territory of the West Bank had been occupied by Jordan since 1948 and was a legitimate target for Israel in that war; in the absence of any peace treaty in the meantime, its occupation by Israel is as legitimate today as it was on 10 June 1967.
(2) During that war Jordanian forces shelled western Jerusalem from their own occupied zone in the east of the city, providing Israel with a clear casus belli (reason for war); (3) The Gaza Strip, occupied by Egypt until the Six Day War, was conquered and occupied by Israel for 38 years. Contrary to what the ICJ claims, it has not been occupied by Israel since August 2005, when it withdrew its army and removed at enormous expense all 9,000 of the very successful Jewish fruit-growing settlers from the Strip. The results of this well-meaning but short-sighted move are obvious today.
Apart from these historical reasons, there is an immediate and pressing one why Israel cannot possibly do what the ICJ demands of it. Every recent opinion poll in the West Bank has shown that Hamas would win any election held there. Were the IDF to be withdrawn from there as from Gaza, Israel would be completely encircled by terrorist entities; the 30,000+ rockets fired on it from Gaza since 2005 would pale into insignificance compared with regular attacks on Ben Gurion International Airport and the country’s central cities.
It is telling and ironic that the ICJ should issue its (non-binding) “opinion” condemning the legitimate occupation of Judea-Samaria and Jerusalem by Israel on practically the same day as it ignores the completely illegitimate occupation of the sovereign territory of northern Cyprus by Turkey. The mainstream media of course will follow suit. And Cyprus is only one of a half dozen such cases of real territorial occupation around the world that go unreported and uncondemned by the NGOs and activists who expend so much of their energies in obsessing over Israel.
All just another instance of the hypocritical double standards that apply to the Jewish state vis-a-vis other states at the UN. At the very least Israel should immediately demand an advisory opinion from the ICJ on the legality of the Turkish occupation of sovereign Cyprus.
By Dermot Meleady.
