[Salon] Israel beyond its borders: the Cyprus Question - ArabDigest.org Guest Post

Israel beyond its borders: the Cyprus Question Summary: Israel is heading to the polls on October 27 and as the campaign heats up a powerful Israeli politician is chasing votes in Cyprus. We thank Nour Halabi for today’s newsletter. Nour is a Lebanese political scientist and journalist whose work focuses on Middle East politics with a particular interest in identity politics and sectarianism. In early August in Rome, Israeli and Lebanese officials sat down for a seventh round of US-mediated talks, with Israel refusing to withdraw from South Lebanon. Its forces continued striking villages in the south mid-negotiation and continued striking Gaza in parallel. None of this is surprising. However, what is quite curious is a battle being fought several hundred kilometres from either front: a billboard campaign near Larnaca airport in Cyprus. The Yashar party led by Gadi Eisenkot a former IDF chief of staff and author of the Dahiya Doctrine (which calls for massive and disproportionate use of force and the deliberate targeting of civilians) launched the campaign in July. Eisenkot has emerged in recent polls as the strongest challenger to Netanyahu. His billboards have become the island’s most unlikely political flashpoint with opposition politicians demanding to know why they were allowed. A promotional billboard campaign for Israeli politician Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar! party was launched in Cyprus to target Israeli citizens on the island ahead of the 27 October legislative elections. But the billboards are just the tip of the iceberg. The country has spent years gradually absorbing a wave of Israeli capital, real estate and diaspora presence that has reshaped its coastal cities. Behind the billboards there lies a story: decades of Israeli capital, real estate and strategic ties outstripping Cyprus’s ability to effectively regulate their impact. Israeli presence in Cyprus well precedes the current election cycle. The exact resident population is difficult to establish, but estimates in recent years have put the Israeli community at around 15,000 people. It is important to note that this should not be reduced to the idea of an Israeli “takeover.” Cyprus has spent years constructing an economic model intended to attract foreign money. Tourism, real estate, favourable tax structures, business relocation and investment-based residency have all formed part of that model. With Tel Aviv just an hour away by plane it is unsurprising that Israeli investment in Cyprus has shown significant growth as has the population of the expat community. The Eisenkot billboards have become a lightning rod for Cypriot fears over Israel’s intentions. The anxiety is exacerbated by two different regulatory problems in attempting to manage the issue. Independent Cypriot MEP Fidias Panayiotou demanded legislation prohibiting third-country election campaigns, while Cyprus’s Interior Ministry said it had no legal framework under its jurisdiction with which to regulate the political content of billboards. The island’s advertising self-regulatory body also reiterated there was no specific framework governing what could appear on commercial billboards. No previous case of a foreign party openly campaigning in Cyprus has been publicly identified. So, regarding foreign political advertising, the gap exposed by the campaign is unusually striking. Cyprus regulates elections conducted in Cyprus. Cyprus never legislated against billboarding on behalf of a foreign politician because it never occurred to anyone that it would need to. And this is less an oversight than a description of how this kind of influence tends to work: it arrives ahead of the law. Second, when it comes to property, the law is more explicit. Non-EU nationals face restrictions regarding acquiring Cypriot real estate. For example, current rules permit a plot of up to 4,000 square metres for an owner-occupied dwelling or up to two specified property units. Cyprus also offers permanent residency to qualifying non-EU investors, including through property investment of at least €300,000. Nonetheless, in February, Cypriot MPs and government officials themselves acknowledged that the legislation governing foreign acquisitions is outdated and riddled with loopholes. A report cited in parliament found that non-EU nationals accounted for more than a quarter of recorded property sales in 2024. Much of the real estate is being purchased by Israelis. Thus, on the one hand, there is a lack of rules, and on the other, there are existing rules that policymakers admit are flawed. Both raise the same broader question: how capable is Cyprus of regulating an external presence once that presence has become economically embedded and valuable? There is also another layer to this relationship that makes the billboards impossible to treat as an isolated event. Cyprus and Israel have spent the past decade deepening their security relationship. Cyprus has acquired Israel’s Barak MX air-defence system as part of a wider effort to replace ageing Russian equipment. Greece, Cyprus and Israel signed a trilateral work plan at the end of 2025 to deepen military cooperation during 2026, building on years of expanding defence ties. Additionally, plans announced in 2025 envisioned an approximately 200-kilometre pipeline carrying Israeli gas from the Karish field directly to Cyprus. In sum, this bilateral relationship has become economically and strategically valuable to Cyprus and to Israel. Thus the billboards have appeared inside a political environment that is already transformed by years of accumulating ties. Months prior to the appearance of the Eisenkot billboards, Oren Anolik, Israel’s ambassador to Cyprus, warned against rhetoric presenting Israeli residents and investment as threatening. He argued that portraying Israeli economic activity as a “takeover” or unchecked influence risks reinforcing historical stereotypes about Jewish economic power. Israeli families and professionals in Cyprus, he argued, can be understood as part of a broader process of economic and social integration. Indeed, it is worth being precise about what is actually being examined here. Criticising a state’s behaviour is not the same as casting suspicion on a nationality. Pointing to concentrations of foreign capital does not imply that every foreign homeowner is a political actor. And analysing defence agreements is not the same as treating Jewish communal life as an arm of the Israeli state. Clearly, an Israeli family moving to Cyprus is not the Israeli state. But recognising this distinction does not mean that the broader political and economic implications of Israeli migration and investment in Cyprus cease to be relevant. For the island, the billboards expose a difficult question: can it regulate Israeli political activity on its soil when its economy has spent years being built around Israeli tourism, capital and residency? Israeli power is generally discussed in the Arab world through its most violent manifestations and those realities remain fundamental. Nothing happening in Cyprus is remotely equivalent to the genocide and occupation in Palestine, the scorched earth war in Lebanon and the IDF occupation of a swathe of land in the south of Syria. However, for the wider region, Cyprus showcases a different and quietly dangerous form of regional reach. Power is still geopolitical even when it doesn’t arrive through arms and military occupation. Consequently, if a politician trying to govern one country can look at the road outside another country’s airport and see that as part of his natural electoral terrain, it is clear that something has already changed in the relationship between capital, mobility, and most importantly, sovereignty.