As Anti-Israel Animus Surges and Turkey Threatens, Greece Signs Deal With Jewish State for $3 Billion ‘Achilles Shield’

ATHENS — Greece and Israel’s signing of a $3 billion defense agreement to purchase comprehensive missile protection — code named “Achilles Shield”— is sending an unmistakable message to a country that is a foe of both Israel and Greece — Turkey.Israel’s Defense Ministry on Monday declared that the contract is the “largest defense export deal in the history of Israel-Greece relations, and one of the largest in the history of the State of Israel.” For the first time the Jewish state will provide another nation with a “complete defense array against a wide range of threats.” The agreement is all the more remarkable given a surge of anti-Israel sentiment in the land of Plato and Pericles. “Achilles Shield” will provide Greece a five-layered system that includes David’s Sling and SPYDER, manufactured by Rafael, and BARAK MX, manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries. A multi-mission MMR radar for air surveillance is manufactured by ELTA Systems, a subsidiary of IAI. Rafael will also supply a new national command and control system. The contract was inked at Tel Aviv by Defense Ministry Director General Amir Baram and his Greek counterpart, Ioannis Bouras. The agreement comes as Turkey ratchets up its anti-Israel invective and moves toward an offensive posture in Syria. In response, earlier this month Israel struck the Abu al-Duhur airbase at Idlib, in northwestern Syria. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained in a statement that “Israel and Syria agreed to a status quo in security matters, which Syria was on the verge of breaching by permitting Turkish troops to deploy at an airbase near Aleppo.”Mr. Netanyahu accuses Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of being an “antisemitic dictator.” The Turkish leader alleges that the Jewish state has committed genocide in Gaza and compared Mr. Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler. The antagonism between Greece and Turkey goes back centuries. The Greek War of Independence began in 1821 and pitted the Greeks against the Ottoman Empire. That hostility persists as Turkey maintains its hold on Northern Cyprus, occupied in 1974 and later declared an independent republic that to this day is recognized only by Turkey. Tensions between Istanbul and Athens flared earlier this month when Turkey laid claim to swaths of the Aegean Sea.Even before the deal was inked, Turkey’s defense ministry suggested that it was monitoring the deterrence arrangement as a potential military buildup in the Aegean. Hurriyet news reported that military officials say if threatened, they will “resolutely neutralize any and all threats.” Turkey has now invested about $800 million in its own “Steel Dome” defensive network. Even as Greece’s leadership avidly pursues Israeli defense expertise, popular sentiment in Greece has turned sharply, and sometimes dangerously, against the Jewish state. In the beginning of August Israel’s foreign ministry warned Israelis in Greece to “keep Israeli and Jewish identifying symbols discreet and to avoid posting your location in real time on social media.” The anti-Israel organization BDS Greece has vowed to “fill the entire country with Palestinian flags, keffiyehs, and slogans.”Data from the Israel Airports Authority indicates that Greece is such a popular vacation spot for Israelis that some 50 flights a day fly to the country from Tel Aviv. Hebrew can be heard spoken freely on the crowded Athenian streets, though a tremendous amount of anti-Israel graffiti, including “Free Gaza,” “Death to the IDF,” and “Fuck Zionism” is painted on structures throughout the city.Anti-Israel graffiti at Athens, August 31, 2026. A.R. Hoffman for The New York SunGreece’s defense minister, Nikos Dendias, boasts that his country is “the first country in the European Union” to thoroughly integrate Israeli technology into its own defense. “Achilles Shield” follows an agreement inked in January between Israel and Greece that provides for expanded cooperation with respect to drone and underwater-vehicle swarms, cyber threats, military exercises, and defense technology. The investment marks fulfillment by Greece of its NATO obligation to increase investment for the alliance’s collective security.Major General Bouras told Greek media outlets that the name, Achilles Shield, is no coincidence. In the spirit of Homer’s greatest hero, the shield offers five overlapping layers comprising five domains, sea, land, air, cyberspace, and space. The system, to be in place in 2027, offers Greece the most advanced technology named after the most renowned weapons of the ancient world. The announcement of “Achilles Shield” comes days after reports that Israel and Finland signed a new memorandum of understanding covering defense cooperation to run through 2034. In 2023 Helsinki purchased the David’s Sling air defense system for €316 million. In an apparent concession to anti-Israel sentiment in the country, Finland has made no official announcement of the pact. The opposition leader, Green League chairwoman Sofia Virta, calls the agreement a “historic shame.”Homer describes Achilles’s shield in Book 18 of the “Iliad.” Forged by the god Hephaestus — “the father of the fires” — at the request of the great warrior’s mother, Thetis, the shield contains the entire cosmos in miniature. “There shone the image of the master-mind/ There earth, there heaven, there ocean he design’d/ The unwearied sun, the moon completely round/ The starry lights that heaven’s high convex crown’d.” The shield was described anew for the modern age by the poet W.H. Auden.Achilles spent 10 years seeking to breach the walls of Troy. When Odyssesus’s famous wooden horse was rolled into the city, though, Achilles was already dead, slain by an arrow shot from Paris’s bow that the god Apollo guides to a vulnerable heel.

As Anti-Israel Animus Surges and Turkey Threatens, Greece Signs Deal With Jewish State for $3 Billion ‘Achilles Shield’

As Anti-Israel Animus Surges and Turkey Threatens, Greece Signs Deal With Jewish State for $3 Billion ‘Achilles Shield’

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