as carried out between June 23 and 27 on a random sample of 1,045 people.
About half of the telephone interviews were conducted shortly after Greece’s FIFA World Cup last-gasp win over Ivory Coast on June 24 in Brazil, a result which put the country’s national team through to the knockout stage of the tournament. Interestingly, researchers noted that respondents’ ethnocentric and nationalist sentiments were on average higher after the match, while indications of anti-Semitism had declined.
“It seems likely that this occurred because people’s sense of victimhood also decreased after the game. Typical ‘underdog’ feelings declined while Greeks’ self-confidence as a nation increased,” Dinas said.
“As a result, they felt less inclined to either endorse conspiratorial theories or consider the Greeks as having suffered more than the Jews,” he said.
The survey was carried out before Israel launched its offensive on July 8 to stop Hamas rocket fire out of Gaza. More than 750 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and 32 Israelis, 29 of them soldiers, have died so far in the conflict.
Experts said that the longstanding unpopularity of Israeli policies in Greece has forged an unexpected consensus across the political spectrum.
“It often becomes hard to maintain sensitivity on the Palestinian issue without at the same time taking on the world’s entire Jewish population,” Antoniou said.
“In this environment, it is difficult to distinguish between legitimate political opposition to Israeli actions and anti-Semitism,” he said.