Harun KarcicKosovo and Israel: What is Behind their Mutual Recognition?
There has been a flurry of Israeli activity in the Balkan region over the past couple of years. The most recent example was the much publicized establishment of formal diplomatic ties between Israel and Kosovo, a Muslim-majority country. Kosovo not only recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but also vowed to move its embassy there. In turn, Israel became the 117th country to recognize Kosovo’s independence. It was a tit-for-tat move beneficial to all.
Though the recent inking of the deal between Israel and Kosovo is new, Israel’s interest in the region is something that has been steadily gaining momentum over the past decade. It is, so to speak, a two way street, involving reciprocal interests and commitments.
But why would Israel be interested in the Balkans in the first place?
From Israel’s point of view, there are two crucial reasons for extending its interest and influence in South-East Europe. First, with many European Union countries placing the peace onus on Israel and seeing it as the occupying power unwilling to halt the construction of Jewish settlements and make way for a viable Palestinian statehood, Israel has come to realize that it needs to weaken such a stance. One way of doing so is to seek alliances among former communist EU member states that are sympathetic towards Israel – such as Hungary, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and increasingly Croatia.
The second reason is that with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict taking on less diplomatic significance in recent years, Israel is seeking to expand its geopolitical and economic clout abroad. Perhaps the Eastern Mediterranean corridor – across Cyprus and Greece – could be considered a passage for Israeli influence in the Balkans, and consequently to Europe. So, with China luring Balkan countries with generous soft-loans, Russia and Turkey aiming to extend their political influence, and Gulf countries seeking to bolster their real-estate investments, Israel is also looking to expand its periphery doctrine and make friends beyond the Middle East. This explains its recent overtures to India, Central Asia, Caucasus – and the now the Balkans.
Third, Balkan countries are hungry for advanced technological knowhow as well as military cooperation and intelligence sharing. The latter is of primary concern to Israel as it has been keeping a watchful eye on radical Balkan individuals who have joined ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria over the past years. Two years ago, Croatia concluded a deal to purchase 30-year-old Israeli F-16 Barak jets, but the deal was called off last minute due to the Pentagon’s objections of end-user agreement violations. In North Macedonia, an Israeli company has been training military helicopter pilots while intelligence sharing with Albania thwarted an attack on an Israel-Albania football match in 2016.
Of all the countries in the region, Serbia has been working hardest to lure Israeli politicians and investors. Over the past two decades, both countries worked on improving bilateral relations, working together in various fields from foreign policy to defense and trade. In Serbia for example, Israelis have invested almost $2 billion in Serbia since 2000, mostly in the IT and security sector. Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić even hired an Israeli PR specialist, a certain Asaf Eisin, to advise him on improving his famously rudimentary public relations skills, which have since become noticeably polished. So it came as no surprise that Belgrade expressed dismay at Israel’s support for Kosovo’s independence, a country which Serbia has refused to recognize.
Serbia still has not come to terms that Kosovo, its former Albanian Muslim province, broke away and declared independence. However, it realized that White House doors open through Israel. The recent Israeli recognition of Kosovo became a bitter pill Serbia had to swallow in the hope of achieving a higher objective – the sympathies of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. Serbian journalists, politicians, and intellectuals have been leading an apparently pre-arranged and well-coordinated campaign to win over Israeli hearts and minds. Having been closely following their mutual visits and statements from government officials and pro-government intellectuals and journalists over the past decade, I noticed three major narratives Serbia uses in an attempt to forge closer ties with Israel.
Because Kosovo resonates so strongly with the Serbian people, the government wants to export its symbolism to a wider audience and justify Serbia’s territorial aspirations to the outside world. Bearing in mind the significance Jerusalem plays in the minds of Jews, Serbian nationalists portray Kosovo as its own ‘Jerusalem’. Depicting Kosovo as ‘Serbia’s Jerusalem’ not only aims at legitimizing the reincorporation of the province into an expanded Serbia but is also an attempt at merging Kosovo and Jewish imagery in the service of Serbian nationalism. It seems that such myth-exporting is beginning to bear fruit: the president of the Israel Serbia Friendship Association recently states: ‘Put simply, Kosovo is to Serbs what Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria are to Jews: the cradle of the nation, the place where it all began.’
Furthermore, as Serbian nationalists have come to notice that Kosovar Albanians and Bosniak Muslims enjoy the sympathies of numerous American Jewish intellectuals, organizations and politicians, Serbia has for years been attempting to derail this friendship by playing on the ‘Muslim terrorist’ boogeyman in the Balkans and accusing Bosnia and Kosovo of being ‘jihadi hotbeds’. Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims joining ISIS back in 2014 and 2015 came as a blessing in disguise for Belgrade – which they used to foster closer intelligence sharing with Israel and depict both countries as sharing a common threat – the threat of ‘Muslim extremism’. Likewise, Balkan Muslim sympathies for Palestinians and Turkey were used to depict them as the disloyal Europeans who gravitate more towards the Middle East.
As foreign activity in the past decade in the Balkans has been accompanied by media fanfare and raucous debate about what they are really up to, increased Israeli activity has been under the radar. It is interesting to note that as Turkey and Qatar have fostered closer ties with Muslim-majority Bosnia and Herzegovina, their arch-rival UAE – and now increasingly UAE’s new friend Israel – have been cozying up to Serbia.
But just as Israel’s embrace of Athens and Nicosia has not prevented it from restoring ties with Ankara, Israel’s concurrent friendship with Serbia does not prevent it from developing a working relationship with Kosovo. By cultivating ties with Balkan states and developing a confluence of geopolitical and economic interests, Israel is opening yet another front in expanding its diplomatic clout.
Increased Israeli activity in the region leads to an important geopolitical conclusion –the Balkans and Middle East are two interrelated geopolitical units. It is obvious that there is geopolitical and security interplay between the two regions and that patterns of enmity and affinity can change overnight in the Balkans, just like they do in the Middle East.