In March 1992, as a young journalist eager to make his mark with an exciting foreign assignment, I visited the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo on the eve of the brutal three-year war that tore this former Yugoslav republic apart. Unlike the other Western journalists in town, I had family there with whom I stayed, relatives of my late grandfather, the descendant of Spanish Jews who arrived in the Ottoman-ruled Balkans after being driven out by the 15th-century Inquisition.
Over breakfast one morning, my grandfather’s cousin—a veteran of the Communist partisans during World War II and a professor who taught in the medical department of Sarajevo University—gave me the lowdown. The Bosnian Serb leadership, he said, was composed of pathological liars who could not be trusted. He told me that the previous week, he had run into Radovan Karadžić—the Bosnian Serb leader who engineered the siege of Sarajevo, and later sentenced for war crimes and crimes against humanity—and asked him point blank what nefarious plans he had for the city in which they both lived. Karadzic flashed him an ingratiating smile and implored, “Please don’t believe all those terrible things that are said about me.”
My elder relative’s cynicism was not limited to the Serbs, however. He also warned me that the elected government in Bosnia, drawn largely from the Muslim-led Party of Democratic Action (SDA), could not be trusted either, particularly by the Jewish community. “They don’t like Israel,” he harumphed. “They support the Arabs.”
As I wrote and broadcast about the war over the next three years, including a stint as a media-relations officer with the United Nations peacekeeping force deployed in the former Yugoslavia, I didn’t find much evidence of hostility to Israel among the Bosnian Muslims. They were too busy trying to win over international backing, particularly from the United States, and perhaps calculated that sounding off on the Middle East conflict was not the wisest strategy.
At the same time, I was well aware that Bosnian Jews had not forgotten how the Holocaust had arrived on their doorsteps through the Nazi-backed Croatian puppet state, and that the notorious Mufti of Jerusalem—Hajj Amin al-Husseini—had recruited several thousand Bosnian Muslims for the Nazi SS Handzar (Turkish for “scimitar”) Division.
Still, in my youthful naivete, I told myself that this was purely history, that the present situation was very different, and that the goal had to be to end the Serb onslaught. I was also struck by the split between Diaspora Jews and Israel over the issue.
In the Diaspora, organizations like the American Jewish Committee and individuals like the French-Jewish intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy, spoke out passionately and eloquently on behalf of the Bosnian cause, reminding the world that after the horrors of the Holocaust, ethnic chauvinism had no place in Europe—a message I enthusiastically endorsed. Israel took a different stance, subtly aligning with the Serbs and avoiding condemnation of the many atrocities committed by Serb and, later, Croat militias in Bosnia.
Thirty years later, I find myself wondering if both my grandfather’s cousin and the Israelis had identified a kernel of truth that I was too reluctant and impatient to see back then. To be clear, I haven’t revised my view that the Bosnian Serbs, backed by Slobodan Milošević’s regime in Belgrade, committed a genocide. But the history of the Jews in Bosnia was not a straightforward tale of happy coexistence either.
Indeed, hundreds of the veterans of the SS Handzar Division had moved to the Arab world after World War II, volunteering for the Arab effort to crush the nascent State of Israel during its 1948 War of Independence. In post-war, Communist-ruled Yugoslavia, the old suspicions between Jews and their neighbors simmered, once more coming to the surface as Yugoslavia violently disintegrated in the early 1990s.
The main trigger for my current self-reflection is the announcement last week from Bosnia’s National Museum that revenues drawn from visitors to its exhibition of the Sarajevo Haggadah—an extraordinary and beautifully preserved illustrated manuscript from the 13th century that was carried to Bosnia by Jews expelled from Spain—will be donated to Palestinian causes.
“In this way, the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina provides support to the people of Palestine who are suffering from systematic, calculated and cold-blooded terror, directly by the State of Israel, and indirectly by all those who support and/or justify its shameless actions,” explained the museum’s director, Mirsad Sijarić. “As an institution that deals with the protection of cultural, historical and natural heritage, we are obliged to warn that in the shadow of this tragedy, the targeted erasure of the cultural and religious identity of primarily Muslims and Christians of Palestine is taking place.”
Sijarić’s statement is as uncomplicatedly antisemitic as the decision in June to cancel a meeting of European rabbis in Sarajevo, which, according to one Bosnian official, would have otherwise sent “a message of legitimization of the occupation and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people.” Sanctioning Jewish citizens of other countries for the actions of the State of Israel is an act of discrimination.
What seems to be happening is that Bosnia is going the way of South Africa. Just as South African leaders have licensed the use of the word “apartheid” to defame Israel, the Bosnians are doing much the same with the word “genocide.” And, just as in the South African case, what’s involved here is an utter distortion of history.
Though you may have the impression from the endless media coverage that the current war in Gaza is the first example of a “genocide” since World War II, that simply isn’t true, as the Bosnians themselves know from bitter experience. And what makes Bosnia different is that the genocidal war launched by the Serbs was not provoked by a vile massacre of Serb civilians by the Bosnian Army. The Serbs did not have to endure an Oct. 7 pogrom at the hands of the Bosnians. The other nations to have suffered genocide in the last 80 years—the Kurds, the Cambodians and the Rwandan Tutsis, among others—similarly did not inflict atrocities that brought down the wrath of their persecutors. They were in the firing line simply because of who they were.
The refusal in Bosnia to understand that Israel’s war is directed at Hamas, the author of the Oct. 7 atrocities, and not Palestinians as a people, is yet another demonstration of the success of the Hamas propaganda effort outside the boundaries of the Middle East. Yet by endorsing the Hamas narrative uncritically, the Bosnians are risking their own security.
The prospect of another war in the republic, where the uneasy peace settlement secured in 1995 is tottering amid Russian machinations with the Serbs, cannot be dismissed. In that regard, Bosnia will need the support of the United States if it is to survive as an independent entity. Parroting Hamas talking points is a surefire way of not receiving it.
Back in the 1990s, I, along with many other Jews, truly believed that our support for a multinational Bosnia composed of Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Roma and other minorities would cement good relations indefinitely. We were wrong.
I am skeptical that we can persuade the various Hamas groupies in Sarajevo of the profound errors in their thinking. But for the sake of its own interests, Bosnia needs to follow the path of Ukraine, which actively identifies with Israel’s struggle for survival, and eschew the South African model.
