It’s strange to think there was a time when you could talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict with a bit of distance. These days, things feel sharper, more polarised. The space for composed reflection has narrowed. The atmosphere is heavy, and the middle ground feels like a memory.
But anyway, let me begin.
Solidarity morphs into identity
We were in Amman, at a formal dinner for an Australian parliamentary delegation. The group was heading to Palestine, via Kuwait, and the Jordanians were hosting us with all the usual ceremony. At one point, a ritual began: guests going around the table, each offering a few words. When the officials had all spoken, my friend Izzat—the Palestinian ambassador to Australia* —leaned over and insisted I say something too.
I hesitated. “I’m just here,” I said, “I’m not anyone official.” The usual things we say to stay in the background. But the microphone found its way to me anyway, and as soon as I began with the words, “We Palestinians…,” something shifted. The room erupted—applause, cheers, whistles. Some people were visibly emotional, even teary. I tried to explain that I was speaking as a Cypriot refugee, not claiming identity, just expressing solidarity. But it was no use. They’d made up their minds. My Palestinian friends, I realised, had always suspected it. I was ‘one of theirs!’
But just when I found myself swept up by Palestine, another side of me—what I sometimes call my Jewish premonition—started whispering. At first, subtly. Then, more clearly. Maybe it’s because some people often mistake me for Jewish—whatever that means. Two moments stand out.
The first was in 2005, when the Israeli President Moshe Katsav visited Melbourne. A big public event was held at the grand Palais Theatre in St Kilda, and I attended with my wife*, who despite her strong support for Palestine, had been invited.
Now, she has her own connection to the Jewish world—through friendships with Holocaust survivors who came to Carlton in the 1960s. But that’s her story.
That evening, she happened to be wearing a gold Orthodox cross—openly, though not intentionally. As we waited in line, a group of elderly Jewish women smiled at me, then turned to her with what I can only describe as speculative glances. I think they thought she had converted a ‘Nice Jewish Boy’.
Reflections from the borderlands
The second moment came not long after in 2019, when we crossed the Jordanian-Israeli border at the Allenby Bridge. My wife nudged me forward—”Go ahead!” she said—knowing full well how these checkpoints worked. I strolled up, not thinking much of it. The Israeli guards smiled, switched to Hebrew, and welcomed me like a long-lost cousin. One even ran out from the booth, pulled up a chair for me and offered a coffee. Meanwhile, the rest of our group was stuck—phones checked, bags searched, passports scrutinised. An Australian carrying a camera was taken aside for extra questioning. Later, I heard all about the delay and stress. “Last time it was seven hours and no chairs,” my wife reassured them.
Cyprus, Palestine, Israel the politics of projection
But my connection to Palestine didn’t begin there. It goes further back—back to 1973, when I attended a protest in support of the Palestinian cause. That year, in Cyprus, an Israeli bomb killed Fatah’s local representative, Hussein Abu al-Khair. Not long after, a Mossad agent was assassinated in what was seen as retaliation. For me, from that point on, Palestine was part of my political coming-of-age. Part of my Cypriot story.
And yet, it’s more complicated than solidarity.
Somewhere, somehow, Cyprus—and I suspect I’m not alone in this—started to live out its political longing through Palestine. It’s a kind of psychological projection: admiration, jealousy, even shame. We see Palestinians resisting, and it reminds us of our own unresolved story, our frozen conflict, our gradual retreat into comfort and status quo. We talk of struggle but stay behind the lines.
It reminds me of Ghassan Kanafani’s ‘Land of Bitter Oranges’, where the father struggles to talk about the past because the present, and especially his children, make it too painful. Palestinian resistance—it harries us, makes us feel something we’ve tried to forget.
In a way, we are trying to borrow their courage to relive our lost idealism. But it’s not fair. The idea of the “Palestinisation” of the Cyprus problem never really held. After 1974, people feared a violent uprising from Greek Cypriot refugees. There were rumours, even in Australia. When a bomb exploded in the Turkish consulate in Melbourne in 1986, the media reported that a group calling itself the “Greek-Bulgarian-Armenian Front” had taken credit. Their grievances included Cyprus. But it was more farce than fact. As usual, the Australian media missed the deeper story.
Meanwhile, just like the Cyprus cause, the Palestinian struggle has been co-opted and diluted. The semi-autonomy of the Palestinian Authority has created its own elite class—people who discuss occupation in soirees, while others live it in checkpoints. The resistance narrative gets smeared, edited, spun, washed—especially for foreign audiences.
Shifting maps, shifting selves
So yes, I began to feel uneasy about my “Palestinian-ness,” especially when I noticed how my geopolitical map was shifting. Once, the Greek world were staunch allies of Palestine. It made sense: shared history, colonialism, invasion, occupation, barricades, negotiations. But with Turkey drifting away from Israel, Greece and Cyprus, have been drawn into a new regional alliance with Israel—based on energy, tourism, security. That old bond with the Palestinians? Forgotten.
Greeks now openly admire Israel’s strategy and power. Some even speak against the Palestinians. Alekos Michaelides from the Cypriot newspaper Phileleftheros wrote a sharp piece about this shift, calling out those who suddenly found “strategic love” for Israel. He posed a hard question: does Israel think, while Palestine merely feel?
But it wasn’t just politics that bothered me. It was something more personal. More inward. An identity question. I come from a blend of cultures: Semitic, Phoenician, Greek, Cypriot, Middle Eastern, Australian. What does that make me? Certainly not a purist. I’ve never believed in cultural or racial purity—it’s not only false, it’s dangerous. The beauty of Greek culture, at its best, has always been its openness, its adaptability, its universality. As Melina Mercouri once said, without that universality, we are “nobody.” Culture lives and breathes in what we do—not in museums, but in life, in exchange, in daily experience.
A last memory. On my most recent trip to Israel/Palestine, I stayed in West Jerusalem. Some Israeli acquaintances were off to Kansas and let me use their place. As we crossed paths—him leaving, me arriving—he asked where I was coming from. I could’ve said Cyprus, or Melbourne… But I said Ramallah.
“Oh, we can’t go there,” he replied.
“Palestinians can’t come here either,” I shot back.
Maybe I should’ve let it slide. Maybe I should’ve “let it go with the river,” as we say. But my Palestinian temperament caught me. The part of me that knows how that feels. I thought of my friend Lubna—the wife of my brotherly-friend habibi Alexander—who can travel the world, but not the 18 miles from Ramallah to Jerusalem. Her own city. Her own loss.
*Dr Michalis Michael spent years at LaTrobe University working on the need for dialogue in inter-communal conflictual settings, where he is now an honorary/adjunct senior researcher and an independent scholar.
Notes:
*Ambassador Izzat Abdulhadi was then Head of the General Delegation of Palestine to Australia.Maria *Vamvakinou, federal Labor Member for Calwell, 2001-2025.
Postscript 1: This piece began as a promise to Izzat. He asked me to write something about my bond with Palestine. It sat in a drawer, half-formed—until recently, when a quiet moment reminded me of my Semitic threads.
Postscript 2: I first noticed this “cohabitation” in 1979, during my first year at the University of Sydney. I was studying Modern Greek in a department that shared a building with Semitic Studies. The two departmental heads, from memory, happened to be a Palestinian and a Jew.
