The Star and the Scepter by Emmanuel Navon;

Author:Emmanuel Navon; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS022000 History / Jewish, HIS019000 History / Middle East / Israel & Palestine, POL011010 Political Science / International Relations / Diplomacy
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Greece

Greece was the only European country that voted in 1947 against the UN partition plan for Palestine. For forty-two years after Israel’s independence, Greece refused to recognize Israel de jure and to establish full diplomatic relations.

A central reason was Greek fear of Arab reprisals. There was an ancient, large, and wealthy Greek diaspora in Egypt, and Egyptian leaders threatened to expel or loot this community if Greece established full diplomatic relations with Israel. After four years of German occupation (1940–44) and six years of civil war (1945–51), a weakened Greece was sensitive to those pressures. (The Egyptians eventually confiscated most of the assets of the Greek diaspora anyway.) When Cyprus declared independence in 1960, Greece lobbied for UN recognition of its claims on the island. With Cyprus populated by Greeks and Turks, both Greece and Turkey had sovereignty claims, and in that diplomatic struggle Greece was easily blackmailed by the Arab and Muslim states, whose natural sympathy was for Turkey (a Muslim country). During the 1982 Lebanon War, Greece’s prime minister Andreas Papandreou accused Israel of committing “crimes against humanity” and drew a parallel between Israel and Nazi Germany: “We have seen what Nazism did to the Jews and now the Jews are doing the same to the Palestinians.”54 Under Papandreou, the PLO’s “embassy” in Athens became one of its strong international footholds.

Only after Papandreou’s electoral defeat in 1990 and the formation of a center-right government did Greece establish full diplomatic relations with Israel, in 1991. In recent years, relations between Israel and Greece have warmed considerably, due to the deterioration of relations between Israel and Turkey (see chapter 10) and the common geopolitical interests created by Israel’s emergence as a natural gas exporter (see chapter 21).

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