The Israel-Greece-Cyprus axis: A new anti-Turkey alliance?

In late December, Israel, Greece, and Cyprus approved a new framework to deepen defence cooperation in the eastern Mediterranean.

The agreement marked the latest step in a rapidly expanding trilateral partnership combining military coordination, energy infrastructure, and political alignment.

Marketed by the three governments as contributing to regional “stability and security”, the agreement comes amid accelerating militarisation and mounting tensions with Turkey.

As offshore gas projects multiply and regional rivalries entrench, Greece and Cyprus are facilitating Israel’s regional integration, a development that poses urgent questions about militarisation, energy securitisation, and third-party complicity amid the devastating war on Gaza, labelled a genocide by the United Nations.

Trilateral framework: Militarisation and regional rivalries

The agreement between Israel, Greece, and Cyprus entails a common framework for military collaboration, paving the way for intensified naval and air force exercises, and closer coordination on security planning and crisis-response mechanisms.

The announcement followed a summit bringing together Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which reaffirmed maritime security and energy interconnection as pillars of the trilateral partnership.

The agreement underscores a deepening strategic alignment closely watched by Turkey. Standing alongside his counterparts, Netanyahu warned that “those who fantasise they can reestablish their empires and their dominion over our lands” should “forget it” - a thinly veiled reference to Ankara.

A deepening alignment

The framework introduced new military capabilities that will further entrench the alignment between Greece, Cyprus, and Israel. While operational details remain limited, the establishment of a common crisis-response force signals deeper military coordination in the eastern Mediterranean, with significant involvement from the Israeli Air Force and Navy.

This alignment accelerated after the discovery of major offshore natural gas deposits in 2011, six of which have since been identified in Cyprus’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) - exacerbating maritime disputes with Turkey and leading Cyprus to turn to Israel to help secure energy infrastructure and maritime zones.

Cooperation has since deepened through military exercises, intelligence sharing and arms procurement. Since 2017, the Israeli military has regularly conducted large-scale drills in Cyprus’s mountains, selected for its resemblance to southern Lebanon.

The partnership also extends to surveillance and border control technologies, including Israeli-made drones and buffer zone surveillance systems originally developed within the context of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.

Security, energy, and regional capitalism

Secured by military developments, energy projects are central to this alignment, notably, the Great Sea Interconnector (GSI) connecting the electricity grids of Cyprus and Greece, with a planned extension to Israel.

Promoted to end Cyprus’s energy isolation and integrate the island into the European market, the project also strengthens regional energy security.

Despite financial and administrative hurdles, strong support from Greece and the European Union (EU) has underpinned the project. In December, the three governments linked the GSI to the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), connecting Asia and Europe through transport, trade and energy infrastructure.  

For Israel, the IMEC represents more than an infrastructure project. Netanyahu has presented the GSI as the “skeleton” of a corridor designed to embed Israel within long-term regional and European networks.

For the United States and the EU, IMEC also serves to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Still in its preliminary stages, the IMEC project has continued despite Israel’s genocide, notably through agreements between India and the United Arab Emirates.

These projects cannot be understood in isolation from the wider political economy structuring Israel’s regional integration, according to Adam Hanieh, Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the University of Exeter.

“These agreements should be interpreted as part of a wider project of normalising Israel’s role within the eastern Mediterranean, a project that has long aligned with US strategic interests for the region,” he told The New Arab.

This “also emerges in a context of accelerating militarisation and competing energy projects, where offshore gas fields, pipeline proposals, and new security architectures function as mechanisms for consolidating regional blocs (especially in the context of the war in Ukraine, and China's increasing involvement in the Middle East),” he added.

This underscores that “Greece and Cyprus are helping normalise Israel as a central military and energy actor in the region”.

Deepening normalisation and the economy of war

Beyond the military and security dimensions, these agreements carry legal and political implications. Greece and Cyprus - as High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions and long-standing diplomatic and economic partners of Israel - have major responsibilities regarding the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), Neve Gordon, Professor of International Law from Queen Mary University of London, emphasises.

Indeed, any diplomatic support or affirmation of Israel’s “right to self-defence” in these territories could violate international law and contravene the July 2024 International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion, which determined that Israel’s presence in this territory is unlawful.

In addition, the ICJ’s provisional orders of January 2024 clarify that governments “must act decisively to prevent genocide and cannot be in any way complicit with Israel’s actions through arms trade, diplomatic support and indeed economic trade that in any way supports Israel’s illegal actions,” he told TNA.

Cyprus’s recognition of Palestine further strengthens its legal obligations, affirming the Palestinian right to self-determination and committing the state to act consistently with that recognition.

Such developments indicate that the deepening of military, economic, and energy cooperation with Israel cannot be considered solely in strategic terms. The partnership intersects with a wider political economy in which third parties may become entangled in systems of domination and systematic dispossession - what the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese terms an “economy of genocide”.

This rhetoric of technical cooperation and neutrality obscures - and sanitises - Cyprus and Greece’s deeper alignment with a US-led regional security architecture, in which these countries’ facilities are central to Israel’s normalisation.

Through arms procurement, defence partnerships, and strategic infrastructure, Greece and Cyprus actively embed Israel within regional security architectures. Greece recently purchased Israeli-made missile defence systems, while Cyprus hosts British bases enabling surveillance and intelligence operations in cooperation with Israel and recently procured Israeli air-defence technology.

Together, these arrangements normalise Israel’s ongoing occupation and military violence.

Israel's new front?

The trilateral framework extends Israel’s strategic depth while complicating Turkish calculations, particularly in disputed maritime zones.

Turkey is likely to respond through intensified naval patrols, military exercises, and diplomatic pressure, making a tense maritime space more prone to dangerous incidents and escalation.

By embedding further within a network of European partners, Israel consolidates its regional position while offsetting international isolation. This bloc alignment could also undermine NATO cohesion, given that Greece and Turkey are alliance members.

For Guy Laron, Senior Lecturer in International Relations from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Netanyahu sees this trilateral framework primarily as an anti-Turkish alliance.

In a recent press conference, he even invited Lebanon to join, explicitly framing the bloc as a “bulwark” to prevent the creation of a “new Ottoman empire.” Laron notes, however, that despite common military drills, it remains unclear whether the alliance can effectively counterbalance the Turkish fleet.

While all three countries intend to curb Turkey’s regional ambitions, their effectiveness remains doubtful. As Laron concludes, “add to that what looks like a strategic alliance between Trump and Erdogan, over energy, stability in Syria, and regional trade routes, and the viability of the trilateral framework looks even more tenuous”.

What seems to concern Turkey most is the mounting dependence of Greece and Cyprus on Israel for the procurement of advanced arms systems - a reconfiguration that further entrenches Israel within European security architectures and exacerbates regional fault lines.

Sylvain Henry is a writer based in Samos, Greece and holds a master's degree in sociology and political philosophy. He recently worked with the Cyprus Refugee Council

Follow him on X: @SylvainHenry_  and on Instagram: sylvainhenry_

Edited by Charlie Hoyle