Much of the criticism directed at Israel goes far beyond policy to a question of legitimacy, challenging the idea that a long-dispersed people can reconstitute a sovereign state in its ancestral homeland. This shadows Israel in ways that shape the entire debate, setting it apart.
Yet while Zionism is unusual, it’s not without parallel, and one can be found, hiding in plain sight, in nearby Greece. Modern Greece shares more than a blue-and-white flag with Israel: both were forged through a European intellectual awakening, sustained by powerful diaspora communities, and won through bloody territorial wars that featured mass displacement of populations.
Moreover, the roots of both peoples predate most of their neighbors in surprising locations around the region. Greek and Jewish communities were established in Odessa before the Slavs, in Constantinople before the Turks, and in Alexandria before the Arabs. They were, in some cases, the original inhabitants, yet centuries of displacement left both as minorities.
When the modern Kingdom of Greece was formally established in 1830, following the success of the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, it had only 750,000 people, and most ethnic Greeks still lived outside it, concentrated in Constantinople, Smyrna, and across the Black Sea.
Many Muslims – primarily Turks but also Albanian Muslims – were killed, expelled, or fled from areas that became Greece. By the early 1830s, the Muslim presence in the core territories of the new state had largely disappeared. No college students today protest in howling outrage.
Establishment of Israel similar to Greece
The establishment of Israel in 1948 followed a similar demographic pattern: a state with a small core population, surrounded by a larger diaspora and shaped by war and population movement. At independence, Israel had roughly 800,000 people, including about 650,000 Jews and 150,000 Arabs who remained within its borders after the war. The Arabs at this time, by the way, did not call themselves Palestinians.
Famously, the 1948-49 war produced a major refugee crisis. About 700,000 Palestinian Arabs left or were expelled from the territory that became Israel, while at the same time and in the following years, almost a million Jews left or were expelled from Arab countries across the Middle East and North Africa, mostly resettling in Israel.
As in Greece in the 1830s, the new state represented only part of the broader national population. Even after the decimation of European Jewry by the Nazis, most Jews still lived outside Israel – in Europe and the Americas mostly – just as many Greeks remained outside the early Greek kingdom.
Fascinatingly, at the start of the Greek Revolution, Athens had around 5,000 residents, comparable to the Jewish population of Jerusalem at the time. Greek cultural life centered in Constantinople and Smyrna. Athens became the capital for symbolic reasons rather than demographic weight, a pattern echoed in Israel’s attachment to Jerusalem.
At the start of the Greek Revolution, an Ottoman mosque stood within the Parthenon ruins. After independence, Muslims left Athens, and the mosque was demolished. In 1948, a mosque and shrine stood on the Temple Mount. Jewish residents were expelled from the Old City of Jerusalem, dozens of synagogues were destroyed, and Islamic structures remained – and are a flashpoint to this day.
In both cases, the state gradually became more demographically concentrated around its core national group, shaped by war, displacement, and the absorption of large refugee populations tied to the same conflict.
Later events intensified these trajectories. The Pontic genocide between 1914 and 1923 killed about 300,000 Greeks and drove survivors into Greece, expanding the refugee population created by earlier conflicts. The Holocaust followed a similar trajectory in Jewish history. Zionism had developed decades earlier, with Herzl publishing Der Judenstaat in 1896 and early settlement underway before World War I. The destruction of six million Jews transformed support for statehood into a decisive political outcome, culminating in the UN partition vote.
The parallels extend into the ideas that made both projects possible, often driven by diaspora networks that proved decisive in both cases. The Greek revolutionary society Filiki Eteria, founded in Odessa in 1814, drew leadership and funding from communities across Europe and the Mediterranean.
Hovevei Zion, founded in Odessa in 1881, played a similar role in organizing early Jewish settlement in Palestine. Philhellenism and Zionism drew on ancient identity: Greek revolutionaries and their backers invoked Themistocles and Leonidas – Zionists Judah Maccabee and Bar-Kochba.
Atrocities also played a central role in mobilizing support. The massacre of tens of thousands of Greeks on the island of Chios in 1822 shocked European publics and brought support. Russian pogroms in Kishinev and Odessa in 1903 and 1905 had a similar effect on Zionism.
Statehood in both cases also carried territorial ambition. The concept of Megali, or “Greater Greece,” emerged after 1830 and guided expansion across successive wars. Greece consolidated its territory through the 19th and 20th centuries, including the transfer of the Dodecanese islands in 1948. Its legitimacy as a state has remained stable within international institutions. Obviously, Israel has tried to expand its borders – albeit in a much smaller area – as well.
And, of course, religion functioned as a central vehicle of identity in both cases. Under the Ottoman millet system, Greek identity aligned with Orthodox Christianity, and Jewish identity remained tied to religious classification. This structure carried into citizenship policies. Greece established pathways for ethnic Greeks to claim citizenship, and Israel enacted the Law of Return in 1950, granting Jews the right to immigrate.
Despite all these parallels, the two movements’ standing in the international system diverged.
That begins with how each war was fought and decided. Support for Greece extended beyond diplomacy. At the Battle of Navarino in 1827, British, French, and Russian fleets destroyed the Ottoman and Egyptian navies, securing the Greek position.
In 1948, Israel faced invasion by neighboring armies under an international arms embargo and relied on improvised weapons procurement, including shipments from Czechoslovakia.
Greece’s legitimacy is embedded in international life, while Zionism remains contested. Tragically, and infuriatingly, this has seemed to gain traction in the West since the October 7 attacks by Hamas, which massacred over 1,200 people in Israel.
It begs the question: How can this be? Let’s sharpen that question: Is it really about Israel’s brutal response and nothing else?
The answer, I believe, lies in the most striking divergence of all: how the Muslim world dealt with the emergence of Greece. Mainly, Turkey absorbed Muslim populations displaced from Greek territories, while Greece absorbed Greek refugees.
In 1948, Israel fully absorbed Jewish refugees from across the region – but Arab states did everything possible to keep the refugees from Palestine apart, often denying them basic rights and citizenship, to this day.
This central fact – an ever-growing population of four- and fifth-generation “refugees,” often genuinely living in miserable conditions, has turbo-charged the propaganda assault on Israel.
The Arab world had its own nefarious reasons for so mistreating the Arabs of Palestine – and it is currently in a state of transition. But why have many in the world, in both the extreme Left and the extreme Right, gone along, treating Israel as if it were born in some extraordinary original sin? Reflection is desperately needed.
The writer is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and the founder of the venture capital firm’s Israel office.
