Why Greece is Israel’s latest unlikely friend
Every year on that date crowds — taking in everyone from Yayas (grandmas) to students to the hard-left and anarchists — march from the Polytechnic in central Athens to the front of the US embassy. There, they proceed to hurl Molotov cocktails, rocks and any sort of missile they can find against the (now shuttered) windows and walls of the embassy. Every year. When I first covered the march about 10 years ago, I remember watching crowds of young Greeks – almost none of whom was alive in the 1970s – carry red flags of the Communist Party while they marched past walls sprayed painted with the hammer and sickle, chanting, “Free, free Palestine!” This, it seemed to me, was what leftist politics in Greece had descended to: an incoherent grabbag of grievances, reduced to often violent kitsch. But if it was ill-thought out, it continued to dominate.
Then came the 2008 financial crisis: the years of PASOK clientelism and corruption were exposed for the
Chimera they were. The economy collapsed; the people suffered.
For a new generation of Greeks, this was the left: not a bloated uncle doling out sweet government jobs with fat pensions, but a movement that had brought them nothing but pain and suffering.
PASOK began to fall, and as it did, Turkey, now with Islamist populist @NûNY BKāāRY 4[MXĔKW K] ]QN QNUV began to rise.
1\ 4[MXĔKW´\ QXUM XW B^[TNā P[Nÿ so did his aggression. The discovery of gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean brought Greece, Israel and Cyprus together in a triple alliance. Turkey, out in the cold, became enraged. Its warships now stalk Greek boats in the seas. Its planes regularly violate Greek airspace. Its politicians threaten to invade.
Suddenly, Greeks see Israel not as an overweening oppressor but a fellow democratic state threatened on its borders.
Suddenly, Greeks see Israelis not as colonisers but as fellow underdogs. Suddenly, Greeks see Israeli tech not as a danger but as a means to level the playing field against a far larger neighbour.
The 21st century is dawning in the Mediterranean. Greece and Israel are now firm allies, yoked together to battle new autocratic threats.
The new decade is throwing up new challenges that require not just new security arrangements, but an end to decades of bad thinking.