+972 Magazine published an expose about Israel's ties to the Greek military junta in the 1960s:
The relationship blossomed during the dark days of the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 and 1974 — a period marked by the brutal repression, imprisonment, torture, and murder of opponents of the regime, and a period that was deliberately omitted from the celebratory narrative Israel promotes.
For Israel, a potential ally in the Mediterranean would of course be an attractive prospect to cultivate.
This article mentions, as an aside:
Immediately upon seizing power, the military junta began a campaign to eliminate its real and imagined opponents, an effort embraced or tacitly supported by most Western European countries and the United States.So Israel was acting exactly as Western European countries and the US did. This was the height of the Cold War, and the junta's anticommunist position was the major factor in this decision-making.
Yet Israel is singled out for not caring about human rights. This was in a year when Israel was being threatened daily with annihilation in Arab newspapers.
When countries choose whom to ally with, they look at shared interests, in how that relationship could help each country politically and economically. Human rights is always a very low priority. This is is true for every country in any time period. It was especially true in the 1960s when nations were divided into pro-Western or pro-communist with little regard to any other issue.
All of that context is missing from the +972 piece.
But it concludes with its own bizarre spin:
This history suggests that the State of Israel was not merely a passive player, following only the will of the great powers; it was and remains a powerful and autonomous promoter of its own interests first and foremost, willing to compromise on values like democracy and human rights in order to gain international support in its own oppression of the Palestinian people.
What do the Palestinians have to do with Israel's relations with Greece? The article didn't mention Palestinians at all before its conclusion. Israel's relations with other countries outside the Arab world have nothing to do with Palestinians. Israel's concerns at the time was with the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War, the Palestinian issue was not even close to the top priority of Israel in those days.
But since the article had no real dirt when exposing Israel's semi-secret relations with the Greek junta, it has to jazz it up to appeal to its audience of Israel-haters - and pretend that everything Israel does is meant to oppress others.
There is nothing embarrassing about how Israel acted. It acted as any other nation would. But when you have Israel, you don't want to compare it to other nations. Doing so dilutes the message that Israel is uniquely evil - and that message is the only reason +972 exists.
