“The ties between our nations run deep, and quite naturally we feel at home in your beautiful country.” On September 11th, in Belgrade, Israeli President Isaac Herzog began his speech at the welcoming press conference for his meeting with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic by recalling the long-standing friendship between Israel and Serbia.
On that occasion, the two heads of state announced a free trade agreement to be established “as soon as possible.” In quantitative terms, Israel is not a key trade partner for Serbia, as it does not rank even among the top 30 export destinations. But in terms of sectors involved, it represents a strategic partnership, as the two countries have been developing economic relations in the fields of technology and artificial intelligence. Vucic said there is “huge space for cooperation” in these sectors, as well as in cyber security, for further attracting Israeli investments. In 2020 Serbia’s Security Information Agency was listed among users of the software of the Israeli company Circles, which enables the user to locate every phone in the country in seconds. Moreover, watchdog organisations Amnesty International and Access Now confirmed that an Israeli military-grade spyware called “Pegasus” targeted Serbian civil society activists just ahead of last year’s general elections.
The sector in which ties have been growing the most in the last year is the arms trade. According to BIRN investigation, “Serbia’s main state-owned arms trader, Yugoimport-SDPR, exported arms and/or ammunition worth just over 7.3 million euros to Israel in July, bringing the total value of Serbian arms and ammunition exports to the country in 2024 to 23.1 million euros”. This growth in the arms trade has occurred mainly through secret shipments from Belgrade airport to Beersheba in Israel, amid the ongoing war on Gaza. This has happened despite widespread concern that the weapons may be used in war crimes against civilians in Gaza, where in the last year an average of at least 120 persons have been killed daily, and despite several calls by international institutions to cease the sale of arms to Israel, as they “may constitute serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian laws and risk State complicity in international crimes, possibly including genocide.” So it is no surprise that, except for the condemnation of the 7th October Hamas attack on Israel, Serbian officials have so far been quite silent on Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.
Serbia and Historic Zionism
Serbia and Israel have forged their relationship also on the historic ties between Serbs and Zionism. The family of Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, originated from Zemun, today part of Belgrade, when it was called Semlin or Zimony and was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His grandfather Simon Loew Herzl and his father Jacob were born in Zemun, where they were followers of Judah Hai Alkalai, a prominent and influential rabbi from Sarajevo who was the local community leader. Rabbi Alkalai is considered one of the precursors of Zionism. Within the small, yet vibrant Jewish community of the frontier town, Rabbi Alkalai held great influence. In his books, some of which were published in Belgrade, Alkalai theorised the unification of all Jews of the diaspora and their return to their ancestral land. On the other side of the Sava River, Belgrade stood as the proud capital of the Principality of Serbia, which gained its autonomy after two national uprisings against the Ottoman empire. According to some interpretations, Alkalai’s theories about the necessity for Jewish unification could have been influenced by the revolutionary events in Serbia and, subsequently, they might in turn have influenced Herzl’s work even more than the Dreyfus affair. As a matter of fact, the obsession with national unity was widespread around Europe in this period of national awakening against foreign empires. Serbian officials and intellectuals were no exceptions. They stressed the need to counter internal enemies, as is attested by the nationalist cry they coined: “Only unity saves the Serb”, words whose first letters (four “S”s, in Cyrillic) are still part of the national coat of arms.
In the realm of international relations on the other hand, the first tangible support for the creation of a Jewish State occurred with the publication of the Balfour declaration in November 1917. The Kingdom of Serbia was the first country to officially endorse it. This happened mainly because of David Albala, a Serbian Jew who served as diplomat in the United States. One month after its publication, in an exchange of letters, Ambassador to Paris Milenko Vesnic confirmed Serbia’s acceptance of the Declaration. “It will be a sad thing for us to see any of our Jewish fellow-citizens leaving us to return to their promised land, but we shall console ourselves in the hope that they will stand as brothers and leave with us a good part of their hearts and that they will be the strongest tie between free Israel and Serbia,” reads the letter, in which for the first time an official used the word “Israel” to indicate the future Jewish State.
During the Second world war, Yugoslav Jews were decimated by both Axis forces and collaborationist regimes. According to some estimations, around 17 thousand Jews died in Jasenovac concentration camp and, in 1942, Serbia became the first European country that the Nazis declared “Judenrein” (free of Jews). Out of the 80,000 Jews living in pre-war Yugoslavia, about 66,000 were killed in the Holocaust, almost half of them coming from today’s Serbia.
After the war, the new communist leadership initially encouraged emigration to Palestine, as they sought redemption from the atrocities of the Holocaust. This emigration was even facilitated by Jewish personalities within the Yugoslav leadership, like Mosa Pijade, one of the closest collaborators of Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito.
Regarding those years, it is worth mentioning one of Yugoslavia’s most original diplomatic contributions to the question of Mandatory Palestine. The Balkan state was in fact one of the 15 UN member states whose delegates worked on a sustainable future for both Arabs and Jews within the UNSCOP commission – the special committee formed in 1947 by the United Nations to find a solution for the Palestinian question. Together with Iran and India, Yugoslavia opposed the partition plan and proposed instead a binational, federal state with Jerusalem as common capital. However, that remained a minoritarian proposal and, in May 1948, when Israel proclaimed its independence, Yugoslavia – together with Czechoslovakia and Poland – was the second European country to officially recognise Israel, only one day after the Soviet Union did so.
However, Yugoslav communists had a close relationship with the Arab world, too. In the 1950s, Tito started cultivating intense diplomatic relations with Egypt – which by 1956 had already fought two wars against Israel – and together with its president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, founded the Non-Aligned Movement. Finally, in 1967, when the Six-Day War broke out, Yugoslavia severed all diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv, while supporting the Organisation for the Liberation of Palestine and its leader, Yasser Arafat.
Diplomatic relations between Belgrade and Tel Aviv were restored only in 1992. In those years, when war tore apart the Yugoslav federation and its multiethnic character, Serbia and Israel found a new ground for developing their ties: the arms trade.
The problematic memory of the Srebrenica genocide
“In my views, that in Srebrenica was not a genocide.” The latest case of public denial of the Srebrenica genocide was made by Israeli Ambassador to Serbia Yahel Vilan. It happened last April when, in an exclusive interview to Russian state-owned media outlet Sputnik, Vilan said “to call Srebrenica a genocide would belittle the meaning of such word.” This case of revisionism regarding what happened in the Bosnian enclave in 1995 occurred just a few weeks before the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) adopted a resolution designating 11 July as the “International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica.” On that occasion, Israel’s seat at the UN remained empty.
A long list of prominent Israeli figures have denied what was established by the verdicts of both the Hague Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Several top Israeli Holocaust-scholars have done so, including Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Efraim Zuroff, and Yehuda Bauer, academic advisor to Yad Vashem. However, two academics in particular have been the most engaged: historian Gideon Greif and Hebrew University professor Rafael Israeli. In 2019, Greif and Israeli were appointed by the government of Republika of Srpska – the Serb-led entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina – to head two commissions “to determine the truth” respectively about Srebrenica and Serbs from Sarajevo. The final reports downplayed the numbers and nature of what happened in Srebrenica and de facto endorsed revisionist theories of Serbian nationalism.
So, what are the reasons for Israeli personalities being negationist about the Srebrenica genocide? There are three possible explanations. The first is based on the consideration that the genocide of European Jews perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its allies is an unique event in human history, which leads to a very restrictive interpretation of what constitutes genocide. As managing editor of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Daniella Peled points out, “maybe this is because it is yoked to the narrative of the redemptive power of Zionism: in this telling, the genocide ended and a free state for its survivors was born from the ashes. But that arc is a problematic enough lens for the Holocaust; for other victims, it has no relevance at all.” The second explanation for Israel endorsing Serbian nationalism is political. Israel in fact sided with Serbs throughout the collapse of Yugoslavia. It did so for political reasons, as it did not want to support any unilateral declaration of statehood, which Tel Aviv feared could create a dangerous precedent that could be followed by the Palestinians. Finally, Israel refuses to call Srebrenica a genocide because of its indirect responsibilities in it, providing Bosnian-Serbs with weapons and military training. In 2016, Israel’s Supreme Court rejected a petition to unveil details about weapons exports to Bosnia. As reported by Israeli media outlet +972, “the court ruled that exposing Israeli involvement in genocide would damage the country’s foreign relations to such an extent that it would outweigh the public interest in knowing that information, and the possible prosecution of those involved”. The evidence was collected by Israeli Attorney Itay Mack and Professor Yair Oron and includes the personal journal of General Ratko Mladic – who was sentenced to life imprisonment by the ICTY for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
So while during the Bosnian war Israel condemned the massacre, behind the scenes it was supplying weapons to the perpetrators and training their troops. Since October 2023, Serbia has therefore been returning the favour to Israel by supporting the latter’s national interests and secretly increasing its arms shipments to Israel, thus possibly risking complicity in war crimes, including genocide.
Disruptive diplomacy
Vucic’s Serbia has been oscillating between the West and the East for over a decade. A candidate to become a full member of the European Union, Belgrade has maintained a privileged relationship with Russia even after its attack on Ukraine and has avoided adopting Western sanctions against Moscow – the only European country to do so.
However, in dealing with Western Asia affairs, Belgrade has sided with the West more than in other geopolitical contexts. Though Serbia has recognised Palestine since 1988, when the Balkan country was still part of Yugoslavia, in recent years it has mostly remained silent concerning the occupation, the apartheid regime, and the violence perpetrated by the Israeli army and settlers against the Palestinians. In last September’s UNGA vote demanding Israel to end its unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory within a year, Serbia was among the 46 countries that abstained (124 were in favour, 14 against). It also abstained at the beginning of the war, in October 2023, when the UNGA voted for a resolution calling for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce” between Israeli forces and Hamas militants in Gaza.
So, Belgrade’s walk along the proverbial political tightrope in the last year has been oriented westward far more than it has been in the country’s approach to Ukraine.
As a matter of fact, Serbia began this path in 2020, under the provisions of the so-called Washington agreement between Belgrade and Pristina. That deal was brokered by then US President Donald Trump, whose administration promoted an agreement that concerns US foreign policy much more than the normalisation process between Kosovo and Serbia. In fact, most provisions regard West Asia rather than the Balkans and many of them have to do with Israel. Both countries agreed to include Hezbollah in its entirety in their own domestic list of terrorist organisations, while Kosovo and Israel mutually recognised each other, with the former opening an embassy in Jerusalem.
That recognition was the main disruption in relations between Israel and Serbia, who out of spite decided not to move its embassy from Tel Aviv, although the deal provided so. Even if many in Israel saluted the recognition from Muslim-majority Kosovo as a step forward in the international legitimacy of Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State, according to some Zionist interpretations recognising Pristina’s independence was “Israel’s Balkan blunder.” The move not only undermined relations with Serbia but also made Israel inconsistent, as it recognised a state that had been seeking international legitimation on the same political premises as Palestine, namely the right to self-determination and to stand against apartheid. In this regard, the fact Palestine never recognised Kosovo makes things even more paradoxical. The Washington agreement was thus a functional electoral campaign ad for Trump, who was seeking re-election by presenting himself a world peacemaker, but left both Serbian nationalists and Zionists sorely disappointed.
Eventually, relations were revitalised in October 2023 with the appointment of a new Serbian ambassador in Tel Aviv after the post had been vacant for three years. On a more informal level, the reset in friendly relations was also obtained by Serbia hosting Israeli basketball teams in Belgrade for their Euroleague home games. Finally, another sign of this revitalisation could be seen in the appointment as Serbian foreign minister of Marko Djuric, who has Jewish origins and for a time lived in Israel. Before becoming foreign minister, Djuric served as Serbian ambassador to the United States, and thus his appointment suggests Serbia is trying to get closer to the US. In its decade-long geopolitical dance between opposite poles, Serbia may exploit its Israeli connections to obtain a more accommodating approach from the West, perhaps in negotiations over Kosovo.
Lastly, today’s warm relationship between the two nations was also confirmed at last September’s UN General Assembly, where President Vucic met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The latter stated the two countries share “a crucial goal – to return all the hostages safely back to Israel, including Alon Ohel,” who also holds Serbian citizenship.
Ideological affinity
In conclusion, the long-standing friendship between Serbia and Israel is based on mutual interests, mainly the arms trade and a strategic, though dangerous cooperation in the sectors of technology and artificial intelligence. But this friendship is reinforced by a past that connected the two nations and shaped their nationalist narratives.
One of the main ideological affinities between Zionism and Serbian nationalism is the belief in an inherent right to ancestral land. According to this interpretation, Kosovo is to Serbs what Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem are to Jews: the cradle of the nation. Consequently, according to both ideologies, whoever actively opposes this inherent right, starting with those who have been living on that land for generations, is to be considered a “terrorist”.
The propaganda of both states also shares similar rhetoric in the interpretation of events relevant to their own national interests. Just as Serbian forces back in the nineties used to claim they were fighting “terrorism” and an alleged Islamist penetration in the Balkans, so Israel has applied the same terminology to any Palestinian resistance. In both cases, the intention is to delegitimise the political demands of the opponent. A common rhetoric among the Serbian nationalists who contributed to the collapse of Yugoslavia presented the Serbs as a “heavenly people,” whose cultural and religious heritage was in danger, and whose existence was threatened by those nations fighting for independence. In a similar way, ultra-orthodox Zionists, including State ministers, have been spreading the idea that Israel has a superior claim to that of Palestine, and that today the West should view the ongoing conflict as a war between “human animals” and a superior, chosen people.