The Silent Conquest: How Israel is annexing Cyprus, one villa at a time

The Postil Magazine | W.O. Munce  

A new front has opened in the long saga of Israeli expansion, but this time, it is not fought with tanks and artillery in the dusty hills of Judea and Samaria. It is a silent, methodical, and alarmingly effective campaign waged with checkbooks and property deeds on the sun-drenched island of Cyprus. By 2025, what was once a beloved Mediterranean escape for Israeli tourists has transformed into a de facto Israeli province, a contiguous territory where Hebrew has become a second language, the shekel is king, and local Cypriots are being priced out of their own homeland. This is not mere tourism or benign investment; it is a calculated strategy of demographic and economic acquisition, creating ex-pat enclaves that answer more to Tel Aviv than to Nicosia. 

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How the Shock Doctrine is being applied to Greece

Comment: This is a very instructive piece from a couple of years ago...

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Naomi Klein

EnetEnglish

April 2013 

 

According to bestselling author Naomi Klein, the systemic use of shock and fear by the power elites to undermine vulnerable communities is very much evident in post-bailout Greece. From the rise of racism to the sell-off of the country's oil and natural gas resources - much of what will shape Greece's immediate future are, she argues, predictable consequences of the politics of austerity.

Naomi Klein is the author of controversial New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine, which has been referred to as "the master narrative of our time". The book argues that business interests and powerful nations exploit shocks in the form of natural disasters, economic problems, or political turmoil, as an opportunity to aggressively restructure vulnerable countries' economies. She posits that because ultra-capitalistic policies are harmful to the majority of citizens, they cannot be implemented without a shock, ranging from media-hyped anxiety to police torture, that squashes popular resistance. In this exclusive interview, Klein explains to EnetEnglish how she believes the Shock Doctrine relates to Greece today.

How do events in Greece relate to your arguments in The Shock Doctrine?

To me it is a classic example of the things I wrote about. It's heartbreaking to see the same tricks and the same tactics being used so brutally. And there's been enormous resistance in Greece. It's particularly distressing to see the violent repression of the social movements that were resisting austerity. And it's just been going on for so long now. People get worn down.

What I've been following recently is the sell-off of natural resources for mining and drilling. That's the next frontier of how this is going to play out - the scramble for oil and gas in the Aegean. And it's going to affect Cyprus as well. This is a whole other level of using austerity and debt to force countries to sell off their mining and drilling rights for fire sale prices.

When you add the climate crisis on top of that it is particularly culpable that you have an economic crisis being used as leverage to extract more fossil fuels, especially because Greece itself very climate vulnerable. And I think its possible that, as the scramble for oil and gas heats up, there will be more resistance because it's a huge threat to Greece's economy  

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