In Bosnia and Herzegovina, this latest chapter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has reinforced divisions between the country’s three constituent nations – Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. In this most recent example of war as a spectator sport, politicians and people alike in Bosnia have engaged in verbal and media conflict, staunchly supporting their respective “side” and using the very real conflict in the Middle East as a proxy to advance their own political interests. Luckily, the verbal skirmish has not, and will not, turn kinetic, but its consequences – heightened animosities between the three nations and a surge in antisemitism – are already significant.
Picking sides in the Middle East
The chairwoman of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Borjana Kristo (R), and Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic (L) attend a joint press conference following their meeting in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, October 19, 2023. Photo: EPA-EFE/FEHIM DEMIR
A complicated web of sympathies for different foreign actors is nothing new for Bosnia. Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bosniaks and Croats have by and large been supportive of Ukraine, while most Serbs have faithfully supported their historic ally, Russia. However, in September, Bosniaks and Serbs found themselves on the same, Azeri, side of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik matched the support of Bosniak politicians in his letter to Azerbaijan’s president Aliyev, congratulating Azeris on their victory over Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Croat politicians were more neutral, but the general sympathies of Croats tended, tacitly, to lie with the Armenians. The groupings switched again a month ago to their third different configuration in less than two years, with Bosniaks supporting Palestinians, and Serbs, and especially Croats, supporting Israel.
Bosniak support for Palestine is longstanding. A banner reading “Yesterday Srebrenica, today Gaza” from an October 22 protest in Sarajevo best encapsulates the relationship, and a common Bosniak perception of shared destiny with Palestinians. The fact that most Bosniaks and Palestinians are Sunni Muslims further strengthens the relationship. Bakir Izetbegovic, the current leader of the largest Bosniak party, the Party of Democratic Action, SDA, drew parallels on October 28 between the plights of Bosniaks and Palestinians, while also indirectly calling out Croats leaders for their continued support of Israel.
Serb support for Israel is also consistent, although it has become more pronounced in recent years. In a 2022 interview for The Jerusalem Post Dodik claimed that “no one understands Jews like Serbs,” alluding to the systemic extermination of both Jews and Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia during World War II, conducted by the fascist Independent State of Croatia, NDH, whose government included both Croats and Bosniaks. In the same interview, Dodik added that what connects the Serbs in Bosnia with Israel is the “Muslim extreme factor, which is trying to destabilize Israel, and which we also fought against in the civil war of the 1990s.” Ironically, just like Izetbegovic, but from the opposite side, Dodik frames the conflicts in Bosnia and in Israel and Palestine through ethnonationalist and religious lenses, equating Serbs with Israelis and Bosniaks with Palestinians.
The direct relationship of Croats with Israel is a more recent development, but the bond continues to intensify. The relationship is personified by the role of an Israeli businessman, Amir Gross Kabiri, in Mostar. In 2019, Aluminij Mostar, an aluminum manufacturing company, became insolvent and declared bankruptcy. In 2020, Aluminij’s factory and its properties were leased to Kabiri’s M.T. Abraham Group, which soon resumed partial production. Aluminij was the largest employer in Mostar, and, with around 300 workers, is still one of the most significant employers. In 2021, Kabiri became Vice President of HSK Zrinjski, a Croat football club from Mostar known as a bastion of Croat nationalism.
Kabiri was elected leader of the Jewish Community of Mostar in 2022, which today includes some 30 members. He was also pivotal in the opening of the main office of the Israeli Chamber of Commerce in Bosnia in Mostar rather than Sarajevo, further strengthening direct links between Israel and Croats in Mostar. During each of these endeavors, Kabiri has been perceived as having a close relationship with the Croatian Democratic Union of Bosnia, HDZ BiH, the largest Croat party in the country.
Flag wars in Mostar and offers to join Hamas
Around the same time that Kabiri moved to Mostar, local Croats started flying Israeli flags. For example, when fighting in Israel-Palestine broke out in May 2021, Bosniaks projected the Palestinian flag on the famous Old Bridge in Mostar. In response, some local Croats put up an Israeli flag and a flag of Herceg-Bosna (the Croat proto-state during the 1990s war) next to a banner that stated: “United Against Terrorism.” The stunt was as much about local political issues as it was about Israel.
In 2022, for Yom HaZikaron, Israeli Memorial Day, the Mayor of Mostar, a Croat, illuminated the Old Bridge with an Israeli flag. Soon after, local Bosniaks covered the projection with a Palestinian flag. On May 1, 2023, the most prominent building in Mostar, Kosača Lodge, was illuminated in Israeli colours to celebrate Israel being the main sponsor of the 24th International Economic Fair in Mostar.
On October 7 this year, the University of Mostar, a Croat university, projected the Israeli flag on one of its buildings as a symbol of support for Israel. Three days later, Bosniaks flew a giant Palestinian flag from the Old Bridge. While Bosniak and Croat flags were once used exclusively to mark one’s own “territory” and to provoke the “other” side, Israeli and Palestinian flags now serve the same role in proxy.
More generally, the tensions generated by the conflict in Israel-Palestine are rising. At a pro-Palestine protest in Zenica on October 29, Serif Patkovic, an SDA councilor and a wartime commander of the 7th Muslim Brigade of the Bosniak Army, ABiH, stated that Hamas reminded him of his own unit during the war, noting that he would make himself available to join. The statement enraged Croats and brought back painful memories, as the unit he’d commanded massacred nine Croats and one Serb, among other crimes, in the village of Dusina near Zenica on January 26, 1993.
During the Bosniak-Croat war within the wider Bosnian war, the ABiH expelled slightly over 150,000 Croats, while the HVO, the Bosnian Croat force, expelled around 50,000 Bosniaks. Both sides tend to see themselves as exclusive victims, often ignoring those among them who were also perpetrators of often unpunished crimes. Because of this context, Patkovic’s statement further raised tensions.
On November 2, four days after the protest in Zenica, HSK Zrinjski played a cup game in Zenica against the local NK Celik. Zrinjski won 6:0. However, the football spectacle was not the focus, but rather the conflict in the stands. Celik supporters, almost exclusively Bosniak, “welcomed” Zrinjski supporters, almost exclusively Croat, with a banner that read: “Your titles and first places are for nothing when you are a whore for the Jews.” The antisemitic banner targeted Kabiri’s role in Zrinjski.
Diplomatic scandal
People rally in support of Palestinians, in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, October 22, 2023. Photo: EPA-EFE/FEHIM DEMIR
The surge of heated rhetoric and strong statements were not limited to protests and social media, but also reached the highest diplomatic and political levels. On October 7, Borjana Krišto, current Prime Minister of Bosnia and joint candidate of all Croat parties for the Croat seat on the state Presidency in 2022, tweeted that she “unequivocally condemn the unjust and brutal attack on Israel and its citizens by Hamas” and stands with Israel. Kristo had been vocal about her support of Israel before. In a May 2023 interview with an Israeli newspaper she stated that she would be “very happy to see the embassy in Jerusalem one day.”
Two days later, on October 9, Zeljko Komsic condemned her statement. Komsic is an ethnic Croat from Sarajevo who was elected four times, most recently in 2022, as the Croat Member of the state Presidency. But he was voted in overwhelmingly by Bosniak voters. Only around 3 per cent of Croats, some 5,000, voted for him. The other 97 per cent of Croats, 170,000, voted for Kristo. He is not considered a legitimate Croat representative by either Croats or Croatia.
Komsic not only condemned Krišto but stated that Hamas’s attack is a gesture of “desperate people” and that everything should be “put into context.” Israel’s Ambassador to Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina, based in Tirana, Galit Peleg, condemned Komšić’s statement and questioned his values. In the biggest diplomatic scandal in Bosnia’s recent history, Komšić, the acting chairman of the tripartite Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, called the Israeli ambassador a “malicious lying fool, or a manipulated, but also malicious fool.”
To add insult to injury, Komsic implied that Peleg was manipulated by Kabiri, whom he called a “pervert,” and employing an old antisemitic trope, stated that Kabiri cares more about “the money than the fact that he is doing business with followers of the politics and ideology held by those who took part in the Holocaust”, broadly implying that all Croats in Mostar are fascists. The spar between Komsic and Peleg is the most prominent example of the direct impact of the most recent Israeli-Palestinian conflict on politics in Bosnia, but not the most important. A rise in hate speech online, and of antisemitism in particular, is arguably most concerning.
Rise in open antisemitism
During the Holocaust, Croat and Bosniak Ustase in Bosnia and Herzegovina organized the systemic extermination of Jews, killing more than 85 per cent of them – 12,000 out of 14,000. Jews made up roughly 20 per cent of Sarajevo’s population before World War II, but today there are just 274 Jews in all of Bosnia, most of whom live in Sarajevo. The history of antisemitism in Bosnia is, sadly, a long one. In the earlier context of football fans, in 2015, on two separate occasions, fans of the Bosnian national football team, who are overwhelmingly Bosniak, engaged in chanting: “Jews goodbye” in German during the game, along with: “Kill, kill, kill the Jews”.
It is not just football chants though. For the past month, social media posts and comments under news articles in Bosnia have been filled with not just the usual hate speech between the three nations, but now more specifically, with antisemitism. The leader of the Jewish community in Sarajevo, Jakob Finci, stated on October 25 that, “the increased level of antisemitism and lack of reaction to the antisemitism by the authorities” resulted in the cancelation of a concert in Sarajevo that was supposed to commemorate the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht. The Israeli Ambassador said it was shameful that Jews in Sarajevo are afraid in their own city. On November 6, an unknown person phoned in a bomb threat to Aluminij, and the next day Kabiri received multiple death threats.
Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina, together with Roma people, are the most discriminated group, both socially and politically. Just like other national minorities, such as Italian or Ukrainians, Jews and Roma are barred from running for the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina and from the upper chamber of the parliament. A colleague of mine and I wrote a reform proposal last year that would allow Jews and Roma to be elected to all political positions in Bosnia, among other benefits. In addition, the representatives of national minorities in the upper chamber of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Republika Srpska are elected by Bosniaks and Serbs respectively. However, unlike other national minorities, Jews and Roma also have to deal with antisemitism and anti-Roma sentiment that just over 80 years ago caused the genocide of Jews and Roma in Bosnia and Croatia.
It is disturbing that in addition to the loss and pain they have inflicted upon Israelis and Palestinians themselves, the human suffering and carnage there has resulted in more animosity, hate speech, and antisemitism in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The divisions within the country seem more pronounced than ever, and it seems as though the only thing the three nations can agree on is the fact that they cannot agree on anything. Any idea of a coherent, common foreign policy position seems like a distant dream.
Valentino Grbavac is a PhD candidate in Politics at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on federalism, power-sharing and institutional design in divided societies.
The opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.
