Against Insularity

The Greek island of Syros is mentioned in The Odyssey: the titular hero’s swineherd, Eumaeus, tells us that his home island is “not so packed with people, still a good place, though, fine for sheep and cattle, rich in wine and wheat.”^[1] Approaching Syros’s harbor city of Ermoupolis today, however, travelers weaned on these Arcadian visions will instead be confronted by the fruits of nineteenth-century industry. When Gérard de Nerval landed in Ermoupolis in 1842, the new city, draped over two vertiginous hills, began to melt in the hallucinatory swirl of Parisian flânerie: the view suggested first a sugared loaf of bread, then a Babylonian city, and finally the floating citadel of Laputa from Gulliver’s Travels (1726).^[2] Surreal, exotic, futuristic, Ermoupolis was far from what he had been led to expect from the birthplace of Western civilization.

Nerval’s fanciful vision nonetheless attests to the seismic upheavals of the modern nation-state that were still tremoring in the 1840s: only twenty years earlier, a large influx of Greek Orthodox refugees from Chios, fleeing massacre by the Turks, had arrived on the island. It was one of many instances of diaspora, population exchange, and exile that would define the traumatic course of Greek history up until our present day. Before long, these refugees turned the small Cycladic island into Greece’s first site of modern industry. Ermoupolis quickly grew into the busiest port in the new nation during the 1840s and 1850s, a cosmopolitan crossroads and de facto gateway to the Levant: Nerval would proceed from Syros onward to Alexandria, and returned there from Syria; Herman Melville would pass through the island on his journey to and from Palestine in 1856–1857, composing the poem “Syra” in honor of that same hallucinatory hill.^[3] In Ermoupolis, both men observed sailors speaking a language rich in loan words from Albanian, Turkish, and Arabic, wearing tasseled fez caps and silks, smoking and playing card games. For Western travelers like Nerval and Melville, however, the sights and sounds of Syros, and the new nation of Greece it emblematized, were bewildering and, at times, disappointing, as they attempted the difficult reconciliation of philhellenic fantasy with modern reality through their writing. It was the first instance of a process of calibration, ongoing today, in which the modern nation of Greece—diverse, incongruous, and unruly—is forced into the phantasmatic frame of Western understanding.

For Nerval, it began with a painting. He had sailed to Syros from the island of Cythera, where he was distraught not to find the pastoral lovers of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s tribute to the “isle of Aphrodite” in his rococo masterpiece The Embarkation for Cythera (1717).^[4] The painting’s hazy ambiguity—art historians have debated, the artwork’s title notwithstanding, whether the band of revelers are returning home from Cythera, or instead departing for Cythera—seems to have colored Nerval’s own difficulty with cognitive mapping during his Aegean sojourn.^[5] Syros was already lowered in Nerval’s estimation on discovering that it was not in fact Scyros, the isle once home to Achilles, and had only the obscure pre-Socratic philosopher Pherecydes to boast of as an ancient inhabitant. Syros’s arid landscape was a wasteland, in which the much-eulogized death of Pan was made palpable: after ascending to the church of Agios Georgios, crowning the Catholic settlement of Ano Syros, Nerval is less interested in the living monument than in gazing in dismay at Delos on the horizon, the “island of Apollo” now reduced, in his eyes, to a chunk of rock. Syros nevertheless possessed an intriguing exoticism befitting the “levant, pays d’aventure”: women wore the veil, after the Turkish fashion, and Nerval (anticipating his countryman Bernard Henri-Lévy 150 years later) wistfully longs for the day when he’ll finally gaze on their beautiful faces.^[6] Melville, too, is momentarily dazzled by Ermoupolis’s seeming distance from Europe: browsing its wharves, he marvels at “Fez-caps, swords, tobacco, shawls / Pistols, and orient finery” but laments the fact that they “Lay orderless in such a loose way / As to suggest things ravished or gone astray.”^[7]

Syros was not the only pilgrimage spot that seemed, to the Western eye, to have withered on the vine of ancient vitality. When Melville’s ship reached Palestine, his heart sank, just as it had on Syros: “No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine—particularly Jerusalem,” he wrote in his journal.^[8] The Holy Sepulchre was “a sickening cheat,” and it is again the arid landscape, lacking the bloom of Western painting, that pains the traveler: “Judea is one accumulation of stones.”^[9] He also saw Christian Zionist missionaries, for whom he had little sympathy: they were in the grips of a “preposterous Jew mania” that was “half melancholy, half farcical.”^[10] These forces would, of course, soon accelerate during the 1880s, as Zionism expanded beyond its initial Christian purview to inspire Jewish settlers to colonize Palestine. Yet what is less well-known is that the Greek revolution played a crucial role in this process: before Zionists sought to “make the desert bloom,” Hellenism had to bring Watteau’s lush arcadia to life.

While the Greek independence struggle emerged from an indigenous population, it involved a similar uprooting of centuries-old Ottoman multiculturalism in favor of British-sponsored nationalism. Nerval and Melville may have been “mere” writers, but the creation of the modern state of Greece obeyed a similar aestheticizing logic. Before Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron glorified the return of ancient Athens in their poetry, the Greek independence struggle was born out of a fragile coordination of Peloponnesian brigands, the quasi-aristocratic “Phanariot” Greeks of Constantinople, and Odessa-based merchants all pushing for the romeiko, the restitution of Christian Byzantium. This vision was only gradually rerouted toward ancient Greece as it became increasingly clear that philhellenic western European ministers, whose support Greek diplomats were soliciting, harbored a fantasy of Greece as a land of hoplites reviving the republic of Athens.^[11] From the moment Alexandros Mavrokordatos, a diplomat living in Pisa with Percy and Mary Shelley, decided to write to British Foreign Secretary George Canning requesting military assistance against the Turks, Greece forfeited a degree of its sovereignty: the British would go on to install an eighteen-year-old German prince, King Otto I, as the new nation’s first monarch.^[12] The three parties that dominated Greek politics in its early decades were called the English Party, the French Party, and the Russian party, each shamelessly signaling their allegiances. The proper backdrop for this democratic politics to play out, was, of course, the birthplace of democracy: Athens. While the city had dwindled, since its heyday in the fifth century BC, to a village of around four thousand people, this attenuation made it the perfect blank slate for Otto and his British backers to project their Hellenistic fantasy: a new city was constructed, in “Greek Revival” style, by German architects Eduard Schaubert and Leo von Klenze.

The relative success of Hellenism, in appearing to resuscitate a two-thousand-year-old culture purged of foreign influences, prompted European intellectuals to look for the origins of Europe and its intellectual framework in antiquity, finding a unique world-historical link in ancient Greece and Palestine. These nineteenth-century philhellenes seemed to discover a transparent window onto the past, discovering classical Greek thought free of its mediation by medieval Arab philosophy. For thinkers like Matthew Arnold, the synthesis of Hebraism and Hellenism led to a confident humanism, marrying the former’s “strictness of conscience” with the latter’s “spontaneity of consciousness.”^[13] As these currents became cross-pollinated with social Darwinism during the 1860s and 1870s, however, racially minded anatomists drew on the image of the athletic Greek body, as portrayed in fifth-century BC sculpture, as a physical ideal. From this point on, the athletic Greek—the “Aryan” ideal championed by Nazism—became a corrective for the neurotic Jew and was embraced, with a manner of self-hate, by Zionism: Max Nordau and Ze’ev Jabotinsky formulated their notions of “muscular Judaism” and the “New Jew”, respectively, after having immersed themselves in the philhellenic writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.^[14]

Jabotinsky’s ideology lives on in the legacy of the Nakba, as well as in the contemporary Likud party fueling the Israeli war effort. This is a Zionism for which Hellenism retains a symbolic and strategic importance: in response to the UN Commission’s finding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, President Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech proclaiming that the country would deal with its growing isolation by becoming “Athens and super-Sparta,” adapting to an economy with “autarkic characteristics.”^[15] When Greek president Kyriakos Mitsotakis visited Israeli premier Isaac Herzog in Jerusalem last March, the latter stated that Israel and Greece represent “two ancient peoples. Our free civilizations started in Athens and Jerusalem.”^[16] Easy for statesmen to sustain as an abstract ideal, this vision begins to fray on the ground. Athens may have named its wide boulevards after British diplomats a century before Tel Aviv would do the same, but look closely at the fading pastel walls of the heavily touristed Plaka neighborhood and you will see “Free Palestine” and “Death to the IDF” graffiti, often with pro-Israel slogans scrawled over them. When Israel’s ambassador to Greece, Noam Katz, chastised Athens’s mayor, Haris Doukas, for not doing more to prevent “organized minorities” putting up the anti-Zionist graffiti, Doukas responded, “We don’t take democracy lessons from those who kill civilians and children in food aid queues.”^[17] Even Athens, the pride of a reconstructed Hellenism, seems to have turned into a thing ravished and gone astray.

This tendency to “stray” ensures that Greece, far from being the serene repository of Western civilization, is instead the place where the fragile boundaries of “the West” are continually re-constructed and policed. While Netanyahu has found a willing partner, for the time being, in Mitsotakis, the long arc of modern Greek history reveals a people continually diverging from their state’s programming by Western powers. Greece, after all, was the incubator in which the Cold War erupted, during the Greek Civil War of 1946–1949, and was one of the few countries to vote against the 1947 UN resolution on Israeli statehood due to fears of destabilizing countries like Egypt and Lebanon that included large Greek communities. Under Andreas Papandreou’s socialist government, it became an asylum for Yasser Arafat and the PLO during the 1980s, and the center of the converging Eurozone and refugee crises in the 2010s. The West’s longed-for hoplites never arrived, a crime for which they never forgave the Greeks: during the debt crisis, cartoons proliferated in German and Dutch newspapers of overweight, lazy Greeks asking for EU handouts.^[18] As the historian Mark Mazower argued in 2021, the Greek war for independence is in some ways still ongoing.^[19]

Independence must be understood here also as independence from the past and the projective fantasies associated with it. Syros is one of the places where this struggle has been most forcefully articulated: an island forging a cosmopolitan future in the absence of the markers of antiquity. The English archaeologist and explorer Theodore Bent visited Syros in the waning days of its economic prowess in 1882, and while sharing Nerval and Melville’s prejudices, he nonetheless attained a greater lucidity in articulating the quixotic aspect of Western intervention in Greece: “The Powers created a kingdom out of a barren, unproductive country, sparsely inhabited, and without any of the sinews of wealth; they expected this country to produce at once all the fine qualities for which their ancestors had been celebrated, and were naturally disappointed.”^[20] While granting that “future ages will quote this little spot as the brightest specimen of activity produced by the revival of the long dormant spirit of independence in Greece,” Bent does not like the look of Greek independence.^[21] He finds Ermoupolis “horribly worldly” and concludes his chapter devoted to Syros with a curt dismissal: “During our rambles in the Cyclades we visited it many times, and were always glad to get out of it, savouring as it did too much of this busy age.”^[22]

All the publicity of Homer, Nerval, Melville, and Bent, however, did little to prepare Syros for the harsher and brighter spotlights directed toward it when the island entered international news last July, as approximately three hundred protestors held a demonstration against the Israeli cruise ship Crown Iris in protest of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Initial reports claimed the 1,600 passengers were prevented from disembarking, but participants in the protest told Drop Site News that while a majority of passengers stayed on board due to security concerns, small numbers left the ship and returned on board before it departed ahead of schedule. Protestors held Palestinian flags and banners reading “Stop the Genocide” and “No A/C in Hell,” while passengers on board the ship responded by unfurling Israeli flags and yelling “May your village burn,” a phrase brandished by Israeli right-wing extremists, and chanting “Death to Arabs” and “Gaza is a graveyard.”^[23]

National and municipal government officials from Greece, eager to remain the economic beneficiary of Israeli tourism, focused their ire on the Syros protestors, issuing quick condemnations of the protests as anti-Semitic and attributing them to outside agitators.^[24] These claims appeared to slide off the backs of protestors, however, and the incident has had a snowballing effect on Palestinian activism throughout the Greek islands. It prompted citizens of Rhodes and Crete to take similar action against the Crown Iris, only to be met by police armed with riot gear and tear gas who ensured the Israelis’ disembarkation. A mass “Day of Action” organized by leftist and anarchist groups followed across all the islands of the Cyclades on August 10, reported to be one of the biggest protests in the islands in decades.^[25] Two boats comprising the Greek mission of the Gaza-bound Global Sumud Flotilla left from Syros on September 14, after hundreds of residents organized a mass mobilization to pressure the municipal port authority to let them set sail from Ermoupolis.^[26] Organizers invoked the Crown Iris protests as inspiration: “We begin from Syros because here a wave of resistance and solidarity was born, spreading throughout Greece. From the same port where residents shouted ’No to complicity’ and proved that communities can stand up against ‘genocide tourism,’ now begins a journey linking local societies with the struggle of a people for justice.”^[27]

The Syros protest remains the most heavily mediatized event from Greece’s now-extensive Palestine solidarity movement. Almost every news story displayed the video of the Crown Iris facing off against the amphitheatrical city of Ermoupolis, as the town continues, just as it did in the nineteenth century, to “savour too much of a busy age”: one of the Crown Iris passengers, American-born Israeli Barbara Sofer, lamented that she and her family were looking for “a little touristy shopping” on Syros only to be met by a “Stop the Genocide” sign, “in English.”^[28] She goes on to mischaracterize Syros as a “small, isolated island, where the economy hinges on tourists like us,” while a report from Combat Antisemitism Movement accused the protestors of “turning tourist stops into battlegrounds.”^[29] These islands, however, far from being mere tourist destinations, were turned into battlegrounds long ago by Anglo-American intervention during the Cold War. While Ermoupolis today remains one of the most beautiful and lively towns in Greece, Syros still bears the scars of this history. Greece’s anti-communist government turned the islet of Gyaros off Syros’s northwestern coast into a concentration camp, dubbed the “Dachau of the Mediterranean,” that housed twenty thousand communist prisoners during the civil war; the number of deaths is unknown as many dying prisoners were taken to a local hospital on Syros in order to obscure the true death toll.^[30] In this regard, the protest against the Crown Iris aligns less with European protests than with similar “viral” refusals of Israeli tourists by hospitality workers in Vietnam and Japan: places that have also suffered the brunt of American imperialist violence and choose to protest Israel as its latest iteration of economic coercion.

Greek solidarity with Palestine, to a large degree sustained by the ports and islands of the Aegean Sea, is thus categorically different from that of continental Europe. Modern Greek history has witnessed the transformation of the eastern Mediterranean from a space of intercultural exchange—some of the first iron-screw olive presses arrived in Jaffa, in the late nineteenth century, from Piraeus—into one of militarized privilege.^[31] The protests today are animated by a desire to resist this metamorphosis: a week before the Crown Iris protest, Piraeus dockworkers, supported by thousands of protestors, refused to transfer military-grade steel to a ship bound for Israel.^[32] Syros protestors took inspiration from this gesture, handing out flyers highlighting Greece’s tightening “economic, technological and military” relationship with Israel: “As residents of Syros but more so as human beings, we are taking action that we hope will contribute to stopping this destruction from the genocidal war that is taking place in our neighbourhood.”^[33]

Protestors from the “Day of Action” emphasized that their issue is not just with tourists, but also “Airbnb real estate owners and other investors from Israel that keep engaging in provocative behavior.”^[34] Under the Mitsotakis administration, Israeli weapons and security contractors such as Elbit Systems have entered into contracts with the Greek government for tens of millions of euros, supplying military training and tech development with the goal of providing Greece with its own iron dome missile defense system.^[35] Due to Mitsotakis’s support, Israel already enjoys a remarkable ease of operation across the eastern Mediterranean: Greece allowed Netanyahu to fly over its airspace in violation of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant issued last year, which, as UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese has pointed out, constituted an abdication of its duty to arrest him under international law.^[36] The Greek portion of Cyprus hosts the British military bases of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, from which British fighter jets leave to collect intelligence on Gaza on Israel’s behalf. These operations are conducted with dubious transparency, as Keir Starmer was filmed awkwardly telling the assembled pilots at Akrotiri: “Though we’re really proud of what you’re doing, we can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing here.”^[37]

Israel’s impunity, as seen in this fluid circulation of weapons, war planes, and intelligence two years into a genocide, as well as their current and long-standing drone-targeting of flotillas bringing humanitarian aid to Gaza, is rendered fleetingly visible via the protests’ obstruction of the Crown Iris. Protestors are also united over the concern that IDF soldiers, having committed war crimes in the Gaza strip, will incite violent incidents in Greece.^[38] David Hadar, an IDF sergeant, was recently arrested after attacking three Palestinian demonstrators in Athens.^[39] Western media outlets, however, deliberately ignore this context in their framing of the protestors’ actions. The New York Times even writes that the Greek protests came as “a rude shock” to Israelis, for whom Greece had become their “home away from home.”^[40] This solipsism is typical of the first-person perspective that the Times often affords Israelis and virtually never grants to Palestinians, as the article opens with a pulse-pounding scenario straight out of 24 or Homeland: Israeli teenager Shahar Gutman hopping over walls on the island of Rhodes in the early morning and sending his mother “the kind of text message no mother wants to receive.” Co-written by Isabel Kershner, whose husband and two sons have both served in the Israeli military, the article does not strain journalistic impartiality as much as it brazenly flouts it.^[41] We only learn halfway through the article, from Greek police, that “the altercation started with the Israelis chanting pro-Israeli slogans and the other group of patrons responding with pro-Palestinian chants.” Kershner nonetheless grants a lofty pulpit to Gutman’s mother, who tells us that the pro-Palestinians “appeared to speak a language other than Greek”; the Greek police tell Kershner and her co-writer that “the nationality of the pro-Palestinians remained unclear.” This phrase is more resonant than the Times is perhaps aware of—the experience of Greek history has indeed shown that Palestinian solidarity reveals the cracked fault line of the Greek nation, and perhaps the very concept of the nation itself.

One of the boats which left Syros to join the Sumud Flotilla is named the Oxygono (“Oxygen”) in memory of George Floyd’s final words, “I can’t breathe,” adopted as a slogan by the Black Lives Matter movement. While American liberals and conservatives alike are fond of painting these connections as a kind of dorm-room free association on the part of Palestine activists, the dockworkers of Piraeus, the protestors on Syros, as well as Palestinians themselves, understand that these struggles are materially connected: American weapons enforce both violent regimes, with Israeli security and intelligence re-emboldening and training American police in a positive feedback loop.^[42] The philosopher Kojin Karatani has characterized our globalized economy as one in which “we cannot know how we are mutually connected, while it is this ungraspable spatial ‘whole’ that morally forbids us to claim our mutual unrelatedness.”^[43] The merchant class of Ermoupolis emerged in the nineteenth century out of the interstices of Europe and Asia, naming themselves after Hermes, the god of messages and exchange. Now, after dockworkers in Genoa followed the lead of those in Piraeus, igniting general strikes across Italy, and after the Israeli hijacking of the Sumud Flotilla inspired protests across Europe, Syros once again refuses to be unrelated.^[44] Where Western eyes insist on finding Greece and only Greece, Syros insists on showing us the world.