The Greek turn toward Israel
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The Greek turn toward Israel is John Kiriakou's explanation of a foreign-policy reversal he describes as painful to watch: the Greek government moving away from the Arab cause and toward Israel.

A personal stake

Kiriakou prefaces the analysis with his own attachment to the country, saying there is nothing he loves more in the world than Greece and that he is proud to have obtained Greek citizenship. He returned in 2019 to vote for the first time, in his grandfather's middle school in the family's ancestral village.

Two reasons, neither valid

Kiriakou gives two causes and rejects both as justifications.

The first is Turkey. As Ankara's very close relations with Israel turned, the two taking opposite positions on many issues rather than becoming outright enemies, the Greeks jumped in and changed their own position 180 degrees. Where the Turks had always been pro-Israeli and the Greeks always pro-Arab, the two swapped, and, Kiriakou says, for no good reason.

The second is money, which he treats as the real explanation. He follows Greek property prices closely because he fantasises about buying a place there and retiring, and says prices have tripled in the last ten years because Israelis are buying up all the real estate. He calls it outrageous. He has elsewhere described the scale of Israeli property acquisition in Greece and Cyprus in more detail.

The second financial motive is gas. The Cypriots, Kiriakou says, are sitting on an ocean of liquefied natural gas, a finger of which extends into Israeli territorial waters, or, as he puts it, really into Palestinian territorial waters off the coast of Gaza. The Greek calculation is that working with the Israelis will make them a great deal of money, and that, he says, is really what it comes down to.

The hotel in Kolonaki

As a marker of how far the change has gone, Kiriakou cites an Orthodox Jewish hotel in Kolonaki, the district he calls the Beverly Hills of Athens, catering only to Orthodox Jews and equipped with a kosher kitchen and whatever else its guests require. He says he had never seen such a thing before.

His verdict

Over the long term Kiriakou considers the realignment a big mistake, walking away from the Arabs at precisely the moment when so many of them, especially the Palestinians and the Lebanese, need European help. He calls it scandalous.

See also

- Kiriakou's Greek citizenship
- Israeli property acquisition in Greece and Cyprus
- The encounter at the Greek ambassador's residence
- The Foreign Relations volume and the sources still alive
