You’ve probably never heard of the Mare Med III Conference before, and that’s by design. The closed-door business conference takes place annually and is organized by the Israeli events company Benny Moran Productions (the Israel-Greece Chamber of Commerce is listed as a partner and co-sponsor of the conference). The purpose? To deepen Israel’s political, military, and economic relationship with—and influence in—Greece. 

From May 12-13, the third annual meeting of Mare Med III took place in the unassuming rooms of the Brown Acropol Hotel in Athens, Greece. The program featured a litany of speakers, including: Sharren Haskel, Israel’s deputy minister of foreign affairs; former officers of the Israeli Navy and Air Force now serving as executives at Israel Aerospace Industries; the CEO of Israel Shipyards; Greece’s minister of tourism; the general secretary of the Greek Ministry of Defense; and the chief economist and head of economic consulting at BDO Israel. 

This year’s Mare Med III Conference hardly made a blip in the news cycle, but that’s not because the substance of the event wasn’t newsworthy. And we know this because one independent journalist, Dimitri Lascaris, former TRNN board member and host of Reason2Resist, managed to secure a ticket and film everything. 

“When I looked at the lineup of speakers, I didn’t hesitate to fork over the money, as painful as it was to pay anything towards an event that is designed to deepen relationships between Israel and Greece,” Lascaris says. “But it was the only way that I could actually get access to the event and hear what was being said behind closed doors. And it has in fact been an extraordinarily enlightening, if not utterly nauseating, affair.” 

In his wrap-up report from Day 1 of the conference, Lascaris shared these unsurprising-but-still-shocking observations: 

First of all, I have not heard the words “Palestine” or “Palestinians” once today. I’ve listened to probably twenty people speak, including various ministers and deputy ministers of the Greek government. The Palestinian people did not come up once. There was never any hint of criticism of what Israel is doing.

And perhaps the most shocking pro-Israel commentary I saw was a Cypriot politician… looking at the Israeli ambassador to Greece—who was sitting in the front row at that moment, beside the Deputy Foreign Minister of Greece, just a few meters away from me—and saying to him: “Yes, it’s going to cause a lot of suffering. We know it’s going to cause a lot of suffering, but you’ve got to finish the job.” Meaning: [Israelis] need to revive the criminal war of aggression against Iran and presumably destroy the country, if not the entire region.


Thanks to Lascaris, you can now see and hear for yourself what these callous death merchants say to each other behind closed doors. Watch these reports on the Reason2Resist YouTube channel: 

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Maximillian Alvarez is an Izzy-Award-winning journalist and the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Executive Director of The Real News Network. He is the founder and host of Working People, "a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today," which he started after his family lost their home and life savings during the Financial Crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. Alvarez is the author of The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke, a collection of interviews with US workers recorded during Year One of of the Covid-19 pandemic. His forthcoming book—tentatively titled “American Sacrifice: Working People Fight for The Lives (and Our Future) in America’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’”—is under contract with Haymarket Books. From April 2022 to March 2024, Alvarez hosted and produced The Art of Class War series on Breaking Points. From September 2016 to January 2019, he was a regular contributor and then a columnist for The Baffler magazine. Prior to joining TRNN, Alvarez was an Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Prior to that, he was a graduate student-worker and rank-and-file member of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (AFT Local 3550) at the University of Michigan, where he earned a dual-PhD in History and Comparative Literature, taught undergraduates, and published academic articles in Media Theory and La Deleuziana: An Online Journal of Philosophy. Prior to that, he worked a litany of low-wage jobs in different restaurants, warehouses, factories, retail stores, etc. Alvarez’s writing has been featured in outlets like The Nation, Poynter, In These Times, Boston Review, The Baffler, Current Affairs, Dissent, Protean Magazine, The New Republic, Truthout, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. As an analyst and commentator, he has appeared on programs like PBS NewsHour, Breaking Points, Democracy Now!, The Laura Flanders Show, NPR’s 1A, The Hill’s Rising, This Is Hell!, Krystal Kyle & Friends, The Michael Brooks Show, The Jacobin Show, CounterPunch Radio, Citations Needed, Bad Faith with Briahna Joy Gray, Know Your Enemy, Srsly Wrong, Left Anchor, Revolutionary Left Radio, The End of Sport Podcast, Pod Damn America, The David Pakman Show, The Megyn Kelly Show, The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent, The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow, The David Feldman Show, and The Marianne Williamson Podcast.