Yanis Varoufakis says Greece is turning into an Israeli satellite at “breakneck speed.” He wrote it ten days ago, reacting to a Middle East Eye piece on how thoroughly the country has folded into Israel’s orbit. He meant the whole relationship, not any single deal. But if you want to see the speed itself, Monday is a good place to look.
That’s when Greece signs the biggest weapons deal Israel has ever sold to a foreign government: three and 3.6 billion euros, depending on which paper you’re reading, for a missile shield called Achilles’ Shield. Two Israeli companies split the work: Rafael, building the David’s Sling and SPYDER systems, and Israel Aerospace Industries, building Barak MX. Three years of negotiation got it here. The paperwork was signed in Tel Aviv, between Greek defense procurement officials and SIBAT, the export arm of Israel’s defense ministry.
Three years is also, more or less, how long Israel’s offensive in Gaza has run, a campaign that has killed tens of thousands of children by UNICEF’s own count. At least 21,289 Palestinian children had been killed as of this February, and another 300 have died in the roughly 300 days since a ceasefire supposedly began, an average of one child a day even now. The negotiating table and the killing shared the same calendar.
That’s the story every news organization is running this weekend, in Athens and in Tel Aviv alike. And here is the line none of them are putting next to it. The country selling Greece its new air shield is, this same week, still trying and failing to explain itself to the International Court of Justice.
South Africa’s genocide case against Israel has been sitting on that Court’s docket since December 2023. In January 2024, the judges found a plausible risk that genocidal acts were underway in Gaza and ordered provisional measures requiring Israel to prevent them and let humanitarian aid through. Within a month, Human Rights Watch found that Israel was doing neither. Then last September, the UN’s own Independent International Commission of Inquiry went further than the Court had. Chaired by Navi Pillay, a former ICC judge, it found that Israel had committed four of five genocidal acts as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention. Article I of that convention, the one Greece ratified decades ago along with 152 other states, commits every signatory to “prevent and to punish” genocide, not merely to sit out of committing it themselves.
Varoufakis has been saying versions of this for a year, each time a little sharper, building to the line that opens this piece. Last September, marking the war’s first anniversary, he told Anadolu Agency his party would fight the Greek government in the streets over what he called its complicity in “Israel’s genocide”. In March, he told the Turkish paper Hürriyet that Greece had become a “satellite” of Israel and the United States. By this month, reacting to the Middle East Eye piece, he’d landed on breakneck speed.
That piece is worth reading past its headline. It quotes Konstantinos Isychos, a former Greek deputy defense minister, calling the alliance “a double suicide”: if a genocide passes unpunished, he argues, the precedent set is one that could someday be turned on Greeks themselves.
It cites a 2026 Pew poll putting Greek opposition to the partnership at 65 percent. It reports that Israel warned its own citizens last week, ahead of nationwide pro-Palestine marches, not to advertise their nationality in public. And it traces rising rents in Athens and on the islands, a real and sore subject, to a wave of Israeli property buyers.
Two-thirds of the country wanting no part of this alliance hasn’t slowed the government down for a single day. Mitsotakis’s cabinet approved Achilles’ Shield anyway, expanded the trilateral pact with Cyprus anyway, and is now closing the largest weapons contract Israel has ever signed with a foreign buyer, three years into a war most Greeks already told pollsters they want no part of. Greece isn’t unusual here, just unusually documented.
Gallup found American approval of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza at 32 percent last summer, a record low, with 60 percent disapproving. More than a third of Americans, and a majority of Democrats, told pollsters this spring that Washington should stop arming Israel altogether; Senate resolutions to block individual weapons shipments have been introduced and voted down every year since the war began. Even in Germany, a poll this spring found 58 percent backing a pause on arms exports to Israel; the shipments didn’t pause. Three governments, three publics saying roughly the same thing, and none of it reaching the room where the contracts get signed.
That last part runs a little ahead of the numbers. Israeli arrivals to Greece hit a record 743,841 last year, up almost 20 percent from 2024 and up 264,000 from 2023. Investment from Israel, over that same stretch, actually dropped, from 129 million euros to 86 million. Whatever is driving up rents on Naxos or in Koukaki, it isn’t yet showing up in the embassy’s own ledger. The tourism is real. The colonization story is, for now, mostly vibes.
None of that stops Monday from happening. There’s a handshake in Tel Aviv, a signing table, a press release the ministry runs by evening, and nowhere in the frame: the 21,289 children, the emergency measures a court ordered and Israel never met, the word genocide that by now sits as comfortably in UN filings as it does on a protest sign.
In the Iliad, the shield Hephaestus forges for Achilles carries the whole world across its surface: weddings and harvests, a city at war and a city at peace, men plowing their fields under the shadow of the fighting. Homer wanted every part of it visible. The shield Greece is buying does the opposite. What it’s designed to keep off the surface is simple: a genocide against the Palestinian people, one the world’s highest court and the UN’s own investigators have already put a name to.
And Israel will still devour Greece, given the chance
Why was Angela’s reply hidden? Was there anything objectionable or untrue about it?
Angela, if you are seeing this, you get a thousand upvotes from me.