From Seas of Solidarity to Circuits of Empire: How Energy Remade the Mediterranean

In Le Bateau de l’Exil (1982), Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab follows Yasser Arafat in exile from Beirut across the Mediterranean seas to Greece, and Tunis. Aboard the Atlantis ship Arafat is candid on the “huge responsibility” he carries in that moment as a “freedom fighter for the Palestinian Revolution.” Yet it is on arrival in Athens that his body takes a breath, in a tender embrace shared with Andreas Papandreou—the then Greek Prime Minister. The two leaders had grown close during the Greek Junta (1967-1974) when the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) offered military training to Greek resistance fighters in the Panhellenic Liberation Movement, founded by Papandreou. Arafat, welcomed with fanfare, had arrived in the arms of comradeship and friendship. 

Historical comradeship is not contained in Greece. Across the same seas, Cyprus housed and nursed wounded Palestinian liberation fighters from the war in Lebanon (1982). The PLO presence in Cyprus was treated as an honour and supported by the government. Cypriot Youth Unions danced and sang at their bedside, proudly wearing Keffiyehs in celebration. This solidarity was neither symbolic nor fleeting. During the 1980s, many PLO fighters relocated to Cyprus, using Cypriot radio transmitters to communicate and moving Palestinian newspapers to Nicosia. Solidarity existed across the divide, with Turkish-speaking Cypriots and Greek-speaking Cypriots protesting the Zionist occupation of Palestine. We see how both countries were once a haven for Palestinian revolutionaries, the Eastern Mediterranean a corridor of anti-colonial solidarity and exchange. 

Four decades on, the scene looks quite different. December 2025, we arrive in a sterile room with plastic stands and corporate chic décor. Three world leaders – Greece, Cyprus and Israel – stand brazen, committing to further defence and military cooperation with Israel amid an ongoing genocide in Palestine. In occupied Jerusalem, the 10^th trilateral meeting unfolds as leaders agree to joint military exercises, the transfer of defence technologies and exchanges on counter-terrorism programmes. These commitments signal a renewed strategic alignment, and promises to synchronise responses to mutual challenges and perceived threats in the region. Far from cradling the Palestinian resistance, Cyprus and Greece are now complicit partners in the surveillance and onslaught of its liberation fighters. How did this corridor of solidarity shift so dramatically? 

The Energy Chessboard

Energy was the catalyst. In 2010, Israel announced significant natural gas discoveries—the Leviathan and Tamar fields—in stolen Palestinian waters. One year later the Republic of Cyprus discovered another major field, Aphrodite, 30km northwest of Leviathan. Touted as seismic shifts, these fields and their proximity created the capacity to fulfil domestic energy needs and construct an export route to Europe. The latter is critical. Export potential turns a domestic resource into a strategic currency. It can both generate revenue and facilitate geopolitical leverage over key powers. For Israel, natural gas represented a rare windfall to fast-track normalisation via extraction—interlocking Israeli gas flows within regional energy architectures. Large-scale investments from US, European and Israeli companies surged production, and pipeline diplomacy led by US convoys secured gas clients. Within a few years, gas had economically and infrastructurally integrated Israel within the Mediterranean basin. Its Arab neighbours became energetically reliant on Israel to function, creating a binding investment to the settler colony’s continued existence, protection and proliferation. 

Greece and Cyprus cannot be abstracted from this agenda – each a node in anchoring Israel to European infrastructure. But what motivated Greece and the Republic of Cyprus? The RoC needed a political win, and Greece an economic bailout. In 2010, Greece was essentially bankrupt and needed help to pay its begrudging debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union. Drawing closer to the US protégé, Israel, Greece made a desperate move to win favour with Washington. Greek political advisors snuck around Electra Hotels in Athens with unofficial Israeli counterparts, engineering a meeting between the two national leaders in a dusty Café Puskin in Moscow. Before long, Netanyahu and (George) Papandreou were publicly parading on boat tours—wives in tow—signalling a new era adorned by Washington’s watchful eye. 

The Republic of Cyprus needed its own bailout. Corruption and incompetence led to a Russian-owned ship Monchegorsk, and its captured munitions, being dangerously stored next to the Vassilikos power station. In 2011, a bush fire detonated the explosives. The blast killed 13 people, injured 67 and severely damaged the island’s primary power source. Battling crippling power outages, the Island’s tourist and financial sectors suffered a high cost on the verge of financial collapse. The RoC president was blamed for the blast, and the government had to ask for emergency aid from the European Union. The political establishment desperately needed to rehabilitate itself. As such, the Aphrodite discovery and a strategic energy partnership with Israel came in the nick of time. Previous hesitations—Israel’s warm relationship with Turkey—were no longer relevant due to Erdogan sending a humanitarian Flotilla to Gaza in 2010. Turkish-Israeli relations had soured, and so the path became clear for the Republic of Cyprus to fill the void. 

In recent months, this strategic axis has gained momentum. Following a political lull, three energy ministers met on the sidelines of the Power & Energy Transition Conference (2025) to reactivate the “3+1” alliance. Coinciding with Washington’s renewed interest, the regional powers agreed to diversify energy supply routes, dependency risks and strengthen Western involvement in the region. Later in occupied Jerusalem, alongside military commitments, flagship energy projects and political backing were a central focus for the trilateral summit. Chief among them: The Great Sea Interconnector. This submarine power cable interweaves Israel within the European electricity system: from Greece to Cyprus, and Cyprus to Israel. US capital and EU backing were secured, bringing Western powers actively into the picture. Moreover, whilst the EastMed pipeline might be dead in the water, a “new EastMed” is now taking shape: a network of smaller interconnecting pipelines and LNG terminals across the region. This modular strategy contracts and serves European, US and Israeli oil and gas companies, looping the financial flows back to imperial cores. Within this new energy chessboard, each country plays its role: Greece the infrastructural hub, Cyprus the geographical gateway and Israel the extractive core. Taken together, it maps out an infrastructural route that stitches Israel into the fabric of European energy systems.

European energy sovereignty becomes fused with Zionism and settler colonialism.  

A Theatre of Military Logistics

As pipelines, interconnectors and maritime corridors reorder the Eastern Mediterranean, a security triangle forms to defend them. Initially, military cooperation played a modest role in the trilateral framework, but the fast-moving regional security landscape necessitated a shift. With the emergence of Türkiye’s Blue Homeland—a maritime doctrine asserting sovereign power over vast swathes of the Aegean, Mediterranean and Black Seas—Israel and the US were positioned as military protectors to Greece and the RoC. The doctrine challenged Greek claims to small islands and unilaterally rejected the Republic of Cyprus’ maritime borders. Türkiye, emboldened, sent warships in 2018 to intercept drilling in RoC waters claiming it was unlawful and in 2017 engaged in naval standoff with Greece regarding a sovereignty dispute over Greek “islets.” Energy corridors were no longer lines on a map—but required guns, warships and militarized allies to secure uninterrupted flows.  

A robust security architecture demands a three-pronged approach: intelligence networks, military drills and foreign bases. Regional reports note that Cyprus is becoming an intelligence and surveillance hub to serve Western imperial interests. For example, the new Maritime Cybersecurity Centre is a trilateral collaboration that will operate out of Nicosia, Cyprus – to coordinate threat intelligence, real-time maritime monitoring and intercept cyber-specific threats across Cyprus-Israel-Greece. These joint intelligence channels are not neutral but operationalised to support Israel’s genocidal assaults across the region. The choice to host the centre in the RoC is no coincidence, but symptomatic of Israel treating Cyprus as its “backyard” and safehouse for Mossad operations. Similarly, Israeli-linked businesses are storming Cyprus to instrumentalise its lax laws and tax regime. For example, Israeli-linked cybersecurity firms use the RoC and its regulatory loopholes to export sophisticated spyware globally. Discovered in leaked documents, the Israeli firm tapped 9 million personal phones to obtain information that muzzled journalists and government officials worldwide. This expands to Greece. In a joint initiative Israel and Greece are constructing a new marine radar system in eastern Crete. The project is designed to not only monitor Greek airspace but a much broader area relevant to Israeli security interests, feeding data into command-and-control networks. Cyprus and Greece, therefore, form a linked intelligence backbone for Israel and its Western allies to target the Axis of Resistance. 

Joint military drills are another critical arm in the security triangle. The Glorious Spartan exercise in 2008 is an early example. Featuring 80 Greek and 100 Israeli F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, Greece and Israel conducted a drill widely reported to simulate long-range strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. Subsequent exercises deepened collaboration: in June 2018 40 Israeli air force planes worked with the Greek military to rehearse a war on multiple fronts that included carpet bombing Gaza. The Republic of Cyprus is not immune. It regularly hosts IOF soldiers for military training, including in the Troodos Mountains to “focus on scenarios for occupying and liberating villages” (Ahronheim) – a clear reference to illegal occupations and settlements in the West Bank. Such cooperation has continued into the ongoing genocide in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. With lands that mimic Palestine, Lebanon and beyond, Cypriot and Greek mountains have become regular training grounds for imperial operations—its airspace occupied by settler warcraft. 

Yet the security apparatus is incomplete without imperial military bases, occupying Greek and Cypriot land. British sovereign bases Akrotiri and Dhekelia—a legacy from British colonial rule in Cyprus—serve as critical nodes for UK and allied military operations within the region. The RoC government has no say, and indeed is often not informed about UK war operations. During the genocide in Palestine, the UK has flown more than 200 spy missions over Gaza for Israel; sent 500 extra troops to support weapons supply to Israel; allowed US special ops flights to freely use the bases; sent over 80 warplanes to Lebanon; launched a bombing campaign on Yemen. This is to name but a few, rigorously documented by Declassified and the “Bases off Cyrus” campaign. The bases operational and logistical use in genocide has drawn widespread protest and diplomatic unease – especially after Hezbollah threatened Cyprus as “part of the war” and more recently Iran bombing the Akrotiri base in retaliation for UK support in the Israel-US war on Iran. 

Greece complements this axis. Souda Bay—a US military and naval base on the Greek Island Crete—played a key role in attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025. Despite official denials, reports suggest Crete served as a launchpad for refuelling B-2 stealth bombers that backed the US-Israeli military operation. Moreover, Souda Bay is a critical node in the transportation of JP-8 imports from Texas to Haifa—a military-grade fuel used to power the fighter jets carpet bombing across Palestine and Lebanon. With the latest imperialist onslaught in Iran, Greece deployed frigates and F-16 fighter jets to Cyprus to defend the RoC against ballistic missile threats. As such, the US imperial foothold consistently lends tactical and logistical support to foreign military operations in the Middle East—firmly cementing Greece within Israel’s military ecosystem. 

Taken together, intelligence networks, joint military drills and foreign bases form an operational backbone that feeds an imperial war machine. Greek airspace, Cypriot land and infrastructures function as logistical extensions of settler colonialism—a Western security front designed to protect Zionist military supremacy, no matter the cost.

From the decks of Atlantis, Saab glimpses a Mediterranean Sea that carries revolutionaries towards refuge and resistance. When Arafat steps out onto the docks of Athens he is met with friendship – two comrades bound in revolutionary memory. Today that same maritime space is threaded with surveillance systems, subsea cables and submarines, rerouting these geographies towards new imperial synergies that serve violence and domination. Yet beneath this architecture of power, undercurrents of solidarity persist. Indeed, these transformations have never been uncontested but are met with vehement protests. From Greece to Cyprus to Palestine, the memory captured in Saab’s film survives in the streets, in the ports, in the long night calls to comrades – insisting that even in the face of accelerating violence the region can and must be otherwise.