I.
We are constantly discussing what the USA is today, we are discussing the Iran of the Ayatollahs, but also the other Iran of the struggling democrats, especially its women; I wish we could also hear a few words about the great cinema and other arts of this second Iran (here are images from an exhibition of women Iranian artists). It is time to talk about Israel, especially about the political Israel of the ruling forces around Benjamin Netanyahu. Shedding light on the issue with historical data.
Many, in Greece and not only, under various political and ideological labels, denounce "Zionism" and the "Zionist state", the "terrorist state" and so on. However, many, and certainly historical data, give rise to strong arguments that the reality is different: The historical roots, the current direction and the action of the ruling political coalition under the Likud party and Netanyahu, do not have good relations with the Zionist origins of Israel as a state, nor with the pre-1948 Zionist movement.
On the contrary, these are political movements or even parties, which are politically and ideological continuity, but also at the level of individuals, a continuation of organizations and armed groups that had seceded from the core of the Zionists in Europe and subsequently in Palestine, when this region was still under British mandate, long before the UN decision to partition British Palestine and establish Israel.
We are constantly discussing what the USA is today, we are discussing the Iran of the Ayatollahs, but also the other Iran of the struggling democrats, especially its women; I wish we could also hear a few words about the great cinema and other arts of this second Iran (here are images from an exhibition of women Iranian artists). It is time to talk about Israel, especially about the political Israel of the ruling forces around Benjamin Netanyahu. Shedding light on the issue with historical data.
Many, in Greece and not only, under various political and ideological labels, denounce "Zionism" and the "Zionist state", the "terrorist state" and so on. However, many, and certainly historical data, give rise to strong arguments that the reality is different: The historical roots, the current direction and the action of the ruling political coalition under the Likud party and Netanyahu, do not have good relations with the Zionist origins of Israel as a state, nor with the pre-1948 Zionist movement.
On the contrary, these are political movements or even parties, which are politically and ideological continuity, but also at the level of individuals, a continuation of organizations and armed groups that had seceded from the core of the Zionists in Europe and subsequently in Palestine, when this region was still under British mandate, long before the UN decision to partition British Palestine and establish Israel.
Jewish extremist terrorists "revisionists of Zionism" before and during the founding of Israel
For example, the Jewish armed subversive organization Lehi. In a tragic irony of history and language, Lehi, a terrorist organization according to the first Israeli government under Ben Gurion, called its newspaper "Hamaas". In both related Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic, Hamaas ~ Hamas means something like Action, Deed, Power, but also Courage or Zeal.
In addition to attacks on Arab settlements and the killing of civilians, Lehi became famous for the assassination of the Swedish diplomat and royal Count Folke Bernadotte, UN envoy to the Middle East (1948), and also earlier for the assassination of Lord Walter Moyne (1944), British colonial minister for the Middle East. After the assassination of Lehi founder Abraham Stern (his guerrilla nickname was "Yair") by the British colonial police, its leadership was taken over by the even more ruthless Yitzhak Shamir, who much later, in 1983, became leader of the Likud party and then Prime Minister of Israel.
Shamir's predecessor in the Likud party was the also wanted terrorist Menachem Begin. Begin, originally from Brest-Litovsk, Belarus, was the head of the Irgun paramilitary organization after 1943. The Irgun had split from the Zionist activist organization Haganah in 1931 and was the armed wing of the "Revisionist Zionist" movement of Vladimir "Ze'ev" Jabotinsky. Netanyahu's ties to this movement are old. Benjamin Netanyahu's father was the secretary of Jabotinsky. The Irgun's terrorist attacks against the British colonial authorities were numerous, even more so against Arab settlements (Deir Yassin massacre, "Black Sunday", etc.), but also against the newly founded (1948) official Israeli army based on the Haganah, which the entire Israeli people call always by the acronym Tzahal, but now its leaders call it the American-style IDF.
For example, the Jewish armed subversive organization Lehi. In a tragic irony of history and language, Lehi, a terrorist organization according to the first Israeli government under Ben Gurion, called its newspaper "Hamaas". In both related Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic, Hamaas ~ Hamas means something like Action, Deed, Power, but also Courage or Zeal.
In addition to attacks on Arab settlements and the killing of civilians, Lehi became famous for the assassination of the Swedish diplomat and royal Count Folke Bernadotte, UN envoy to the Middle East (1948), and also earlier for the assassination of Lord Walter Moyne (1944), British colonial minister for the Middle East. After the assassination of Lehi founder Abraham Stern (his guerrilla nickname was "Yair") by the British colonial police, its leadership was taken over by the even more ruthless Yitzhak Shamir, who much later, in 1983, became leader of the Likud party and then Prime Minister of Israel.
Shamir's predecessor in the Likud party was the also wanted terrorist Menachem Begin. Begin, originally from Brest-Litovsk, Belarus, was the head of the Irgun paramilitary organization after 1943. The Irgun had split from the Zionist activist organization Haganah in 1931 and was the armed wing of the "Revisionist Zionist" movement of Vladimir "Ze'ev" Jabotinsky. Netanyahu's ties to this movement are old. Benjamin Netanyahu's father was the secretary of Jabotinsky. The Irgun's terrorist attacks against the British colonial authorities were numerous, even more so against Arab settlements (Deir Yassin massacre, "Black Sunday", etc.), but also against the newly founded (1948) official Israeli army based on the Haganah, which the entire Israeli people call always by the acronym Tzahal, but now its leaders call it the American-style IDF.
The Irgun was marked as a terrorist organization by the UN, the British and US governments, as well as by the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry and the 1946 Zionist Congress. The two most prominent Jews of the 20th century, Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, along with other prominent Jews, in a joint letter to the New York Times in 1948, compared the Irgun and its affiliated Herut party (predecessor to today's Likud) to "Nazi and fascist parties" and described it as a "terrorist, far-right, chauvinist organization". The even more radical Lehi was a splinter group of the Irgun. It was declared a terrorist organization by the Israeli government after the assassination of Count Bernadotte. But in 1949 an amnesty was granted, in the hope that the new situation, with Israel now independent, would contribute to a "rehabilitation" of the Irgun and Lehi cadres, so that they could eventually rejoin the emerging political elite of the newly founded state.
The "turning point in the history of the Jewish people". Jewish "young conservatives" in power
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| Poster of the colonial British Palestine Police Force with Irgun and Lehi guerrillas convicted of terrorist activity. First on the top left is Menachem Begin |
And this indeed happened. But only superficially. As is often the case in history, the second side of the coin is completely different. Menachem Begin, the former Irgun commandante, as chairman of the Likud party in 1977, was to be elected as the first prime minister in the history of Israel who did not come from the Labor Party and from “orthodox” Zionism. But that change in 1977 was not a simple electoral victory for Likud. It signaled a fundamental restructuring of Israeli society. The Zionist Socialist elite of Ashkenazim (Jews from Central and Eastern Europe and Soviet Union), which was the historical founding elite of the Israeli state, was replaced by a political coalition that represented communities that were until then socially marginalized and economically disadvantaged. They were mainly Mizrahim, that is, "Oriental" Jews who had lived as religious minorities within the Muslim world and came from the wider Middle East, the Caucasus and West and Central Asia, as well as small communities of religious Jews with other roots. Unlike the Labor Party, the new government strongly promoted an agenda that was socially "conservative" and economically extremely liberal. Begin himself called his victory “a turning point in the history of the Jewish people,” mixing in his victory speech excerpts from the Torah and excerpts from Abraham Lincoln’s speech after the Northern victory over the Southerners in the decisive Battle of Gettysburg!
Thus, Israel, some thirty years after its founding, turned a new page. The driving force and catalyst were the reintegrated political and guerrilla personnel of those small subversive organizations. They were the defectors from the mainstream of European Ashkenazi Jews, ideologically and organizationally cut off from the body of Orthodox Zionism.
That subversive nucleus had been born in Europe. From the perspective of the history of ideas and political currents, it was something that looked somewhat like a Jewish branch of the broader nationalist revolutionary movement of interwar Europe. The spiritual mentors of all of them were the first angry and subversive “young conservatives” (“Jungkonservativen”, see Habermas), like Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt of the first period, Ernst Jünger (before he found himself as a conscripted reservist in Paris), up to the Italian futurists.
That core of terrorists “under reformation” and rehabilitated apostates, managed to mobilize the “mass” of Mizrahi Oriental Israelis, alien to the Orthodox Zionists and hitherto inactive (as Hannah Arendt and Elias Canetti understand the mass). Ultimately, this new coalition, of a type that is anything but unusual in history, reformed the state and incorporated it into the old, harshly nationalist project of the “revisionists of Zionism”. It is easy to see that in this historical-political chain that began with the Irgun/Lehi and ended with the Likud party, are linked not only persons, but also ideas and ways of action.
Orthodox Zionism declined and was marginalized in Israel in parallel with the decline and marginalization of the Labor Party. The powerful party of David Ben-Gurion (prime minister 1948-1953 and 1955-1963 continuously), Levi Eshkol (1963-1969), and Golda Meir (1969-1974), was, among others, the ruling party of all the great military victories, when coalition armies of almost all Arab states, from Egypt and Syria to Saudi Arabia and also Morocco, attacked Israel. But by 1977 the Israeli Labor Party was already on its way to becoming a shadow of itself. Last desperate glimmers, already rather lonely even within their own party, were Shimon Peres (1984-1986 and 1995-1996), and above all the murdered Yitzhak Rabin (1974-1977 and 1992-1995, when he was assassinated by genuine ideological heirs of Lehi and the Irgun).
Rabin's effort, which he paid with his life, with Peres as his Foreign Minister, was the last attempt to put on the geographical, geopolitical and geoeconomic map a form that was stable, rationally manageable, viable and in accordance with UN resolutions, not only Israel and Palestine, but one could say the entire Near East, perhaps even the entire Middle East together with Iran. Ehud Barak, with his short-lived term as prime minister (1999-2001) of the Labor Party, which briefly recovered, is, as a Social Democrat, at most a kind of Israeli Schröder, Blair or Hollande. Equally socialist and equally democrat. And to be fair, an even less serious politician of the Socialist family: In his personal and parapolitical life, he is the "Barack of the Jeffrey Epstein circle", with particular involvement with the well-known Peter Thiel and with people close to Putin.
Thus, Israel, some thirty years after its founding, turned a new page. The driving force and catalyst were the reintegrated political and guerrilla personnel of those small subversive organizations. They were the defectors from the mainstream of European Ashkenazi Jews, ideologically and organizationally cut off from the body of Orthodox Zionism.
That subversive nucleus had been born in Europe. From the perspective of the history of ideas and political currents, it was something that looked somewhat like a Jewish branch of the broader nationalist revolutionary movement of interwar Europe. The spiritual mentors of all of them were the first angry and subversive “young conservatives” (“Jungkonservativen”, see Habermas), like Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt of the first period, Ernst Jünger (before he found himself as a conscripted reservist in Paris), up to the Italian futurists.
That core of terrorists “under reformation” and rehabilitated apostates, managed to mobilize the “mass” of Mizrahi Oriental Israelis, alien to the Orthodox Zionists and hitherto inactive (as Hannah Arendt and Elias Canetti understand the mass). Ultimately, this new coalition, of a type that is anything but unusual in history, reformed the state and incorporated it into the old, harshly nationalist project of the “revisionists of Zionism”. It is easy to see that in this historical-political chain that began with the Irgun/Lehi and ended with the Likud party, are linked not only persons, but also ideas and ways of action.
Orthodox Zionism declined and was marginalized in Israel in parallel with the decline and marginalization of the Labor Party. The powerful party of David Ben-Gurion (prime minister 1948-1953 and 1955-1963 continuously), Levi Eshkol (1963-1969), and Golda Meir (1969-1974), was, among others, the ruling party of all the great military victories, when coalition armies of almost all Arab states, from Egypt and Syria to Saudi Arabia and also Morocco, attacked Israel. But by 1977 the Israeli Labor Party was already on its way to becoming a shadow of itself. Last desperate glimmers, already rather lonely even within their own party, were Shimon Peres (1984-1986 and 1995-1996), and above all the murdered Yitzhak Rabin (1974-1977 and 1992-1995, when he was assassinated by genuine ideological heirs of Lehi and the Irgun).
Rabin's effort, which he paid with his life, with Peres as his Foreign Minister, was the last attempt to put on the geographical, geopolitical and geoeconomic map a form that was stable, rationally manageable, viable and in accordance with UN resolutions, not only Israel and Palestine, but one could say the entire Near East, perhaps even the entire Middle East together with Iran. Ehud Barak, with his short-lived term as prime minister (1999-2001) of the Labor Party, which briefly recovered, is, as a Social Democrat, at most a kind of Israeli Schröder, Blair or Hollande. Equally socialist and equally democrat. And to be fair, an even less serious politician of the Socialist family: In his personal and parapolitical life, he is the "Barack of the Jeffrey Epstein circle", with particular involvement with the well-known Peter Thiel and with people close to Putin.
The Bidermen and the Arsonists
Hamas, with the terrorist attack inside Israel and the terrible massacre on October 7, 2023, managed to deliver the last and most crushing blow to that old, now sunken Israel of the orthodox Zionists and the Labor Party, the Israel of the kibbutzim, of the great military victories against the combined forces of the united Arab countries. Its targets were not accidental. They were the remaining kibbutzim, a melancholy remnant of their former glory, it was a music festival and civilians everywhere. The massacre and what followed, in Gaza and elsewhere, confirms for the umpteenth time a historical rule: “Forces of evil” mortally opposed to each other and irrational strategies, which pursue diametrically opposed goals, feasible or unfeasible, “cooperate” very well to transform their malicious and irrational ideas, desires and visions together into a destructive act.
But there are also those who are even more malicious and irrational. The instigators and arsonists.
As of April 2025, US President Donald Trump has appointed Mike Huckabee, an “ultraconservative” Baptist pastor, bassist for the rock band Capitol Offense, former governor of Arkansas, and 2008 Republican presidential candidate, as his country’s ambassador to Israel. In February 2026, Ambassador Huckabee told notorious MAGA commentator Tucker Carlson that he agreed that Israel has a “biblical right” to territories that correspond to a version of “Greater Israel,” i.e. “essentially the entire Middle East.” Probably unaware of the difference between the Near and Middle East, he went crazy until the end: According to him, “it would be OK if they took it all,” although he added that Israel itself “does not seek to occupy it,” it only wants “to keep the lands it currently occupies.”
Already in 2008, Huckabee declared that “in reality there are no Palestinians.” In 2017, he said that “there is no West Bank, it is Judea and Samaria. There are no settler settlements, it is communities, neighborhoods, cities. There is no occupation of lands.” On June 1, 2025, Huckabee declared that if France wants a Palestinian state, then it must “give them” the French Riviera. And on July 25, on the occasion of France’s recognition of a Palestinian state, he wrote the following: “If Macron can ‘declare’ the existence of a state, then perhaps the United Kingdom can ‘declare’ the whole of France a British colony”!
The Swiss writer Max Frisch wrote in 1948 the play “Biedermann und die Brandstifter”, subtitled “a didactic play without a moral”. The plot of this black comedy, which has been interpreted mainly as an allegory for the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933, is as follows: Mr. Bidermann hosts two arsonists in his house, even though they declare from the beginning that they intend to set fire to it. Mr. Biedermann ignores all the elements that lead to the disaster, initially because he considers it all a simple joke and then out of fear. Eventually, he himself becomes an accomplice in the arson of his own house.
In the German language, the word that is identified with Mr. Biedermann's surname is today used derogatorily to describe the conventional, narrow-minded petty bourgeois with a sly and hypocritical conformist mentality, which often proves to be naive, unrealistic and self-destructive in the end.
To the question of who are the Biedermänner, who are the Arsonists and which house will burn in this tragicomedy, involving the revised Israel under Netanyahu on the one hand and the USA of MAGA Republicans, oilmen and Silicon Valley bro-oligarchs on the other, everyone can give their own provisional answer. For the final, it is better for us to be patient.
If there are any moral lessons to be learned from this story, here are two: First, some of the so-called “conservatives” not only do not aim to preserve, but are in fact subversive and destructive. Furthermore, some “conservatives” claim to be religious, supposedly faithful Christians, even with clerical duties. However, they persistently and with destructive fury attack the two pillars of Christian morality, the Sermon on the Mount and Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Just as some so-called “progressives” seek as progress forms of regression to old barbarities. The first lesson, then, is: Those who are not deluded and do not want to deceive others, instead of relying solely on the interpretative monopoly of concepts and political categorizations originating from the 18th or 19th Century, would do well to consider that each specific political force and each politician is in reality nothing more than how they really think and act on the most critical issues of the 21st.
And secondly, forces from the other side of the Atlantic, political and other, exercise this great influential power in the rest of the world, either as cunning arsonists, or as cunning Biedermen transmitters of stupidity, because (1) they have the material means (in this case they provide Israel, the Arab countries, as well as Europe, with weapons systems, protection and the privileges of the petro-dollar), and (2) because the whole world has been allowed to become culturally Americanized. This Americanization has been going on for many decades and is happening in many ways; the latest Trojan Horse is the transformation of specific forms of technology into a “school” of socialization and “civilization” of planetary dimensions, that is, into a comprehensive ideology and “spirit of our time” (Zeitgeist). Thus, along with strategic autonomy, Europe needs, to some extent, cultural autonomy. "Thank you America, but enough is enough!" must have two sides.
Greece and Israel: From the "big NO" to Ben-Gurion's Israel (UN) to the "strategic partnership" with Netanyahu's Israel.
How is Israel's political adventure involved with that of post-war Greece?
Hamas, with the terrorist attack inside Israel and the terrible massacre on October 7, 2023, managed to deliver the last and most crushing blow to that old, now sunken Israel of the orthodox Zionists and the Labor Party, the Israel of the kibbutzim, of the great military victories against the combined forces of the united Arab countries. Its targets were not accidental. They were the remaining kibbutzim, a melancholy remnant of their former glory, it was a music festival and civilians everywhere. The massacre and what followed, in Gaza and elsewhere, confirms for the umpteenth time a historical rule: “Forces of evil” mortally opposed to each other and irrational strategies, which pursue diametrically opposed goals, feasible or unfeasible, “cooperate” very well to transform their malicious and irrational ideas, desires and visions together into a destructive act.
But there are also those who are even more malicious and irrational. The instigators and arsonists.
As of April 2025, US President Donald Trump has appointed Mike Huckabee, an “ultraconservative” Baptist pastor, bassist for the rock band Capitol Offense, former governor of Arkansas, and 2008 Republican presidential candidate, as his country’s ambassador to Israel. In February 2026, Ambassador Huckabee told notorious MAGA commentator Tucker Carlson that he agreed that Israel has a “biblical right” to territories that correspond to a version of “Greater Israel,” i.e. “essentially the entire Middle East.” Probably unaware of the difference between the Near and Middle East, he went crazy until the end: According to him, “it would be OK if they took it all,” although he added that Israel itself “does not seek to occupy it,” it only wants “to keep the lands it currently occupies.”
Already in 2008, Huckabee declared that “in reality there are no Palestinians.” In 2017, he said that “there is no West Bank, it is Judea and Samaria. There are no settler settlements, it is communities, neighborhoods, cities. There is no occupation of lands.” On June 1, 2025, Huckabee declared that if France wants a Palestinian state, then it must “give them” the French Riviera. And on July 25, on the occasion of France’s recognition of a Palestinian state, he wrote the following: “If Macron can ‘declare’ the existence of a state, then perhaps the United Kingdom can ‘declare’ the whole of France a British colony”!
The Swiss writer Max Frisch wrote in 1948 the play “Biedermann und die Brandstifter”, subtitled “a didactic play without a moral”. The plot of this black comedy, which has been interpreted mainly as an allegory for the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933, is as follows: Mr. Bidermann hosts two arsonists in his house, even though they declare from the beginning that they intend to set fire to it. Mr. Biedermann ignores all the elements that lead to the disaster, initially because he considers it all a simple joke and then out of fear. Eventually, he himself becomes an accomplice in the arson of his own house.
In the German language, the word that is identified with Mr. Biedermann's surname is today used derogatorily to describe the conventional, narrow-minded petty bourgeois with a sly and hypocritical conformist mentality, which often proves to be naive, unrealistic and self-destructive in the end.
To the question of who are the Biedermänner, who are the Arsonists and which house will burn in this tragicomedy, involving the revised Israel under Netanyahu on the one hand and the USA of MAGA Republicans, oilmen and Silicon Valley bro-oligarchs on the other, everyone can give their own provisional answer. For the final, it is better for us to be patient.
If there are any moral lessons to be learned from this story, here are two: First, some of the so-called “conservatives” not only do not aim to preserve, but are in fact subversive and destructive. Furthermore, some “conservatives” claim to be religious, supposedly faithful Christians, even with clerical duties. However, they persistently and with destructive fury attack the two pillars of Christian morality, the Sermon on the Mount and Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Just as some so-called “progressives” seek as progress forms of regression to old barbarities. The first lesson, then, is: Those who are not deluded and do not want to deceive others, instead of relying solely on the interpretative monopoly of concepts and political categorizations originating from the 18th or 19th Century, would do well to consider that each specific political force and each politician is in reality nothing more than how they really think and act on the most critical issues of the 21st.
And secondly, forces from the other side of the Atlantic, political and other, exercise this great influential power in the rest of the world, either as cunning arsonists, or as cunning Biedermen transmitters of stupidity, because (1) they have the material means (in this case they provide Israel, the Arab countries, as well as Europe, with weapons systems, protection and the privileges of the petro-dollar), and (2) because the whole world has been allowed to become culturally Americanized. This Americanization has been going on for many decades and is happening in many ways; the latest Trojan Horse is the transformation of specific forms of technology into a “school” of socialization and “civilization” of planetary dimensions, that is, into a comprehensive ideology and “spirit of our time” (Zeitgeist). Thus, along with strategic autonomy, Europe needs, to some extent, cultural autonomy. "Thank you America, but enough is enough!" must have two sides.
Greece and Israel: From the "big NO" to Ben-Gurion's Israel (UN) to the "strategic partnership" with Netanyahu's Israel.
How is Israel's political adventure involved with that of post-war Greece?
There are things that we do not discuss. This is very convenient today for all those who are manipulating and tailoring to their own liking the current agenda of our domestic Greek public debate. Thanks to silence, neither the old remember, nor the young learn. But nothing is erased if it is a historical event. No matter how much they pretend to forget, forerunners' scripta manent and haunt the descendants. In 1947, Greece was the only one of the then UN member states on the European continent (i.e. the victorious countries of World War II) that voted against the UN General Assembly's resolution ("Resolution 181 II") to partition Palestine. That is, it opposed the principle of the "two-state solution", Israeli and Palestinian.
In 1949, after the establishment of the state of Israel, Greece abstained from the vote to recognize this state as a member of the UN ("Resolution 273"). Britain, Sweden and Turkey did the same. The former, like Greece, had selfish reasons (with the 1947 resolution it had lost the mandate of Palestine). Sweden was still mourning the assassination of its top diplomat, member of the royal family, Count Folke Bernadotte, by the aforementioned terrorist organization Lehi.
Since then, much has happened and much has changed many times. But the Greek vote of November 1947 at the UN, its justification and the strange image of that Greece on the world map, remained a taboo subject in domestic public debate, and probably also in scientific research of our diplomatic history. However, is it a coincidence that this “original sin” was committed by the foreign policy of the only European country whose incompatible political factions were just then managing to continue World War II with their own Civil War?
Even worse: Subsequently, Greece never officially recognized that Israel of “true Zionism”, the Israel under the almost permanent domination of the Labor Party, Ben-Gurion, Eshkol, Golda Meir, and the first Rabin period.
Along with the other more weighty reasons (it's the "economy" stupids, that is, the heaviest of the Greek "heavy industries"), was it perhaps also the ideological aversion that the governing ERE-party (and then ND), let alone the junta, felt for anything that bore the label "Labor", "Socialist" and so on? And also, the persistent anti-Semitism in a large part of the popular base of the ND? Of course it was both. The first Greek Minister to visit Israel was Karolos Papoulias (1987). Forty years later. This is to the credit of PASOK, and indeed in defiance of the former rhetoric of this party in favor of Arab autocrats, when PASOK was oppositional party. It also shows something else: PASOK never had the ideological hardness and rigidity of the ND, and this difference continues to be seen even now. However, neither the ruling PASOK of Andreas Papandreou, supposedly a sister party to the ruling Labor Party in Israel, dared to fully and de jure recognize it after 1981, if we assume that the one-dimensional system of political coordinates “Right-Center-Left” has decisive power! But it does not.
Greece officially recognized Israel only in 1990, during the New Democracy (ND) government of Konstantin Mitsotakis. But it recognized an Israel governed by Yitzhak Shamir. It was now worthy of official recognition. It was an Israel well beyond the “turning point in history of the the Jewish people"; no longer full of kibbutzim, with the Orthodox Zionisms with socialist overtones now extinguished, an Israel harshly nationalistic and economically harshly liberal. Because, after Begin's “turning point", his old competitor in extremism, Shamir, was the leader who tοοk over. All this happened before Yitzhak Rabin, for a short time, won his second term, the fatal one for him and the death knell for Orthodox Zionism.
Thus, many in Greece, and especially in the New Democracy, always closely linked to the Republican Party of the USA, perhaps even imagined that by this recognition they exorcised the evils that bear names such as the Labor Party, Socialism, but also Zionism, "orthodox" Zionist Israel. But these "evils" were already being exorcised in reality, with words and bullets, by the descendants of Lehi and the Irgun.
It is never too late. The captains and the officers on the bridge of the ship "Greece" turned the international political course of the ship into the turbulent waters of the Near and Middle East when the most favorable time came for them.
After four decades and more of rejecting through "de facto informal relations" and "liaison offices" the Israel of Ben-Gurion, Meir and Rabin, and after in 1990 they sent the first clear signals of friendship to the Israel of Begin and Shamir, they finally became "strategic partners" with the Israel of Netanyahu. Starting measuredly from the period 2015-2019 under SYRIZA-ANEL of Alexis Tsipras and moving forward at full speed under ND of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, also with the consent of PASOK and many others, the new Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu, the most creative student of Begin and Shamir, finally convinced the difficult Greek potential partner.
But this work of persuasion was not achieved by Israel itself alone. Nor was the auxiliary “push” from Turkey, as an acting factor that incites reaction, sufficient. Others also helped immensely, as we will see in the second part that will follow. The oldest strategic, and mainly business, partners of those who exercise the most influence on the decisions made on the bridge of the ship “Greece”.
In this country, many people are very much deceived with excessive doses of "post-truth" on issues of history, old and very new. Much of this self-deception concerns the real history of our relations with the Middle East, with Israel and with the (oil-producing mainly) Arab countries.
Somehow, together with the "strategic partnership" of Greece, Cyprus and Israel, we have come to defend Greek Patriot batteries at the Aramco refineries in Saudi Arabia. And our Minister of Defense boasts that they protect the assets of the Wahhabi Royal Family of Saudi Arabia, a country with an absolute monarchy, without even a pretense of a legislature, a country - an arsonist rather* and not Biedermann. Saying that this is done for the sake of our own "standard of living". In simpler, less pompous Greek: For our energy.
Let us imagine how an observer from above the Near and Middle East would react, casting a sharp glance at today's Greece, but also at the puppet show in the USA, with the figure in power and the moving players, oilmen and bro-oligarchs of Silicon Valley, and at the Kremlin's butcher, the oil-powered would-be new Tamerlane. Such an observer, with a gaze that can see beyond his nose, with a sense of the tragic irony of our times, nevertheless with humor, and most importantly, equipped with the tools of logic, mathematics and the natural sciences, might remember William Blake's lines in the poem Jerusalem:
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
This rational observer would think that in such an era of international, geoeconomic and geopolitical paranoia, in the midst of a climate crisis (which the paranoid welcome and the completely confused pretend not to see), it is worth demonstrating logic and wisdom: When we say energy for the not-so-distant future, we mean mainly sun and wind.
In 1949, after the establishment of the state of Israel, Greece abstained from the vote to recognize this state as a member of the UN ("Resolution 273"). Britain, Sweden and Turkey did the same. The former, like Greece, had selfish reasons (with the 1947 resolution it had lost the mandate of Palestine). Sweden was still mourning the assassination of its top diplomat, member of the royal family, Count Folke Bernadotte, by the aforementioned terrorist organization Lehi.
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| November 1947: Greece was the only European country, then a member of the UN, to vote against the UN General Assembly's decision for a two-state solution. |
Even worse: Subsequently, Greece never officially recognized that Israel of “true Zionism”, the Israel under the almost permanent domination of the Labor Party, Ben-Gurion, Eshkol, Golda Meir, and the first Rabin period.
Along with the other more weighty reasons (it's the "economy" stupids, that is, the heaviest of the Greek "heavy industries"), was it perhaps also the ideological aversion that the governing ERE-party (and then ND), let alone the junta, felt for anything that bore the label "Labor", "Socialist" and so on? And also, the persistent anti-Semitism in a large part of the popular base of the ND? Of course it was both. The first Greek Minister to visit Israel was Karolos Papoulias (1987). Forty years later. This is to the credit of PASOK, and indeed in defiance of the former rhetoric of this party in favor of Arab autocrats, when PASOK was oppositional party. It also shows something else: PASOK never had the ideological hardness and rigidity of the ND, and this difference continues to be seen even now. However, neither the ruling PASOK of Andreas Papandreou, supposedly a sister party to the ruling Labor Party in Israel, dared to fully and de jure recognize it after 1981, if we assume that the one-dimensional system of political coordinates “Right-Center-Left” has decisive power! But it does not.
Greece officially recognized Israel only in 1990, during the New Democracy (ND) government of Konstantin Mitsotakis. But it recognized an Israel governed by Yitzhak Shamir. It was now worthy of official recognition. It was an Israel well beyond the “turning point in history of the the Jewish people"; no longer full of kibbutzim, with the Orthodox Zionisms with socialist overtones now extinguished, an Israel harshly nationalistic and economically harshly liberal. Because, after Begin's “turning point", his old competitor in extremism, Shamir, was the leader who tοοk over. All this happened before Yitzhak Rabin, for a short time, won his second term, the fatal one for him and the death knell for Orthodox Zionism.
Thus, many in Greece, and especially in the New Democracy, always closely linked to the Republican Party of the USA, perhaps even imagined that by this recognition they exorcised the evils that bear names such as the Labor Party, Socialism, but also Zionism, "orthodox" Zionist Israel. But these "evils" were already being exorcised in reality, with words and bullets, by the descendants of Lehi and the Irgun.
It is never too late. The captains and the officers on the bridge of the ship "Greece" turned the international political course of the ship into the turbulent waters of the Near and Middle East when the most favorable time came for them.
After four decades and more of rejecting through "de facto informal relations" and "liaison offices" the Israel of Ben-Gurion, Meir and Rabin, and after in 1990 they sent the first clear signals of friendship to the Israel of Begin and Shamir, they finally became "strategic partners" with the Israel of Netanyahu. Starting measuredly from the period 2015-2019 under SYRIZA-ANEL of Alexis Tsipras and moving forward at full speed under ND of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, also with the consent of PASOK and many others, the new Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu, the most creative student of Begin and Shamir, finally convinced the difficult Greek potential partner.
But this work of persuasion was not achieved by Israel itself alone. Nor was the auxiliary “push” from Turkey, as an acting factor that incites reaction, sufficient. Others also helped immensely, as we will see in the second part that will follow. The oldest strategic, and mainly business, partners of those who exercise the most influence on the decisions made on the bridge of the ship “Greece”.
In this country, many people are very much deceived with excessive doses of "post-truth" on issues of history, old and very new. Much of this self-deception concerns the real history of our relations with the Middle East, with Israel and with the (oil-producing mainly) Arab countries.
Somehow, together with the "strategic partnership" of Greece, Cyprus and Israel, we have come to defend Greek Patriot batteries at the Aramco refineries in Saudi Arabia. And our Minister of Defense boasts that they protect the assets of the Wahhabi Royal Family of Saudi Arabia, a country with an absolute monarchy, without even a pretense of a legislature, a country - an arsonist rather* and not Biedermann. Saying that this is done for the sake of our own "standard of living". In simpler, less pompous Greek: For our energy.
Let us imagine how an observer from above the Near and Middle East would react, casting a sharp glance at today's Greece, but also at the puppet show in the USA, with the figure in power and the moving players, oilmen and bro-oligarchs of Silicon Valley, and at the Kremlin's butcher, the oil-powered would-be new Tamerlane. Such an observer, with a gaze that can see beyond his nose, with a sense of the tragic irony of our times, nevertheless with humor, and most importantly, equipped with the tools of logic, mathematics and the natural sciences, might remember William Blake's lines in the poem Jerusalem:
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
This rational observer would think that in such an era of international, geoeconomic and geopolitical paranoia, in the midst of a climate crisis (which the paranoid welcome and the completely confused pretend not to see), it is worth demonstrating logic and wisdom: When we say energy for the not-so-distant future, we mean mainly sun and wind.
And perhaps he would conclude that these Satanic Mills are not worth even a shot from a Greek hunting rusty gun.
George V. Ritzoulis
* Saudi Leader Is Said to Push Trump to Continue Iran War in Recent Calls, New York Times, 24.3.2026
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sees a “historic opportunity” to remake the region, according to people briefed by U.S. officials on the conversations
Part Two to follow
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