Benjamin Netanyahu did not surprise anyone at the United Nations. He came to defend Israel, confront its enemies and repeat arguments the world has heard many times before. What deserves closer attention is how much wider he chose to draw the circle of confrontation — taking aim not only at Iran, but at Qatar and Turkey. And there, standing increasingly close to Israel at a particularly dangerous moment, is Greece.
By the Editorial Team of TLF
Benjamin Netanyahu went to the UN General Assembly and, in many ways, delivered exactly the speech one would have expected from him.
There was the defiance. There was the defence of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and its military campaign against Iran. And there was the familiar presentation of Israel as a country surrounded by enemies and forced to fight because, in Netanyahu’s words, “we have no other choice.”
None of this was particularly surprising.
What was more striking was the breadth of the confrontation Netanyahu chose to stage from the podium of the United Nations.
Iran was there, inevitably. But so were Qatar and Turkey.
Netanyahu accused Qatar of spending billions to spread hostility towards Israel and of seeking to “brainwash young minds” against Israel and the West. Then he turned towards Turkey, accusing Ankara of hosting Hamas and personally attacking President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a “tyrant.”
Israel has genuine security disputes with all three countries, although they are very different disputes and should not simply be placed in the same basket. Iran is Israel’s principal regional military adversary. Qatar has maintained relations with Hamas while also serving as a mediator. Turkey, once an important Israeli partner, has become one of the Israeli government’s fiercest critics.
There are legitimate questions about the relationships that governments in Doha, Ankara and Tehran have maintained with Hamas and other armed movements hostile to Israel.
Those questions should be asked.
But there is another question worth asking after Netanyahu’s speech: where does this politics of permanent confrontation actually lead?
The Levant does not lack enemies. It does not lack missiles, militias, grievances, historical wounds or governments convinced that greater pressure will finally make the other side retreat.
What it desperately lacks are exits.
Someone eventually has to negotiate the ceasefire. Someone has to carry the message between capitals that refuse to speak directly. Someone has to arrange the exchange, calm the border, release the prisoner, bring home the hostage or simply pick up the telephone before another missile is launched.
That is why diplomacy sometimes requires talking to governments one profoundly distrusts.
Turning every disagreement into another public front may feel satisfying from a UN podium. It does not necessarily make Israel safer. And in a region already stretched dangerously close to its limits, rhetoric has a habit of acquiring consequences of its own.
And Then There Is Athens
Greece should understand this better than most.
Only hours around Netanyahu’s appearance at the General Assembly, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met his Israeli counterpart in New York.
According to Netanyahu’s office, the Israeli leader emphasised the strategic partnership between Greece and Israel, welcomed Athens’ acquisition of Israeli defence systems, and discussed energy cooperation, regional developments and plans for another Greece-Cyprus-Israel trilateral summit.
There is nothing extraordinary, much less objectionable in itself, about Greece having a strategic relationship with Israel. Countries cooperate. Greece has security interests in the Eastern Mediterranean. Israel has security interests there too.
The danger begins when a relationship becomes political theatre — when friendship with Israel starts being presented implicitly as evidence that Greece belongs to the stronger camp in an increasingly divided region.
For Athens, that temptation is especially dangerous.
Mitsotakis is navigating domestic pressure from his right, including the continuing political presence of former prime minister Antonis Samaras and the broader far-right space. Against that background, a close strategic relationship with a militarily powerful Israel can also carry domestic political symbolism.
But Greek foreign policy cannot afford to become an extension of Greece’s internal political competition.
Turkey will still be across the Aegean tomorrow morning.
The Arab world will still surround much of Greece’s wider neighbourhood.
The Palestinians will still exist.
And Greece will still need diplomatic relationships that extend considerably further than whichever regional alliance happens to look strongest at a particular moment.
Greece Has Another Tradition
There is another Greece, too, and it should not disappear from this conversation.
It is the Greece whose citizens have repeatedly marched for Palestine; the Greece that historically maintained close relations with the Arab world; the Greece that understood that friendship with one people did not require hostility towards another.
Few Greeks embodied that tradition more powerfully than Mikis Theodorakis.
And here the history deserves to be told accurately because it is richer than the mythology.
Theodorakis did not write the melody of today’s official Palestinian national anthem, “Fida’i.” The Palestinian Embassy in Egypt identifies the composer as the Egyptian musician Ali Ismail and the lyricist as Palestinian poet Said Al Muzayin. But the same official Palestinian account records that Theodorakis re-orchestrated the anthem in 1981 as a symbolic expression of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
And his involvement went further.
In 1982, at Yasser Arafat’s request, Theodorakis composed a separate work generally catalogued as the Palestinian Anthem or Hymn of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Theodorakis’s own musical catalogue lists the Palestinian Anthem as an orchestral work from 1982, while IRCAM records it as having been commissioned by Arafat.
That distinction matters.
Theodorakis was not merely a famous Greek musician who occasionally spoke about Palestine. His solidarity entered his music. At a moment when Greece was redefining its international identity after dictatorship, one of the most recognisable figures in modern Greek culture was deliberately building a cultural bridge towards the Palestinian people.
Nobody needs to reproduce the foreign policy of 1982 in 2026.
But Greece should remember what that history says about itself.
Supporting Israel’s right to security does not require silence about Palestinian rights.
Cooperating with Israel does not require treating Turkey as an eternal enemy.
Disagreeing profoundly with Qatar does not mean destroying every diplomatic bridge to Doha.
And opposing Iran does not make permanent regional escalation inevitable.
The Trap Of Permanent Confrontation
That is ultimately what was troubling about Netanyahu’s UN appearance.
Not that it surprised us.
It did not.
The danger lies precisely in how unsurprising this language has become.
One enemy becomes three. Three become five. Every disagreement becomes existential. Every mediator becomes suspect because it also speaks to the other side. Every country is eventually asked which camp it belongs to.
That logic has consumed the Levant before.
Greece should be particularly careful not to import it into the Eastern Mediterranean.
Athens can be Israel’s partner without becoming part of every Israeli confrontation. It can strengthen its defences without turning its rivalry with Turkey into somebody else’s proxy struggle. And it can maintain close relations with Israel while remembering the Palestinian people and the long Greek tradition of solidarity with them.
The image of Mikis Theodorakis standing beside Yasser Arafat belongs to another era.
The principle behind it does not.
Sometimes a small country earns influence not by shouting more loudly than everyone else, but by keeping doors open when everyone around it is busy slamming them shut.
Netanyahu came to New York to remind the world who Israel considers its enemies.
Greece should resist the temptation to inherit that list.
Photo: A critical illustration, create by the AI technology
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