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Turkey's Rise Sparks New Friendship Between Israel and Greece
(Wall Street Journal) Yaroslav Trofimov - It's hard to find a better example of how geopolitical realities trump ideology than the blossoming friendship between Israel and Greece. In the 1980s and 1990s, Greece was among Israel's harshest critics and a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause. As the leader of Greece's leftist Syriza party before gaining office in 2015, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called to expel Israel's ambassador. Today, Tsipras has intensified cooperation with Israel. Turkish President Erdogan's increasingly hard-line foreign policy, which seeks to project Turkey's power across the region, threatened both Israel and Greece, uniting them like never before. "We have to...keep...in mind that to our east we are not neighboring Switzerland or Liechtenstein, but a very nervous and in some cases a very aggressive neighbor," said Yiannis Bournous, Tsipras' strategic planning chief.