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Story by Alexis Daloumis
ATHENS, GREECE—An Israeli cruise ship making repeated tours of Athens and the Greek islands has been met by protests nearly every time it docks this summer, as Palestine solidarity demonstrators in Greece escalate actions and tactics amid growing anger over Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The Crown Iris—a 10-deck cruise ship complete with a casino, theater, waterslide, and basketball court and holding up to 2,000 passengers—leaves from Haifa every few days for four- to seven-day cruises of the nearby Greek Islands.
At its most recent stop at the port of Piraeus near Athens on Thursday, Greek riot police cordoned off an area around the ship to prevent several hundred protesters from approaching. Demonstrators held flares and waved Palestinian flags from behind a cordon, formed by riot police buses, as Israeli tourists disembarked. The Crown Iris has set sail only to find protests along its route since late July, when a mass demonstration almost prevented the ship from docking on the island of Syros—an incident that made international headlines.
The demonstrations against the Israeli cruise ship are part of a wider trend of anti-Zionist protests across Greece in recent weeks that culminated in what organizers say was one of the largest pro-Palestine mobilizations in Greek history on August 10, when tens of thousands took to the streets in over 120 different locations across the country—primarily in popular tourist areas.
The original call for a day of mass protest was first made by March to Gaza, Greece, which dubbed it a “Day of Action on islands and tourist destinations … Against the genocide of the Palestinian people and their supporters.”
The initiative read in part: “As millions of tourists flood the country, let’s make our presence visible and loud. Let’s turn islands, beaches, alleys, mountaintops, and shelters into places of solidarity—not relaxation for murdering IDF soldiers. The organized effort to make Greece a ‘haven’ for those who participate or support the slaughter in Palestine will not pass!”
Greece has long been a popular destination for Israeli tourists who arrive en masse every summer to vacation on the country’s islands. Some 621,000 Israelis visited Greece in 2024, according to data from the Institute of the Greek Tourism Confederation (INSETE), generating 419 million euros in revenue—an increase of 55 percent from 2023.
Yet as Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza continues, Israeli tourists in Greece this year are facing a growing backlash.
The proliferation of local pro-Palestine groups culminated in the August 10 mobilization and gained massive momentum in a short amount of time. “It exceeded the most optimistic expectations; it also exceeded the scope of any preexisting network,” Paris Laftsis, a 33-year-old software engineer and a coordination team member of March to Gaza, Greece, the group that initiated the call for the August 10 demonstration. “New initiatives kept popping up, even on the day. But it was also the first time the pro-Palestine groups acted in such coordination. In some places it was reported to be the biggest demonstration ever—in others, the first one in decades.”
The call for the August 10 protests was quickly co-signed by BDS Greece and the Palestinian Community in Greece, with dozens of local groups across the country signing up to take part. Israeli media labeled it a “Day of Rage,” with Israeli government officials cautioning citizens traveling to Greece. The Israeli Ministry of Diaspora affairs and Combating Antisemitism issued a report on August 9 about the planned demonstrations saying, “While no explicit calls for violence have been identified, the growing anti-Israeli sentiment in Greece, combined with recent instances of radical protest activity across the country, increases the likelihood that multiple demonstrations may escalate into confrontations or acts of violence.”
The turnout was unprecedented, with call outs led by various leftist and anarchist groups—and people from all walks of life—taking to the streets, beaches, and mountains across the country. No incidents of violence were reported.
Israel’s starvation campaign in Gaza that is causing a widening famine—along with Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to invade and ethnically cleanse Gaza City—has only fueled the recent protest actions in Greece. Activists and organizers who spoke to Drop Site News also pointed to growing frustration over what they said is a recurring pattern of Israeli tourist provocations—sometimes involving off-duty IDF soldiers. According to organizers, some Israeli tourists have engaged in provocative behavior such as tearing down pro-Palestinian posters in streets and shops or verbally and physically harassing people wearing keffiyehs or pro-Palestine T-Shirts.
“It’s not just tourists, it’s also Airbnb real estate owners and other investors from Israel that keep engaging in provocative behavior,” Dapergolas said. “It’s not all Israelis who do this, but it’s enough to create a phenomenon.… We wanted to highlight the problem and push back.”
On July 11, the anarchist group Rouvikonas (Rubicon), along with Marxist/Leninist group T-34, organized the first of what they called “Palestinian Strolls”—with a group of some 50 people wearing matching black T-shirts featuring the Palestinian flag taking a long walk along some of the most touristic sites around the center of Athens. The organizers declared that they wanted to assert their right to walk around their own city of residence without being attacked or harassed. A prominent member of Rouvikonas, 55-year-old graphic designer Spyros Dapergolas, told Drop Site, “Our protocol was simple. We just walk, we don’t bother anyone. If anyone, of any nationality, is bothered by us and they express it, we respond proportionately.”
The July 11 action was criticized as antisemitic by various commentators and government officials, including the Vice President of the governing conservative New Democracy party, Adonis Georgiadis. “Not only do we deny this accusation, but we return it,” Dapergolas said. “There is absolutely no antisemitism among us. We consider as brothers and sisters the minority of Israeli society and the large part of Jewish diaspora that resist the genocide.”
In a less covered incident the following day, the Open Anti-Zionist Assembly organized a demonstration in the center of Athens, during which an Israeli-owned Kosher restaurant graffitied with slogans including “Smash Zionism, fascism, colonialism,” and “Israel Death Forces—rapists, torturers, murderers.” The restaurant later posted a video of the slogans being painted over with “Zionist is safe here.”
The actions continued on July 14, when thousands of people gathered at the port of Piraeus—Greece’s largest port—following a call by the dockworkers union to blockade a ship carrying military cargo to Israel. “We stain our hands with grease, not the blood of innocent people,” union leader Markos Bekris said. The blockade was successful and the cargo had to be transferred to another ship, which was later also blockaded by dockworkers in Genoa, Italy.
Yet the event that made headlines across the globe came on July 22 when over 300 people gathered at the port of the island of Syros for a Palestine Solidarity protest against the docking of the Crown Iris arriving from Israel with some 1,600 passengers on board.
As the ship approached and the demonstrators came into view, there was an immediate reaction on deck. Passengers raised Israeli flags, chanted Zionist slogans, and made obscene gestures at the protesters. Contrary to much of the reporting, the Crown Iris was not prevented from docking and passengers were not physically obstructed by the protesters from disembarking. While most of the passengers did opt to wait on board, a few disembarked and walked out before returning shortly afterwards when the ship left a few hours later and ahead of schedule.
“There was a couple that got off the ship at some point,” one of the protesters Maria, a theater usher, told Drop Site. “They walked past the protesters and entered the town; they didn’t provoke, so nobody bothered them.” She added, “There were another three, though, that came close to us from behind the police and started provoking us. One of them, the most aggressive, said ‘I wish Turkey will fuck you’ as he was walking away.”
There is a widespread perception among demonstrators that many of the Israeli tourists on board the Crown Iris are off-duty soldiers. “What kind of simple, innocent tourist keeps a national flag handy while traveling?” asked Petros, a 30-year-old construction worker who took part in the demonstration. “We can’t have Greece become a playground for IDF soldiers … it’s also a matter of dignity. Yeah, we live off tourism, but there’s a limit.”
In the aftermath of the July 22 demonstration at Syros, Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, said that he had contacted his Greek counterpart, Giorgos Gerapetritis, regarding the incident and discussed future precautions. Two days later, Greece’s minister of citizen protection (which oversees the police force) said in a televised interview that the police would be more proactive and that “wherever this phenomenon appears again, there will be arrests.”
When the Crown Iris approached the island of Rodos on July 28, there was a heavy security presence at the port, with police in riot gear forcefully pushing back a small crowd of 100 demonstrators and making at least eight arrests. The next day, however, a much larger crowd gathered at the cruise ship’s next destination at Agios Nikolaos in Crete. Protesters managed to break through police barricades and enter the port where they unfurled a massive Palestinian flag. The passengers disembarked onto buses that were forced to make their way through the chanting crowd under police protection. Some projectiles were thrown, at which point the riot police used tear gas to push back the demonstrators.
Amid the actions targeting the Crown Iris and the repeated de-centralized actions on the mainland, Israel’s ambassador to Greece, Noam Katz, publicly lashed out at the mayor of Athens, Haris Doukas, who had been vocal in his criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza. Israeli citizens felt “uncomfortable,” Katz said in published statements on August 3 that blasted Doukas for “not protecting the city from organized minorities” who put up anti-Zionist graffiti.
The Athens mayor responded a few hours later saying, “We don’t take democracy lessons from those who kill civilians and children in food aid queues, from those who drive dozens of people to death every day in Gaza, with bombs, famine and thirst.”