EDITORIAL

For years before the current catastrophe struck, the very few and far between in this country, who kept insisting that the numbers simply did not add up and the whole storefront was bound to collapse in one fell swoop, were treated as pariahs.

Currently, they have the bitter satisfaction of knowing they were correct all along and everybody else was wrong, including those who posed as “experts,” “diplomats,” “academics,” and the assorted riffraff that man the decks of “investigative journalism” in Greece.

Dr. Shlomo Shpiro
(Deputy Head of the Political Studies Department at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He has been closely cooperating with Greek academics for almost two decades)

Copyright: www.rieas.gr

An old proverb in the Middle East says that necessity makes good friends. It could not have been better illustrated as in the case of the Greek-Israeli relations, which are now seeing both countries move closer than ever before. But the recent closeness is not only a matter of changing regional interests – it is also the result of generational changes which transcend old animosities and bring together cold political realities with cultural and historical heritage.

The visit of the Greek prime minister George Papandreou to Israel on July 21-22 has been cautiously greeted as a new beginning in Greek- Israeli relations. Greece has traditionally shunned expanded relations with the Jewish state. In a way, it is an irony of history that the incumbent Greek prime minister took the initiative to pay a visit to Israel: his late father, Andreas Papandreou, was an unabashed friend of the PLO and Yassir Arafat and missed no opportunity, while he was prime minister of Greece, to publicly slam and vilify Israel with complete abandon. It was in December 1981 that Papandreou the Elder granted the PLO equal diplomatic status to that of Israel (but, in the background, even a ‘non-aligned’ firebrand like the old Papandreou was quietly searching for ways to improve ties with Israel, beginning with the signing of bilateral cultural and commercial agreements in 1984).

The International Monetary Fund has just issued an interim report titled “Greece: Stand-By Arrangement -- Review Under the Emergency Financing Mechanism.” Let’s do a reality check and explain what lies behind some of this template language, so familiar to those who actually have the guts and the time to apply themselves to such reading. Plain “on the ground” English actually shows the real facts hidden behind these eery “technocratic” documents. Text in italics is lifted verbatim from the report.

The Greek government was “surprised,” newspapers said, because, suddenly, Turkey sent one of its hydrographic vessels to loiter in the northern Aegean near the Greek island of Samothrace performing, the Turks said, updating of navigational charts! This was a tin excuse of course, but the Turks aren’t amateurs at this. Ever since the Imia crisis in 1996, they have been working persistently at creating tensions and “incidents” that can be then woven permanently into a broader scheme of pushing Greek sovereignty in the Aegean back and advancing their own interpretation of the so-called “gray zones” theory in the Archipelago.

The catastrophic fiscal crisis that is rapidly consuming Greece, with the unabashed and eager help of her own government, is having many unintended consequences, aside from viciously impoverishing millions of Greeks and returning them to the level of standard-of-living expectations of the 1960s. As bone-crushing deficits, plain and hidden, consume large swaths of the country’s public sector, the Lego construction of the current Greek state reveals itself in all its awe-inspiring glory and structural brittleness.