Fresh tensions between Turkey and Greece are flaring over territorial waters and military installations on islands in the Aegean. But Ankara is more worried about the ever-closer ties between Greece and Israel.
Turkey, Greece and Israel
During a visit to Azerbaijan this week, Turkey’s foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, said that Ankara saw Greece’s deployment of military assets to islands in the Aegean as a threat to its security. And in a reference to Athens’s increasingly close defence relationship with Israel, he said: “we don’t want Greece to become a tool in the hands of those who wish to destabilise the region and plunge it into chaos.”
Turkey has complained for decades about Greek military installations on the Aegean Islands, claiming they are prohibited by the treaties of Lausanne and Paris, signed in 1923 and 1947 respectively. Greece agreed in 1936 to limit its territorial waters off the islands to six miles but when it ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 1995, it said it reserved the right to extend its limit to 12 miles, as permitted under the convention.
Turkey, which never ratified UNCLOS, warned it would regard any extension of the territorial waters as a casus belli, or a justification for war. Greece interpreted that warning as a threat of war that necessitated the installation of more military infrastructure on the islands.
Ankara complained last month about military drone activity on Rhodes, although Athens said it had no plans for a permanent drone base there. And Fidan’s warning this week followed a visit last week by Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his armed forces chief to the island of Kastellorizo, less than 3km off the Turkish coast, where they inspected a garrison outpost and a navy patrol boat.
For its part, Greece points to Turkish plans to pass a law codifying its Blue Homeland maritime doctrine, which makes sweeping claims to jurisdiction in the Black Sea, the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean. Athens views the draft legislation as a threat to its sovereignty and an expression of Turkey’s increasingly assertive strategic stance throughout the region.
Greece last month signed a €3 billion deal with Israel to build a multilayered air defence system called Achilles Shield, combining systems to defend against ballistic missiles, aircraft and drones under a single command-and-control network. Nineteen Israeli defence companies will be involved in the project and although much of the weaponry will be produced in Greece, it will draw entirely on Israeli technology and Israel will retain the source code.
The system will include David’s Sling, which Israel used to intercept Iranian missiles, and other systems made by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and its subsidiaries. IAI, which is wholly owned by the state of Israel, manufactured many of the attack drones and munitions used in the war on Gaza.
The Achilles Shield deal follows the signing last December of a joint military action plan between Israel, Greece and Cyprus, committing to joint air and naval exercises in the eastern Mediterranean.
Israel’s defence ministry director general, Amir Baram, told the Herzliya security conference in Tel Aviv last June that Israel should help construct a new regional security architecture stretching “from India through the UAE to Greece and Cyprus”.
Baram was speaking about the threat from Iran but Turkey views the warming ties between Israel, Cyprus and Greece as directed primarily towards itself.
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