Israeli property acquisition in Greece and Cyprus is a development John Kiriakou — a dual Greek-American national who visits two to four times a year, and who says a DNA test put him at 26% Cypriot — reports from repeated first-hand visits, having spent ten days in Cyprus three weeks before the interview.[1][2]
What he says is being bought
He distinguishes the scale from ordinary foreign property-buying. Hearing Hebrew everywhere and seeing new synagogues built he treats as “perfectly fine.” What is not fine, in his account, is that “the Israelis are buying up all the real estate not just to have, you know, a summer place or a weekend place or to make an Airbnb. They’re buying literally entire villages all at one time.”[3]
In Cyprus, he says, they bought an entire village outside Paphos: “it is Jewish only. They’re only selling to other Israelis. The legality is unclear, but this is what they’re doing,” and are building a casino there to attract Israeli visitors. Three weeks before the interview they asked the Greek government for permission to buy an entire island in the Ionian Sea, and were denied. They also asked the Cypriot government “four or five weeks ago for permission to open the first ever Zionist high school. Not Israeli high school, Zionist high school, specifically to teach high school students the philosophy behind Zionism so that they can produce more active Zionists.”[3][4][5]
Why the governments allow it
Kiriakou grants the strategic logic without accepting it. “The governments of Greece and Cyprus are joined at the hip with the Israelis. And I get it. The Israelis and the Turks hate each other. The Turks not just hate the Greeks and the Cypriots, but are an active day-to-day threat.” He offers as evidence of that threat a Turkish government order, issued the previous day, that the term for the Aegean be replaced in Turkish textbooks with “sea of islands” — which he compares to the Gulf of America renaming.[4][6]
His objection is that the trade is not worth its price: “you cannot just throw away your centuries long commitment to human rights. You can’t throw away 80 years of support of the Palestinian people.”[6][7]
The popular reaction
He reports the gap between the governments and the populations as visible at the quayside. Two days before the interview an Israeli cruise ship docked at Piraeus and its passengers “were blocked from even getting off the ship by a mob of Greeks.” He says this has happened repeatedly over two years in the islands as well, including on Rhodes, his own ancestral island — “Average Greeks, normal Greeks will not allow Israelis to disembark. And this is in protest for the way the Israelis are treating the Palestinians.”[7][8]
His summary of the dynamic: “everybody can live happily ever after if there’s mutual respect for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties. And there is not. There is not. The Israelis will take what they want and if they can’t take it, they’ll buy it.”[8][5]
He places the whole development against the older Greek relationship with Jews, which he says had nothing to do with Zionism — see Rhodes Jewish deportation and Zakynthos Holocaust rescue.[9]