Greece-Israel relations: A never-ending saga
Old distrust transformed into lasting (?) friendship?
Greek historians attempting to address Greece-Israel relations have their jobs cut out for them. Historically, Greeks and Jews did not see eye to eye. During the long Turkish Musselman subjugation of Hellas, Jews, in the eyes of the enslaved Hellenes, acted as “collaborators” of the Turks persecuting the Greeks. Religion played a key role in this lasting antipathy. It was the Jews who crucified Jesus Christ and, thus, in the eyes of the Orthodox Christian Greeks, were perennially cast in Hell on earth as well as in the afterlife. The Jews returned the favors fully, Greek popular history suggests. Jews acted as tools of the Turk to persecute, impoverish, and enslave the Hellenic folk.
The Jews of Salonika (Thessaloniki), a community established in the 15th century and eventually destroyed by the Nazis, co-existed with their Hellene neighbors in everyday, thinly-veiled, simmering tension for centuries. When the Germans arrived in 1941, they found a good number of Greeks already at daggers drawn with their Jewish neighbors—and exploited this seething social and religious tension, and often hatred, to assist the shipping of 99 pc of the local Jews to Auschwitz via nineteen train journeys to Poland.
Postwar, Greece treated the newfound state of Israel icily refusing to appoint a full-time ambassador to Tel Aviv. It was not until Greece came under the rule of a military junta in 1967 that Athens changed its tune toward Israel. Bilateral relations warmed up and the Greek junta praised Israel’s leading-edge military in defeating Arab attempts to finish the state of Israel.
The Greek putschists depended fully on American support and, thus, continued to expand their friendly relations with Tel Aviv. The fall of the junta in 1974, and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus that permanently divided the island between an internationally recognized Greek Cypriot government, and a Turkish Cypriot enclave occupied by Turkey, marked the further rapid improvement in Greece-Israel relations.
Today, Greece and Israel maintain close diplomatic, economic, and defense relations and have expanded their common initiatives to include natural gas exploration and exploitation and a plan to share electricity via a common Greece-Cyprus-Israel grid funded by the European Union.
Meantime, the Hellenic and Israeli armed forces have developed close training collaboration via regular common large-scale exercises and intelligence sharing. According to Wikipedia, “Greece is one of only three countries Israel has signed a Status of forces agreement (SOFA), with the other being the United States and Cyprus. The agreement enables Israel in hosting Greek military forces in its territory or stationing Israeli military forces in the territory of Greece, as part of the military agreements and comprehensive security arrangements between the two countries.”
Such blossoming Greece-Israel cooperation, however, is not sitting well with left wing parties in both countries.
“Real” communists in Greece, for example, represented by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), are still frigid toward a Greece-Israel alliance that, among others, sustains Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians. The neo-communist SYRIZA party, meantime, struggling to create a revamped “Euro-communist” identity, is largely silent vis-à-vis Israel, but its more strident, left-of-the-left, wing minces no words regarding Israel’s “militarism.”
This Greek leftist opposition to Israel is welcomed by Israeli opponents of the current supra-nationalist Netanyahu administration, which has unleashed a thinly-veiled mass assault on all who oppose its Jewish fundamentalist policies and wholehearted support of ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlers occupying Palestinian lands and building permanent settlements by kicking out the Arab Palestinian residents, whose land rights and national existence are recognized by the international community.
The Israeli Left has not (justifiably) forgotten the amicable relations between the Jewish state and the Greek colonels, who took over Hellas in April 1967, and continues to expose it publicly. A latest expression of this hearts-and-minds campaign, highlighting the “darker” side of Greek-Israeli “friendship,” is the following lengthy article “published in Israel and based in the archives of the Israeli Foreign Minister.” This is the English translation of the original, which appeared in July 2019.
The suppressed history of Israel’s support for the brutal Greek junta
Declassified files reveal the extent of Israel’s ties with the regime known for torturing and murdering thousands of its citizens in the 1960s-70s.
Greece is one of the few countries in Europe today that openly embraces the Israeli army, holding joint military exercises with Israel and acting as an enthusiastic partner for Israeli arms and surveillance companies. Against the background of Israel’s current constitutional and political crisis, Greece has also reportedly been trying to attract more Israeli hi-tech companies, many of which build military or dual-use products, by offering them extremely generous incentives.
This close relationship has also had a major impact on Greek domestic politics. Last year, for example, it was revealed that an Israeli former intelligence general named Tal Dilian, who runs a spyware company from an office in Athens, was involved in a political and legal scandal over the spyware’s use against Greek politicians and journalists; both the head of intelligence and the adviser to the prime minister of Greece were forced to resign.
How did this unique relationship form? Publicly, Israel and Greece trace their strong ties back only to 1990, when full diplomatic relations were established and an Israeli embassy opened in Athens. On May 21, 2015, the 25th anniversary of that milestone, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a celebratory statement explaining its narrative of Greek-Israeli diplomacy, according to which the period between 1952 and 1990 saw only low-level relations between the two countries.
In recent years, the statement continues, “a strategic partnership has developed between the two countries … based on democratic values and common interests shared by the two countries, which face challenges in the Eastern Mediterranean region … The two countries, Greece and Israel, are modern and democratic scions of ancient nations … The bilateral cooperation between the two countries promotes common values, progress and stability in the region. Both countries strive to continue to promote peaceful and good neighborly relations with peoples and nations in the region.”