How Israel's creation mirrors Greek independence - and why it's overlooked - opinion

The narrative surrounding Israel's establishment often focuses on its unique challenges, particularly the legitimacy questions raised by critics who doubt a dispersed people's right to reconstitute a state in their ancestral homeland. However, this perspective overlooks compelling historical parallels, most notably with the Greek War of Independence. Like Israel, modern Greece was born from a confluence of European intellectual currents and sustained by a vibrant diaspora, ultimately secured through a bloody territorial conflict that resulted in significant population displacement.

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Modern Greece shares more than a blue-and-white flag with Israel: both were forged through a European intellectual awakening, sustained by powerful diaspora communities, and won through bloody territorial wars that featured mass displacement of populations.

Both Jewish and Greek peoples possess deep historical roots in their respective regions, often predating many of their current neighbors. Communities in places like Odessa, Constantinople, and Alexandria existed for centuries, with Greeks and Jews sometimes being the original inhabitants before displacement left them as minorities. The establishment of the modern Kingdom of Greece in 1830, following its war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, mirrored Israel's situation in 1948: a new state with a relatively small core population, surrounded by larger diasporas and defined by war and demographic shifts. In both cases, the new states represented only a portion of the broader national population.

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Many Muslims – primarily Turks but also Albanian Muslims – were killed, expelled, or fled from areas that became Greece. By the early 1830s, the Muslim presence in the core territories of the new state had largely disappeared.

Crucially, the article highlights that the establishment of Greece involved the expulsion or flight of large Muslim populations, primarily Turks and Albanians, from territories that became part of the new Greek state. This historical parallel to the Palestinian refugee crisis of 1948 is often ignored. While the Greek War of Independence is widely accepted and celebrated, the similar circumstances surrounding Israel's founding—including the displacement of Arabs and the simultaneous exodus of nearly a million Jews from Arab countries—remain a subject of intense debate and criticism. This comparative analysis suggests that the international community's reception and understanding of these foundational historical events differ significantly, often to Israel's detriment, overlooking the shared patterns of nation-building through conflict and diaspora engagement.

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Famously, the 1948-49 war produced a major refugee crisis. About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs left or were expelled from the territory that became Israel, while at the same time and in the following years, almost a million Jews left or were expelled from Arab countries across the Middle East and North Africa, mostly resettling in Israel.