LIMASSOL – Until 12,000 years ago, dwarf elephants and hippopotami lived in Cyprus, their small size the result of evolutionary developments that spanned the ice age, beginning some 2.6 million years ago, on the island. The Cyprus elephant, for example, is thought to have weighed about 200 kilograms (about 440 pounds), a drastic 98 percent less than its early ancestors, which weighed in at over 10 tons. Reduction in body size, a well-known phenomenon among animals on many islands around the world, is apparently due to predation, a dearth of food and other factors.
But Israelis who move to the island nation seem to be subject to opposite forces: Their transition to life here is usually marked by expansion – not of the body but of their material assets. In some cases also of their families.
“The birthrate here in Cyprus is 1.3 children per woman,” says Linor Gross Cohen, who moved here six years from Kfar Hanagid, a moshav south of Tel Aviv, together with her husband and two children – and has since given birth to two more children. The average Israeli rate is the reverse: 3.1. “When I enter a restaurant with the children, the Cypriots are stunned,” she chuckles. “I’ve been asked more than once whether they’re all from the same husband.”
Cyprus is an island of unlimited possibilities. Did you want a live-in domestic worker who will wash your windows and fold your laundry and more for about 500 euros ($590) a month? She’s yours. A Maserati for the price of a Volkswagen? Coming right up. A tax policy based on subtraction instead of addition? Count on it. The economic conditions on this island, along with the similarity to their place of birth in terms of weather and the general mentality, are attracting more and more Israelis. According to a good number of them, including newcomers who say they have no interest in inflating the scale of the phenomenon, the past few years have seen a large wave of new arrivals from the Jewish state.
“A lot of people have been coming over lately,” says Shimon (the names of interviewees identified without surnames have been changed at their request), one of the veteran Israelis on the island, who is active in the community in the southern coastal city of Larnaca. Gross Cohen, who manages an expanding WhatsApp group of Israelis, estimates that the number of her compatriots in Cyprus has doubled since 2018 and today stands at between 4,000 and 5,000.
A crucial element for these people is the proximity to Israel. “Do you know what the distance between us is right now?” Ophir Rav Hon, a veterinarian, asked during our first conversation – with me in Hadera, and he in his village near Paphos. “Only 340 kilometers, and I’m even on the far side of the island.”
The life of the Israeli-born islanders became even easier when Ryanair, a low-cost airline, started flying to Paphos in 2017. Many also began to move to that area, in the southwestern part of the island, beefing up a local community that emerged in parallel to those in the more established locales of Larnaca, Limassol and Nicosia, the capital.
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The flight time from Ben-Gurion International Airport to Cyprus is 40 minutes. Flights on the new Haifa-Larnaca route (which have been suspended for now, but will undoubtedly be renewed when the pandemic tourism crisis ends) took a few minutes less and mainly made the trip easier for relatives and friends coming over from northern Israel. In door-to-door terms, a trip to Cyprus isn’t much different from one from Metropolitan Tel Aviv to the Galilee or to the Arava desert.
“Friends visited us last week,” Shahar Levy, who is also living in the Paphos area, relates. “They left home at 11 A.M., and at 4 P.M. they were at my place with a beer in hand. If it weren’t for the coronavirus, it would take an hour less.”
Israelis moving to Cyprus come in all shapes and sizes: Some are wealthy, others less so; there are self-employed professionals and also salaried types who are relocating, regular law-abiding folks along with those whose livelihoods are in a grayer zone, Jews and Arabs. Many seem to be coping with the local passion for roasting pork properly on the grill and trying their best to distinguish between 50 shades of halloumi. However, they admit that they have a hard time adapting to the backwardness in planning and infrastructure on the island, as well as to its mediocre health system.
The Gross Cohens – Linor and her daughter Neta. Many members of her firm’s all-women staff provide general advice to Israelis wanting to relocate to Cyprus.
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“They’re part of the [European] Union, but it’s not Europe,” an Israeli named Michal tells us, somewhat resentfully. She explains that she lived in Cyprus for just a few years, but that was more than enough for her. “It’s definitely the Middle East.”
Cypriot expertise in taking leisurely pleasure in life, as per the Greek expression “siga siga” (roughly, “slowly, slowly”), can drive Israelis crazy. But those who stay on here do so because they have found the charm in it. They delight in the tranquility – a sharp contrast to the chronic stress that characterizes their former existence. If there’s one phrase that recurs in different versions in conversations with local Israelis, it is: “It’s like Israel was 20/30/40/50 years ago” – the number changing according to the speaker’s age and the part of Cyprus they’re referring to.
“The quiet here is deafening,” says Momi, an avid sailor of 73 who dropped anchor in the Larnaca region a few years ago. “We lost that in our beautiful country long ago. You walk on the street here and you find quiet. There’s quiet even on a beach with 4,000 people around, because no one plays music or cracks nuts,” or, I would add, plays matkot – beach paddleball. There are also hardly any jellyfish, and there’s a lot less plastic refuse in the water. But the icing on the cake for many Israelis is the traffic situation: In Cyprus the private vehicle is still king and the roadways are open. “There are no parking problems here,” they say, almost incidentally, building up to the climax: “And there are no traffic jams here.”
Help and breathing space
When Adi and Niv Michover were planning their move in June to Cyprus, they didn’t think they would want a live-in housekeeper. Psychotherapists by profession, Petah Tikva residents by previous address, today they run a business managing and establishing stores on Amazon. A villa and a pool, fine, but full-time domestic help? “At first the idea shocked us,” Niv admits, explaining that they were concerned about maintaining their privacy. But life is chock-full of surprises. The couple, who have a son named Itai, 6 and a half, both fix a blue-eyed gaze on me. We’re sitting on the large patio of their spacious home in a leafy suburb of Limassol, west of Larnaca on the southern coast. The landscape seems very Israeli; a light breeze wafts through the Mediterranean brush.
“It’s worth everything,” Adi sums up. “She [the domestic helper] also babysits our son and the dog, too – she cleans, she cooks… And it costs only twice as much as our cleaning person in Israel, who came once every two weeks.” Unlike the situation with many other Israeli families here, the young Nepalese woman, Russo, joins them for all their meals and has become a genuine part of the family.
Four years ago, Linor Gross Cohen opened ICY, a firm that employs only women and specializes in entrepreneurial projects, building and selling real estate, as well as in providing general helpful advice to Israelis who want to relocate to Cyprus. A large number of her 12-member staff are engaged in that last task around the clock, so she knows what’s going on. In terms of the standards of the local Israeli community, and particularly in relatively expensive Limassol, she says, it’s modest to have just one female Nepalese domestic helper. “All the Israelis have a domestic worker at home,” Gross Cohen asserts, “and the well-off have two and three, and a personal chauffeur.” She is currently looking for another person who will join the domestic helper she currently employs in her own home.
“She’s amazing, she’s more important to me than my husband,” Gross Cohen says. “I don’t want to work her hard. I want things to be good for her. It’s not fair to her.”
What’s her name?
Gross Cohen: “Nerli.”
Like “ner li dakik” – the little candle in the Hanukkah song?
“Exactly. We play her the song every Hanukkah.”
Where does she live?
“In the basement.”
The Turgemans – Yarden (36) with her children Niv (11) and Ron (9), and their domestic helper Jennifer.
Emil Salman
Gross Cohen (formerly a senior executive in the Phoenix insurance company in Israel) and her business partner, attorney Yarden Turgeman, meet us in their well-appointed office on the Limassol boardwalk. The city that Israelis call “the Tel Aviv of Cyprus” does actually evoke Tel Aviv – maybe more Bat Yam, with hints of rural India. They serve us mineral water from Fiji and begin to rave about their move here. Turgeman, who arrived three years ago, explains how much live-in domestic help contributes to the quality of life.
“In Israel, even if I arrived at 4:30 P.M. to collect [my child] from day care, we would then go to afternoon activities, and by the time we got home it would be 6:30-7:00. How much time is left to spend with the child? You make him an omelet with toast, do a shower and you’re done. He’s in bed. There’s no breathing space. Here, there is. That’s the most essential difference. Today when I get home, even if it’s 6 o’clock, I’m with the children for two and a half hours. You have supper with them – and you don’t need to clear the table and do the dishes and take care of everything. It sounds like being spoiled, but it means you benefit from a family life that is a lot better and healthier.”
The two women take us for a spin in Turgeman’s fancy four-wheel-drive Mercedes. I don’t think there’s a centimeter of this car that isn’t coated in black leather – well, maybe the air-conditioning vents. We stop near a few low buildings in an area they like to call “Neve Tzedek” (after the upscale Tel Aviv neighborhood). They intend to build extravagant residential housing next to and on top of the existing buildings, to be known as “Mini-Israel.” The first building will be called Rothschild and the others Florentin, Balfour, Allenby and maybe also Jerusalem.
“We are reinforcing the foundations here and adding two-and-a-half floors,” Turgeman explains. “For us that’s basic, but the locals are flabbergasted. We in Israel are 30 years ahead of them. We came from the future.”
From there we went to Turgeman’s home, a well-tended villa in a gated community with a guard, located on a man-made stretch of land in the Limassol marina. Because the house is very close to the city center – unlike Gross Cohen’s home, which is in the suburbs – a certain downscaling was required; it’s built more vertically than horizontally. There’s a pool, of course – this is not some hut on the Sinai coast in Nueiba – but the garden isn’t very big and the living room is also quite modest. Turgeman notes that the house covers 280 square meters (3,014 square feet), on a plot of half a dunam (one-eighth of an acre). “In a way it’s chutzpah to say that I have ‘compromised'” on a relatively modest home, she says.
The homes in this area date from the period when wealthy citizens of the world were allowed to acquire a European Union-Cypriot passport with an investment of 2.5 million euros in local real estate. The result was a rash of mansions across the island, and the more luxurious the better, because you had to reach that lofty amount somehow. A corruption scandal that came to light less than a year ago led to the elimination of that avenue, or at least its suspension, depending on whom you ask. All in all, in fact, the attitude toward law and order in Cyrus makes Israelis feel at home. For example, the villas in the marina quarter are beachfront residences: You walk out of the front yard and step onto your own private beach, in the presence of a guard nearby who makes sure it will stay private. I had assumed that in Cyprus, as in Israel, the beach belongs to everyone and that it is forbidden to block access to it.
“I didn’t know you could do that,” I said to Gross Cohen.
“You can’t,” she replied, “But it’s allowed. This is Cyprus.”
The Levys – Shahar (46) and Avigail (44). Their daughters, like most of the Israeli children in Cyprus, attend a private British school.
Emil Salman
Toward the end of last year, when Shahar and Avigail Levy, who are in their mid-40s, decided to move to Cyprus with their three daughters, ages 7 to 15, they rented out their five-room apartment in Karkur, northeast of Hadera. With that money they are renting a home near Paphos – a lavish mansion on an oligarchical scale, surrounded by banana groves, and with a sea view. The Levys greet Emil, the photographer, and me graciously in their living room, an immense space tiled with white marble, bathed in light, tastefully designed with impressive furnishings. White ceiling fans hum above us as we sip wine. I rub my eyes at the sight of the pool (heated) that is vividly visible outside the huge windows. Here there is no domestic help, only a cleaning person who comes once a week and Shahar – who adroitly uses a kind of sophisticated squeegee to clean an invisible stain on the floor.
The last straw in Israel, the couple says, was the girls’ education. “The education system we encountered resembles the one we attended as children, but it’s gotten a lot more violent and extreme,” Shahar says. “Forty children in a class. Fights… Teachers are despondent. You see there all the ills of Israeli society.”
They had tried to enroll their daughters in every anthroposophic and democratic school in their area, but there was no room. “It’s one thing if things are hard for you, but when things are hard for your children, that motivates you,” he adds.
On their property in Cyprus, the couple set up a small office, where they jointly run their business of online workshops (in Hebrew). Their daughters, like most of the Israeli children in Cyprus, attend a private British school. They are respectable institutions with small classes of 15 to 20 pupils with two teachers. Besides classes in English, which for most of the parents are an advantage, every day the children have an hour-long lesson in Greek, a lilting language that might be of assistance in their philosophy studies in the future. In the store that sells the requisite uniforms for the English school in Paphos, for example, one can obtain all the necessary accessories: vests, cardigans, silk scarves, ties and tailored blazers.
“The girls are pleased,” Shahar says. “They get along in terms of language. The education is meticulous and personal. It’s private, it costs, and it’s something completely different.” Tuition ranges between about 400 and 750 euros a month, per child, and Limassol is more expensive in this regard, too.
Shahar and Avigail relate that they were substantially aided in their integration by a neighboring Israeli family with children of similar ages. Almost every Israeli we met in Cyprus showed us that from their window or the corner of their yard another home of Israelis is visible. That neighbor of ours, someone will say, still manages a successful restaurant chain in Israel; or, we get together with that family for Shabbat meals; or, those people have opened a massage business. Some of the interviewees implore us not to write anything good about Cyprus – because “all the Israelis will come.” Others take pride in being part of an extensive communal support network, which offers tips about the tastiest cottage cheese, sends food packages to new mothers and even raises money for local Cypriots who have suffered damage in fires.
Turgeman, for one, is especially pleased with the high level of discipline in the school her children, Ron (9) and Niv (11), attend. “They teach you what respect for the teacher means,” she says, “which is something that doesn’t exist in Israel.” The children call their teacher “Miss” and speak to her with hands held behind the back, and if a parent wants to speak to a teacher they need to make a proper appointment; obtaining a private phone number is unheard of. When another boy at school – with a Syrian father and an Israeli Arab mother – said to Ron, “Free Palestine,” he was suspended for two days. When Niv uttered a curse, he and his parents were summoned for a series of urgent reprimands, and Niv stopped. When Turgeman herself experienced an incident relating to proper English discipline, she was absolutely delighted.
The “diplomatic incident” between Israel and Great Britain occurred after her son Niv told his mother that he was scared of the teacher’s reaction if he didn’t do his homework. “What does he mean by ‘scared'”? the mother asked herself angrily, and went to see the “Miss” about it. The educator, for her part, asked the mother not to intervene. “In that situation in Israel you start to argue with the teacher,” Turgeman says. “Here there’s no arguing. She didn’t let me speak. Spoke to me aggressively.”
Gross Cohen: “She was told, ‘Honey, you’re welcome to get up and leave.’ Do you know what kind of waiting list the private schools here have?”
Turgeman: “In Israel I was very involved in the kids’ schools. In the parents’ leadership, on this committee, that committee. I was one of those mothers who stick their nose in everything. Dealing with shit. And here, she just stood me in the corner. Hats off.”
No Gaza, no Iran
We landed in Larnaca on a warm July night. Emil and I left the airport in a rented car and hit the empty road, trying to get used to driving on the left side without incurring loss of life. The urban landscape was a hybrid of the Israeli Arab village of Jisr al-Zarqa and the suburbs of Athens. What stood out especially were the large expanses between the modest buildings, and the broad roads with small gravel stretches on their shoulders. There’s room here.
Cyprus is a small island, but not necessarily in terms of the size of its population. In the Greek section, where the overwhelming majority of the Israelis live, around 900,000 people are spread luxuriously across 5,996 square kilometers. Israel is almost three times as crowded. Even the Galilee is a lot more densely populated.
We lodged in a ghost hostel in a neighborhood with no sidewalks and quickly fell into a deep sleep. At the rosy-fingered dawn, we both sat bolt upright in our beds at the sound of a rising and falling alarm, a very weird experience. It took me a moment to remember that we were in Cyprus, so it’s unlikely that were being shot at, and I could go back to sleep. Afterward we discovered that we had unluckily arrived on the anniversary of the Turkish invasion of the island, in 1974, which is commemorated by an alarm sounded at maximum volume at 5:20 A.M.
Some of the Israelis we met, it turned out, leaped up like we did, also unaware of the tradition. For the more veteran re-locators, it’s an annual reminder of the constant feeling of emergency they left behind. “You live a tranquil life here,” Shimon says. “You’re not told that tomorrow there will be rockets from the Gaza Strip and the day after tomorrow the Iranians will drop a bomb on your head.”
Why not simply move to the Galilee?
“Because there you’re told that Hezbollah [in Lebanon] has 150,000 missiles. In the Galilee you’re still living in Israel; here the atmosphere is completely different. Every time I visit Israel my blood pressure shoots up dramatically. It only goes down again when I get back to Cyprus.”
Turgeman, the lawyer, relates that the level of triglycerides in her father’s blood – he moved to the island in her wake – also surges when he visits Israel and decreases when he returns, and not because of his diet.
The Michovers – Adi (40) and Niv (38), with their son Itai (6) and their live-in helper, Russo.
Emil Salman
Adi Michover says that only when she and Niv immigrated to Cyprus were they finally able to bring their runaway working hours under control. “In Israel I worked 17 hours a day, we would keep going after putting Itai to sleep,” she says. “We paid a lot for advice from a mentor about this situation. We were told, ‘You have to put a stop to it, set up two separate phones.’ But nothing helped. We came here and something just happened. There’s a kind of calm. We finish working at 4 o’clock, and our output is a lot better.”
The couple relate that they had contemplated joining the Israeli community in Ko Pha Ngan, in Thailand, and had already registered their son for preschool there. (You could have been in Ko Pha Ngan now, I said to myself, if you had suggested the right idea for an article.) The move to Thailand was canceled at the last minute because of the coronavirus crisis. When the Michovers saw a television report about Cyprus, a place they’d never visited, the penny suddenly dropped. “Boom,” Adi says, “all the pieces of the puzzle came together.” They made the move within a few months.
The Michovers were not the only ones for whom the pandemic became a turning point. Israelis here describe the past year as a crisis period in which the desire to leave came to fruition. “Something in the atmosphere closed in on us,” Avigail Levy says. “We felt that politically things were becoming very problematic.”
Shahar adds, “The pandemic brought all the problems to the surface and made us ask ourselves where we were headed. And that was even before the rioting [in mixed Jewish-Arab cities in Israel, in May, when the Levy family was already in Cyprus].”
Quite a few Israelis choose to spend their retirement years in Cyprus. With no expenses for private education for their offspring, the differences in the cost of living become more pronounced. You can enjoy a high quality of life and still be a short flight from the grandchildren (now such a trip would involve self-isolation, however).
“I just spoke with a woman who retired from the Israel Prison Service,” says David Azriel, around 70. “I told her, ‘You will live here like the queen of Thailand.'” Azriel greets us in a two-family villa on the outskirts of Larnaca, 100 meters from the sea.
In terms of red tape, immigration to Cyprus is quite simple. For the many Israelis who hold a European passport, there’s no problem. The rest have to prove that they have a stable source of income in order to receive a “pink slip,” i.e., a temporary residency permit. A work permit is somewhat more complicated. Those who work or can work from home – which is true today for roughly half of the workforce in Israel (according to a study published in February by the Labor Ministry), can simply go on doing here what they did before: working remotely for their Israeli companies. Under certain conditions, the owner of a work-from-home business in Israel can shut down operations, reopen it in Cyprus and pay taxes here – a move that was repeatedly described to me as a fantastic financial bonanza. Company tax in Cyprus is 12.5 percent (about half the rate in Israel), and foreigners are usually exempt almost completely from tax on dividends. Clever salaried employees can resign, emigrate to Cyprus, set up a business there and then sell to their former employers the same services they provided as salaried workers back in Israel – and pay far less tax.
Another option is to go on paying taxes in Israel from Cyprus, as a salaried worker or as a self-employed person. That’s what the Levys are doing, for example. The photos Avigail uploads to her business profile, in which she’s seen smiling with a pool in the background, illustrate the workshops she leads, coaching people to alter their awareness of what constitutes financial abundance and well-being, by connecting to what she calls “the secret frequency of money.”
I asked Ophir Rav Hon and his partner, Moriya Bednarsky, who have lived in Cyprus since 2017, why they didn’t choose Greece. He explained that the Greek islands are charming, but that there are direct flights from Israel only in the tourist season. The rest of the year getting there is a headache: buses, ferries, chaos. “Cyprus is accessible all year round,” he notes.
In their first years on the island, Rav Hon, the veterinarian, and Bednarsky, an accountant, traveled weekly to Israel to work. These days they are engaged mainly with local real estate. Hanging out with us in the yard of their handsome stone house in the hills, a quarter of an hour from Paphos, they displayed serenity and great tans. Dangling in the vines above us were, at a cautious estimate, a few dozen kilos of impressive looking grapes, but most of them weren’t ripe yet, so we made do with a generous bowl of cold cherries. “0.95 euros a kilo in the grocery store,” Rav Hon pointed out.
Moriya Bednarsky (52) and Ophir Rav Hon (54). “Cyprus is accessible all year round,” he says, and not just during tourist season, as in the Greek islands.
Emil Salman
“It’s not a worthwhile relocation,” says Michal, who once lived on the island, offering a different viewpoint. “We’ve exhausted this island.”
She describes a nice country but one that’s a little backward, with government officials who blow smoke in your face and wait staff at cafes that take hours to fill an order. She says she also feels somewhat uncomfortable about the local Israeli dependence on domestic workers. “There are people here who have borne children into that situation. The home helper gets up at night for the children, bathes them – like a nanny like in the stories.” The local Israeli community, which others say is inclusive and embracing, is in her eyes a small, oppressive swamp.
It hasn’t escaped the Levys, either, that the island they moved to is small, but they’re not bothered by it. “We don’t term ourselves olim [new immigrants] or yordim [a sometimes derogatory term for those who leave, or “descend from” Israel],” Shahar says. “We embarked on a joint family experience, and we’ll stay as long as we have it good here.” He’s pleased with the local Israelis: “They are people who read the map, each in their way, and took action. They didn’t make do with grumbling. They got up and left.”
Wild weeds
The hard core of the Israelis in Cyprus were and remain salaried employees of technology and commercial firms dealing in foreign currency, who were relocated to the island for tax purposes. Many of these Israelis make a point of saying that they are “not from Forex” (foreign exchange), because such businesses have a negative image, to put it mildly; Cyprus is indeed trying to uproot the wild weeds among them. According to Michover, the relatively recent arrival, the local authorities have become very strict, and it’s difficult to relocate dubious businesses to the island. “When I opened the company here, I was asked to explain exactly what I do, where the money comes from,” he says. “They demanded documents from my bank, from my former accountant. The supervision is very tight today.”
The Cypriots may have cleaned up their act in terms of the black market, but it’s not certain the same can be said about their cuisine. I was first burned in this regard back when I read a gushing article about the island by Avirama Golan, published in this paper two years ago (in Hebrew). “On a Thursday morning, end of November, the azure waters of Pyrgos beach looked as though winter would never come,” she waxed poetic. “A few dozen kilometers from there rain mixed with hail pounded the town of Platres in the Troodos Mountains, and silent snow floated down on the summit of the mountain… In the small hotel that overlooks the forest a fire blazed in the fireplace, English tea and hot wine were poured, and baklava was served… The proud Cypriot heritage sets a table that astounds even true-blue Greeks,” etc. etc.
It was one of those articles after which you can hardly keep from eating the newspaper; waiting at the end was a recipe for jam made from Cypriot kumquats, which is ready when the color of the syrup “resembles the eyes of a fox.” Naturally, we rushed to pick kumquats, we followed the directions as best we could and the result was swallowed by the garbage can very quickly.
At the time we blamed ourselves. But after the series of culinary disasters that Emil and I experienced in Cyprus, it’s hard not to form the impression that there’s a genuine problem here.
“Cypriot food is shocking,” Linor Gross Cohen confirms. “They burn the meat until the animal gives up its soul a second time.”
Shahar Levy is more delicate: “There is no distinguished culinary tradition here – it’s a poor people’s Greece.”
David Azriel (70), who lives on the outskirts of Larnaca. “I told a woman who retired from the Israel Prison Service: ‘You will live here like the queen of Thailand.”‘
Emil Salman
Azriel dissents: “Anyone who says that either doesn’t understand food, or doesn’t understand Cyprus.”
What can be said in favor of the Cypriot kitchen is that it’s better off when it comes to fish and seafood – and if you like halloumi, the traditional semi-hard goat’s or sheep’s milk cheese, there’s no doubt you have come to the right place. And the prices, the prices. For two huge sandwiches (revolting, yes, but huge), a dish of olives and cheese, four cups of coffee and a cordial smile at an eatery in a small mountain inn, we paid 10 euros. And yes, the mountains here are quite beautiful, by the way.
Israel is a small country with a rapidly changing landscape. Israelis in Cyprus describe the island as a reduced version of their homeland. The comparisons don’t end with Limassol vs. Tel Aviv: Paphos is compared to Eilat, Larnaca is like Tiberias or Petah Tikva, Nicosia can be seen as a pale version of Jerusalem, and the Troodos Mountains boast snow in the winter – but they take just 50 minutes to reach and there are no long lines at the entrance. Those who chose to live here apparently did not do so only out of a fondness for Cyprus, but also due to a lack of desire or an inability to disconnect from Israel completely. After they finish telling you how the social rifts there made them leave, how the cost of living slaughtered them, how the air pollution and the dirt broke their spirits – some of them emphasize that their stay on the island is only an “adventure” or “a way of getting some air,” and they promise to return to their native land when the kids know English or the high-schooler is ready to be drafted, because being here “helps develop one’s character.” As they drive along the island’s traffic-free roads they listen to Army Radio’s music station, which can be picked up from the air – hey, it’s only 300 kilometers away.
On our last morning in Cyprus, I went to the beach near the vacation resort where we had slept – in a new and spacious wooden cabin (60 euros a night). I was still tired from hanging out the night before with the Cypriots in the adjacent cabin, elderly folks with a limited English vocabulary and expansive hearts, who wined and dined us into a stupor. The beach was clean, quiet and people-free, and instead of sand there were only large pebbles. I skipped one of them across the flat sea and I looked over the horizon. Immigration to Cyprus suddenly resembled the first skip of the stone. Some of the Israelis return home from here, but many others stay far longer than they’d planned, or go on from here to other countries, growing more and more distant from the hand that threw them across the surface of the water.
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