Greece is an interesting case study of the nexus between rabid opposition to Israel and old-fashioned European anti-Semitism. Its socialist leaders have a long history of close ties to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and the Greek public is deeply mistrustful of the United States, in part because of U.S. support for the repressive junta that was deposed in 1974. A full 90 percent of Greeks opposed the war in Iraq, polls showed.
Greece is also an extremely homogenous country that only recently began allowing significant numbers of immigrants. About 97 percent of the native-born population is baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church, whose clerics have sometimes been accused of preaching anti-Semitism. There is little mention of the Holocaust or the fate of Greek Jews in the country’s school textbooks, according to an analysis by a professor at the University of Athens.
More than 90 percent of Greek Jews - about 70,000 - were deported to death camps by the Nazis during World War II.
Those who remain pick their battles carefully, and they express ambivalence about Greek anti-Semitism.
“Jews have never had it better here,” said Jean Cohen, a Greek-born Jewish correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But then Cohen, a Greek citizen, recounted how, when he was debating the Theodorakis remarks with a television commentator on the air, the man retorted: “You should respect the country that’s hosting you.”
“In my opinion, the Greek news media is anti-Semitic,” Cohen said later. He said newspapers frequently run stereotypical cartoons and make irrelevant references to someone’s Jewishness.
Too many Greeks blame Greek Jews for the policies of the state of Israel, said Constantinis, who hid with his family in a one-room flat during the German occupation.
Jews are often described in the Greek language as Israelites, and that word is often used interchangeably with Israeli.
“This is caused by anti-Semitism,” he said.
An even more aggressive critic is Panayotis Dimitras, a non-Jew who runs the Greek Helsinki Monitor, a human rights organization.
“We don’t have much violence here,” he said. “What we have much more of is anti-Semitic hate speech in mainstream media and in mainstream politics. And, most importantly, an absence of reaction. There is a tolerance of intolerance, because we have not been taught otherwise. There is no anti-racist education in Greece.”
In October, an internationally known Greek artist, Alexandros Psychoulis, began displaying a work featuring a Palestinian woman blowing herself up in a crowded Israeli supermarket.
In an interview, he professed to be mystified as to why Jewish activists had expressed revulsion over the piece.
“They’ve actually built this atmosphere without any real basis,” he said.
Last month, though, Psychoulis had a decidedly harsher take in remarks to Ta Nea, Greece’s largest daily newspaper.
“I personally feel that the experiment of Israel has failed,” he was quoted as saying, “and I understand the desperation of a girl who carries out a suicide bombing having nothing to lose.”
