The prime minister of Albania, Edi Rama, said on Friday that street protests in his country about plans for a real-estate project led by former White House official Jared Kushner are part of a “hybrid war” led by “enemies of Albania and enemies of Israel.”
Rama, a center-left politician who has maintained friendly ties to both U.S. President Donald Trump and Israel despite their unpopularity in Europe, said this in a Euronews interview, in which he described the protests in recent days as the results of how the concerns of “well-meaning people” were “weaponized by the enemies of Albania and of Israel, because there is a narrative in the whole thing that this is about a hidden deal between me and [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, through Jared Kushner, to bring the Palestinians in that part of Albania—which is a total fantasy.”
Hybrid war is a term that emerged in the 2000s to describe warfare in which a main component relies on nonmilitary vectors, such as psychological warfare and the erosion of the enemy’s internal cohesion or institutions. The term has been widely applied to Russia’s way of waging war against Ukraine, mainly before the full-blown Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Rama declined to name the people behind the phenomenon he described.
Ivanka Trump, U.S. President Donald Trump’s elder daughter, and her husband, Kushner, a real-estate developer and investor who was one of the American president’s most influential advisers during his first term, recently unveiled plans to build a luxury vacation project in Albania’s uninhabited Sazan Island, a former communist-era military base.
The plans provoked protests on the far left and by environmentalists who claimed it would damage natural habitats, though Rama has said the plan was a “model for how you develop and how you make nature better by bringing people into nature.” Rama implied that some of the rhetoric about the planned project has antisemitic elements.
“In the first day [of the protests], imagine, we saw five times more users than the number of users that are the usual ones in the Albanian social media. It’s a lot of bots, it’s a lot of fake profiles, it’s a lot of attacks coming from all over. Now, this is one narrative. Because Albania has a very proud history of saving the Jews. Albania has a very proud position of never having had antisemitic sentiments. And there are enemies of Albania. They have names that want to fuel this among the Albanian Muslims that are incredibly tolerant, that are amazingly pro-European, that are citizens of Europe and nothing to do with this. This is one. The other narrative that is mixed with that is the environment,” Rama said.
During the Holocaust, when their country was occupied by Italian Fascist troops, Albanians, who are predominantly Muslim, rescued approximately 2,000 Jews, owing partly to Besa, a local code of honor and neighborly conduct. Due to the arrival of Jewish refugees from Bulgaria and Greece, Albania is perhaps the only Axis-occupied country that had more Jews after the Holocaust than before.
