Greece's alliance with Israel is becoming a domestic liability
Published by Middle East Eye
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Who is named
The characters and things this document talks about — 19 in alls. Each links to everything else the record knows about them.
People 9
Iason Apostolopoulos Amichai Chikli Abba Eban Benjamin Netanyahu David Ben Gurion Konstantinos Loukopoulos Yorgos Papandreou Ehud Eiran Yaar Dagan
Organisations 8
NATO Greece Saudi Arabia Elbit Systems Turkey Israel Pakistan Shladot
Places 1
Claims made
Every claim in this document. Firsthand = asserted on its own basis; secondhand = recounted from elsewhere, carrying no independent weight.
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Israel issued a rare warning to its citizens in Greece last Sunday ahead of nationwide pro-Palestine protests: avoid advertising your nationality in public.
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65 percent of Greeks opposed the partnership with Israel according to a 2026 Pew Research poll.
A 2026 Pew Research poll found that 65 percent of Greeks opposed the partnership, although many view it as a necessary evil because of what they perceive as an expansionist Turkey.
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Pro‑Palestinian protests in Greece are vastly larger than pro‑Israeli protests.
On the streets, meanwhile, pro-Palestinian protests are vastly larger than the smattering of pro-Israeli ones.
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"There's never money available for better hospitals, firefighting aeroplanes, trains or pensions," Iason Apostolopoulos, a pro-Palestine activist and rescuer of migrants in the Central Mediterranean for Italian association Mediterranea Saving Humans, told MEE.
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Nearly 100,000 Israelis left their country for more than three months in 2025, marking a third record year.
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"Buying property in Greece and Cyprus became the secular response to the settler project," Ehud Eiran, an associate professor of political science at the University of Haifa, told MEE.
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David Ben Gurion studied in Istanbul and Abba Eban studied Arabic at Cambridge.
David Ben Gurion studied in Istanbul, while early diplomat Abba Eban studied Arabic at Cambridge.
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Greece and India voted against the UN Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947.
Although current Israeli allies like Greece and India joined Muslim‑majority countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey to vote against the UN Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947, it passed.
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Israel won wars in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973.
Israel won four wars in a row in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, prompting neighbours like Egypt and Jordan to begin concluding peace with it.
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The Abraham Accords initiated a fresh series of agreements in 2020, the most enthusiastic of which have been with Morocco and the UAE.
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A turning point came in 2010, when former Greek Prime Minister Yorgos Papandreou bumped into Netanyahu in a Moscow restaurant and invited him for dinner.
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Israeli fighter jets began using Greek airspace for training.
Israeli fighter jets began using Greek airspace for training, giving Israel an important opportunity to prepare for long‑range operations.
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In 2015, Greece became only the second country after the US to sign a military cooperation agreement with Israel, allowing the two countries to host each other's troops and materiel.
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"When we discovered gas fields in around 2010, we suddenly went from being an energy‑poor country to an energy exporter," said Eiran.
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Turkey signed a mutual defence pact on 7 August with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
When Turkey signed a mutual defence pact on 7 August with economic heavyweight Saudi Arabia and nuclear‑armed Pakistan, officials were careful to say the new alliance was not directed against any particular country, especially Iran.
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"It could have extremely serious consequences both in the Mediterranean and on the Syrian front," Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli warned, "and it requires us to deepen our alliances with Greece, Cyprus, the UAE, Somaliland and India."
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Israel completed a hat‑trick of major Mediterranean air‑defence sales in July when Greece agreed to a €3bn deal involving many of the same systems sold to Morocco and Cyprus in 2022.
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In April, Greece agreed to spend €650m on 36 rocket artillery launchers, precision‑guided missiles with ranges of up to 300km, loitering munitions and a 10‑year support package from Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, Elbit Systems.
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In August Athens bought €1.5 million worth of armoured vehicles from Israeli manufacturer Shladot.
In August, Athens bought €1.5m worth of armoured vehicles from Israeli manufacturer Shladot, building on an earlier deal with the Greek police to acquire the rugged vehicles frequently seen in media coverage of the occupied West Bank.
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"Israel's arms industry owes its success to its ability to test its weapons on Palestinians, proving through these endless human labs how useful they are," Yaar Dagan, a lecturer in international law at Middlesex University and author of the forthcoming title Drones, Settler Colonialism, and the Law: How Israel Became a Drone Superpower, told MEE.
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The €3bn air‑defence system will also be interoperable with Nato's Link 16 cryptographic communications system, further integrating Greece into a wider military architecture.
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Greece is developing an artificial intelligence‑powered Command and Control (C2) network designed to combine data from existing Greek sensors and radars with Nato‑standard information from Greek F‑16s and F‑35s and feed it into the Achilles Shield system.
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A custom‑built Israeli C4I control centre will combine inputs from Israeli‑purchased ELM‑2084 radars and Greek fighter jets, allowing the system to track enemy drones in real time and minimise data‑transfer delays.
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"No system offers 100 percent protection and we still don’t know how it will react in real‑world conditions," retired Lieutenant‑General Konstantinos Loukopoulos told MEE.
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Defence spending in Greece rose from $5.5 billion in 2019 to more than $8 billion a year.
Defence spending has risen from $5.5bn in 2019 to more than $8bn a year.
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Under its 2030 project, Greece plans to spend nearly €28bn on military modernisation by 2036, taking defence spending to 3.5 percent of GDP.
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Benny Nathan said Greece has great brains but is largely corrupt and fails to maximise them.
"Greece has great brains but because it's largely corrupt, it fails to maximise them," said Benny Nathan, a Greek‑Israeli professor at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Technion.
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Israel has authorised the sale of sophisticated spyware such as Predator and Pegasus to Greece and Morocco, respectively, and possibly to Cyprus.
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The software is believed to contain a technological backdoor, potentially allowing Israel to benefit diplomatically from access to intercepted communications.
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The closer the two countries become militarily, the harder it is for Athens to separate its relationship with Israel from the public anger generated by Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
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Syndication
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