Middle East Critique

From the River to the Aegean Sea: Imperialism, Racialization, and Anticolonialism from Palestine (Israel) to Greece and Cyprus

The ongoing genocidal military campaign in Palestine—encompassing Gaza, increasing in the West Bank, and expanding to Lebanon, Syria and Yemen — has underscored Israel’s colonial war as a regional and global project. It has also revealed that this project is enabled by deepening military, energy, and security cooperation between Israel, Greece, and Cyprus, reinforcing Israel’s role as an imperialist outpost in the Eastern Mediterranean region.

One of the main aims in the special issue is to explore how, under US patronage and with EU involvement, Israel, Greece and Cyprus have created a “white triangle” of regional domination —a militarized axis advancing racialized discourses and Islamophobic narratives, energy extractivism, joint military exercises and hi tech-driven border controls. The triangle extends to academic, cultural and economic spheres, including real estate ventures, university research programs and art exchanges. Far from merely being Israel’s strategic partners, Greece and Cyprus have become central for Israel’s genocidal project in Palestine and its expansionist project in the larger Middle East region. Furthermore, mainstream media and government agencies both in Greece and Cyprus have actively promoted Islamophobic narratives and the erasure of their Muslim/Ottoman past, aligning with well-documented historical Zionist practices of indigenous erasure and civilizational supremacy. At the level of academia, the Eastern Mediterranean is often reductively framed in IR scholarship down to Israel’s "security environment" or Eurocentric narratives of energy geopolitics. As a result, racialized and imperial underpinnings of this closely-knit partnership are eclipsed.

Much has been written about emerging frames and forms of cooperation and solidarity between the anti-Zionist resistance in Palestine on one hand and social movements in the imperial core, such as workers’ unions and student encampments, associations of Muslim and antizionist Jews, Black Lives Matter and Red Nation activists, revolutionary feminists and anti-imperialists.   Whereas these interconnected areas and the multiple links between Palestine/Israel and the imperial core have been- to an extent-adequately addressed by researchers, there is a glaring lack of critical scholarly and activist attention on similar questions, fields and relations within the Eastern Mediterranean region at large. Postcolonial, indigenous, settler-colonial studies, and imperialism approaches have tended to shy away from interrogating how racialization, sub-imperial political economies and vernacular ideologies of white supremacy, and their relations with the history, political economy and contemporary reality in Palestine/ Israel play out in the Eastern Mediterranean.

At the same time, emerging South-South and South-North solidarities are increasingly reforming the political landscape—from Palestinian resistance and indigenous Arab-Muslim mobilizations to alliances with Greek and Cypriot solidarity movements. These contemporary struggles revive earlier traditions of Third World solidarity, particularly the militant ties between Palestinian liberation movements and anti-imperialist forces in Greece and Cyprus during the 1960s–1980s. The Palestinian diaspora in both countries played a pivotal role in fostering these connections, finding resonance among Greek and Cypriot leftists resisting military juntas and imperial interventions. Yet these histories remain marginalized, even as they offer critical lessons for today’s movements. 

This special issue of Middle East Critique seeks to interrogate these tensions, inviting interdisciplinary contributions that uncover the imperial and racialized, entanglements between Greece, Cyprus, and Palestine/Israel and the forces that are resisting them. We welcome theoretically rigorous and empirically grounded submissions from anthropologists, historians, political economists, sociologists and others that address, but are not limited to, the following themes: 

• Critical political economies of military-industrial and energy entanglements: Joint ventures in gas extraction, arms trade, surveillance technologies, and border militarization in Eastern Mediterranean. 
• Ethnographies of (settler-)colonial ideologies and relevant projects (i.e., real estate) in the Eastern Mediterranean region beyond occupied Palestine.   
• Historical studies that compare/contrast Hellenism & Zionism as doctrines of white supremacy; comparative studies of Islamophobia and the erasure of Muslim presence in Greece, Cyprus & Israel; academic/epistemic framings of Eastern Mediterranean region that normalize settler colonialism.
• The role of the Orthodox Church in Arab lands; (Arab) Greek Orthodox resistance to colonization, Zionism; the “orthodox Question” in Palestine.
• Greek/Cyprus solidarity to Palestine: Forgotten and revived networks of anticolonial struggle, Third-Worldism and anti-imperialism including the role of Palestinian diasporas in Greece and Cyprus; Studies of contemporary Palestine solidarities spanning the region.
• Ethnographies and histories on the relation between Palestinian anticolonialism and Greek and Cypriot political movements and parties.
• Region formation through anticolonial practice and theory: cultural /academic production as resistance; Palestine as anticolonial template for the region. 

We encourage submissions that challenge dominant frameworks and center marginalized perspectives, fostering new research on imperialism, racialism, resistance and liberation across the Mediterranean East.