Israel does not recognize Kosovo.
“All civilized nations have recognized Kosovo,” says Votim Demiri, the president of Kosovo’s community of 56 Jews, “but Israel has not.”
Six years after the United States recognized Kosovo, the “Kosovo Thanks You” website records every new country to follow suit, most recently the Solomon Islands on Aug. 13.
There are 110 entries, including 23 of the 28 members of the European Union.
“All of Israel’s closest allies are on that list,” says Petrit Selimi, Kosovo’s deputy foreign minister, who has made gaining Israel’s recognition a personal mission.
“Has Israel recognized us yet?” he half-jokingly greets a JTA reporter.
What resounds in Israel’s snub are the echoes that members of Kosovo’s Albanian majority hear from the last century.
“Israel is not just a number, it is symbolic,” says Ines Demiri, the Jewish community leader’s daughter and a foreign ministry official assigned to the Israel case.
A plinth commemorating the Holocaust in an enclave where Kosovo’s parliament now stands in Pristina. (Ron Kampeas/JTA)
Albanians, Kosovars will tell you, rescued Jews from genocide in the last century’s middle, while they credit Jews with rescuing Kosovar Albanians from genocide at its end.
This pairing is reflected in the plaque marking last year’s installation of a plinth near the parliament building memorializing the Holocaust: “The ceremony was supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kosovo as a token of gratitude for the support to the people of Kosovo shown by the Jewish community during the war in Kosovo 98-99.”
It is true that American Jews played a prominent role in rallying support for NATO intervention during Serbia’s brutal military campaign against Kosovar Albanians who were seeking independence for what was then a Serbian province.
Selimi rattles off the names of congressmen who championed Kosovo before, during and after the war: the late Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), whose survival of the Holocaust informed his concern for a nation subject to the predations of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic; and Reps. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) and Ben Gilman (R-N.Y.), like Lantos leading foreign affairs activists in Congress. There was also Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate and Holocaust memoirist who urged international action during the Kosovo conflict.
Then it gets weird. Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state during the Kosovo action, was Kosovo’s Jewish “great aunt,” Selimi says. Then he adds the name of Wesley Clark, the commander of NATO when the alliance beat back Serbian forces. Both Albright and Clark discovered Jewish roots well into adulthood, but neither is in any conventional sense a member of a Jewish community.
With other interlocutors, the listing of Kosovo’s supposedly Jewish saviors can veer into the downright bizarre: Vice President Joe Biden, a number of Kosovars say authoritatively, is Jewish, and this is why he visited Kosovo soon after independence. Ditto for Tony Blair and his joining with President Bill Clinton in mounting the NATO action. Biden and Blair would no doubt be surprised to learn not only that they are Jewish, but that it is why they aided Kosovo.
It is as if Kosovars see their salvation as the result of a massive Jewish conspiracy, only one that is heroic rather than nefarious.
“If you look at what the U.S. government did, look at their profile, look at how many of them have Jewish roots,” says Isak Bilalli, deputy director of the Kosovo Israeli Friendship Association. “The footprints are everywhere.”
Albanian Kosovars assign epic proportions to the relationship — great and powerful Jews sweeping in to rescue the little nation that once rescued them.
Albania during the Nazi occupation not only protected its own 200 or so Jews, it welcomed Jews fleeing from other lands — between 600 and 1,800, according to Yad Vashem.
Ask Kosovars about their sister nation, Albania, and if you’re Jewish, the first thing you are likely to hear is that it is the only Nazi-occupied land that had a larger Jewish population at the end of the war than at the beginning.
Albanian Kosovars also rescued Jews, although it is not clear how many.
Bilalli, 40, a translator and consultant, likens Israeli recognition to a totem of protection against Serbian ambitions to reclaim Kosovo.
“We want a brick to put in our wall,” he says. “Israel is in a position to recognize what a great country did for them.”
