Right, so on 31 October, people gathered outside the town hall in Lavrio and marched against the sale of their port. Among the companies bidding for control of said port you see was a certain Israel Shipyards Industries you see, a military shipbuilder seeking 51% of the port authority.
What the protesters were demanding was that their government stop it, because for the people living around this waterfront, the proposed sale reaches beyond who collects the revenue. It concerns who will make decisions about a working part of their town, and what they might choose to use it for and as you might imagine, being at the beckon call of the genocidal apartheid state isn’t exactly their flavour of the month, even if their government thinks differently.
Israel Shipyards presents its interest as overseas expansion and income diversification. What a lovely phrase. How long before those flowery words get replaced by much simpler terms such as bombs and bullets? If I lived in Lavrio I might have that same sort of thought. The group already operates a private port in Haifa and acquiring another one would extend a business combining military shipbuilding with cargo handling and logistics.
A promising addition to the Israeli portfolio, then. Except the people beside the asset have, well, turned up with their objections. Terribly inconvenient when the investment opportunity comes with inhabitants who don’t like the cut of your jib.
And their concern has a very specific local foundation. Lavrio has ammunition production very close nearby. The ammunition company itself identifies proximity to the port as an advantage for its business needs, and so that bombs and bullets quip gains a harder edge.
Now put that beside a defence group bidding for control of the port operator, and you can see why residents want answers before ownership changes. What could that combination enable? Who would decide? And how much influence would the people living and working there retain afterwards?
Those questions connect the Lavrio protest to a much wider struggle over Greek ports more widely. The previous day, workers had gathered in Piraeus as part of a global portside rejection of Israel and its interests as I’ve covered in recent days. Georgios Gogos, president of the dockworkers’ union there, explained why they were intervening.
The mandarins who negotiate access to the port can go to lunch, while the dockers who work there have to put up with the sheer genius of stupidity that comes out of the conference room.
That is why it is important to be heard before the sale is signed. Once the ink is dry, the inhabitants and the workers have to fight a boss they never voted for over decisions they never endorsed.
In Lavrio, they are talking of selling control of the company operating the port.
Israel Shipyards, according to the deal described by Port2Port, will receive 51 per cent of the company, leaving the rest to the Greek state and giving Israel the right to appoint the directors, making it the controlling company.
Fifty-one per cent. Just enough to keep the public at the kids' table forever, while the grown-ups make all the real decisions.
The question is whose power will guide industry, its appropriations, its trading relationships, and the priorities it will pursue through its facilities.
A customer pays to use a port. This is a much more intimate relationship than a shipper leasing the port. The controlling shareholder can continually determine how the shipper is to develop.
This fact explains why the argument cannot be confined to whether a particular cargo has been identified.
The proposed acquisition involves decisions that will determine what happens later on. The inhabitants have the right to object to this transfer of power before they are obliged to debate with the company which has acquired it.
The State would retain the financial interest by keeping 49% of the shares. This by itself would not meet the objection of giving a majority to private hands.
Ministers about to swing around this "leftover stake" as if it were a magic shield ought to explain their little ruse threfore. A percentage in a report will not jump out of the document to pin down a bad decision.
The money from the sale is deposited only once. The operator can run things for years; it may put storage and transport of freight and large-calibre ships first, and passengers will be the ones allowed to wait a decade in a sardine-tin of a waiting room. But you see the results every time someone waits for a ferry and wonders why it is as crowded as it is.
A passenger berth connects people to work, families, and society. Combined transport creates additional business. Those public functions give the public a stake in the port's use, whether or not it is listed on the shareholders' list.
"To transfer power to someone else is a way of saying: 'We'll give them the wheel and hope they don't drive us into a wall.'"
Such a choice is political and should be subject to proper political debate therefore, not just putting up a suggestion box where people are asked what they want nailed to the door of an arrangement they didn’t ever get to choose.
Besides, the identity of the lot's buyer is what makes the transfer as controversial as it is.
Israel Shipyards Industries emphasises civilian and military shipbuilding, alongside harbour operations, port cargo handling, and logistics. In its company profile, it lists all of these side by side.
The company began to operate its own port in Haifa in 2007. According to its development strategy, it intends to buy foreign ports.
It would fit into an expansion pattern already in place: an organisation of military-industrialists and ship-builders seeking control of overseas transport facilities. Israel is horribly reliant on sea trade given its propensity for upsetting the neighbours, so having ports elsewhere secures their logistics, but at the expense of who?
In comments reproduced by Port2Port, chief executive Zvika Schechterman described this Greek bid as aimed at expanding into new foreign markets and diversifying the company's income.
In the same reported comments, he spoke of the support the group gives to Israel's security forces and of maintaining the group's operation as a vital industry.
The commercial aims and the military role, in the company's own words, go hand in hand. So far so, very familiar and yet no less disturbing.
"Diversification" is an expression of the Board of Directors and means "we want more toys." That word doesn't explain why the Greek public should hand over the car keys and smile for the media.
An arms-linked business that is growing, gaining revenue and market share, is still arms-related. The civilian side of its portfolio does not erase the military side.
People are asked to look behind what’s printed in the advertising blurb. It concerns control of a port, which a company that manufactures warships is seeking to obtain.
These are the firm's declared aims and the foreign port policy. The Greek government is offering an opportunity for expansion, and affected people are absolutely going to challenge that of course.
EfSyn's Myrto Perouli reports hundreds gathering outside the town hall before the march, with local campaigners and Palestine solidarity organisations opposing privatisation and possible military use.
And just for variety, the situation gives this opposition an industrial flavour.
And as I mentioned a moment ago, Lavrio already produces ammunition.
Hellenic Ammunition brings together Greek state-owned Hellenic Defence Systems and MSM, part of the Prague-based arms conglomerate Czechoslovak Group, or CSG. The company says it has completed contracts to fill 130,000 artillery shells at the Lavrio facility since 2024.
It also identifies the facility's location near Lavrio port, along with the supporting infrastructure, as an advantage for its production capabilities.
The munitions concern shows that the port is not only for postcards and twilight photographs.
The relationship between industry and port services is already the subject of commercial speculation and as such, the protesters asked what this bidder could do with these port services.
The industrial complex is evolving. The CSG's August reports distinguish between active explosive manufacture and the planned manufacture of TNT by 2027. Decisions about port ownership would operate alongside that development for years.
So in evaluating the sale of the port, a government must therefore consider the future as well as the present. It cannot answer a question about the port's long-term ownership with the reassuring accounts of today's ferry lines for instance.
Now despite all of this and the fairly obvious optics of it all, I do have to point out that Hellenic Ammunition and Israel Shipyard Industries are separate enterprises and I’ve been able to find no record of a contract to supply munitions to Israel or of shipments to be made through Lavrio at this point.
No export contract or guaranteed route through Lavrio has been established. At least not yet. A verified contract naming an Israeli recipient and Lavrio as the export route, or authenticated shipping records showing military cargo leaving Lavrio for Israel, would change that. But until then, the evidence supports concern about what this arrangement could enable, rather than proof of an actual supply deal.
In Perouli's reporting, Dimitris Pleionis of BDS Greece linked the acquisition proposal with concern about possible exports to Israel though. His warning concerns that combination of port control and nearby military production as we’ve already outlined, it’s a natural reaction all things considered I think.
The political case for opposing that combination therefore, does not depend on pretending the prediction has already come true.
The industrial activity already exists. The ammunition company acknowledges the port's usefulness. The bidder advertises its defence-and-logistics role.
These are substantive reasons for resistance, and they place the responsibility for explaining the sale on the officials who are pursuing it.
Residents are not obliged to wait until the disaster has struck to complain, nor do they have to present the government with a notarised letter from the future before it hears its own people.
So prevention is a crime? Hold your tongues until things are really messed up, and we can assure you that it's all terribly complicated, and nothing can be done.
This action however, reveals another side of the question and it’s a point all of the portside protests in recent days have put on show at that: the fact that the port's actual work depends on the people who work there to do it.
The report helpfully enumerates the usual points: pay, working conditions, safety; before coming to the small matter of not wanting to see the workplace transformed into the staging ground for further genocide.
The port is not a square on a board game. A port is a place of work with real people and real disputes and with responsibilities that cannot be done away with, with the stroke of a pen.
A purchaser may take shares, but political agreement from the labourers is something else.
They are not, of course, mentioned in the bid documents, but that does not mean their interests do not exist.
The mobilisation of the seamen adds another part of the world of work. Ships and harbours depend on different groups of workers, under different employers and responsibilities.
An edict from the boss does not create cooperation, no matter how many exclamation points he might like to use to emphasise his point. Thus, networks of opposition form.
The footage shows a mobilisation. The political challenge is to combine those interests with such force as to make a difference. Any future action will depend on what people actually organise.
What obligations would be imposed on the public? Who should decide the priority of activities? What could the public do if the businessman took a direction the city's residents opposed?
Why is it presumed that the privileged position of private property is the road to these advantages?
The State is obliged to give a full account of the reason why it is so eager to sell the port. It is not sufficient that, having embarked on the assumption that it is a sale, they seek the public's opinion.
Gogos's argument on the question of welfare also throws into question the meaning of development. He asks which needs political decisions serve.
More business for a security company and greater security for the population are two different things.
In the Anadolu Agency statement carried by the Middle East Monitor, Sofia Topalidu describes the demonstration as a message to the Greek government. Evangelia Sotiropulu raises concern about Lavrio's potential involvement in supporting Israel's military operations.
Palestine solidarity activists have identified the political motivations behind this resistance. These are people who oppose their town's infrastructure helping to sustain Israel's war and the genocide in Gaza.
It is a protest against participation; it is also a demand that their own government take responsibility for the relations it fosters.
The Greek State is conducting the disposal process; it is the State that has chosen to offer a controlling share for sale and to Israel of all places at that. These are political choices, whatever investment language they might choose to use.
And the people responsible for such decisions have every right to demand public control and to tell a defence-linked buyer to get lost. They don't have to disguise their objections as a polite request for "more transparency" just to keep things polite.
A bidding process is merely a bureaucratic game for determining the winner. It doesn't necessarily mean the public must swallow the whole thing without gagging.
Legal disputes already mark the process. Ports Europe's report out today indicated a legal dispute over which bidders were still in the running, while another report said only Israel Shipyards Industries and Jet Plan Shipping, a Cypriot outfit, remained.
The immediate political development is a coordinated resistance to the proposed transfer. The next task is to turn that resistance into influence on the outcome: press the local council to oppose the sale in advance, make the draft sale available for scrutiny, challenge the ministers, and work with the port unions on coordinated action. The aim is to put the local government on the spot and make it responsible for the transfer, while it is still possible to prevent it.
Later, Gogos's appeal addressed how the opposition could spread beyond those already in the fold.
The significance of this appeal is that it seeks to unite struggles that would otherwise remain divided: one harbour, one employer, one labour force bargaining separately.
A broader organisation could give the workers more power in common; building it involves participation and decisions in these workplaces. This is real politics, not a triumph announced in a photograph of a parade.
The Greek government also has responsibilities which it cannot delegate to a public tendering process.
A bidder's legal qualifications do not prove that transferring ownership will benefit the public. Courts, when faced with a conflict between bidders, cannot replace political consent with judicial determinations.
Legal capacity does not automatically become a public mandate just because someone puts on a wig and strikes a gavel.
Nor does retaining a minority share remove the government from responsibility for the majority stake it proposes to sell. It would be actively creating that ownership arrangement.
The ministers were responsible for the decision to allow this business to take place, if that was how the matter developed. The buyer's conduct would not diminish the state's responsibility for the terms of the transfer.
That is why dissent is required at this stage. The people ought to be able to object to the decision, while the government has the power to modify it.
So all in all this sale is no joke: the contender with military and supply-chain plans, the ammunition industry licking its lips at the port, and the inhabitants and workers who do not want to play pass-the-parcel with responsibility. The government must explain why it is so keen to pass on public power like a raffle prize; an opportunity for investors is not a sacred mission. Lavrio does not owe the Israeli defence group a red carpet, and its people do not owe the Greek authorities a submissive silence while their town is being auctioned off from under them.
For more on the global ports outcry and protests happening in the last few days all over the place, including here in the UK, though you’ll have seen precious little coverage, do stick with the channel fore more, such as this story right here as your recommended next watch.
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