Accused of genocide, internationally shunned: What can Israel learn from the case of Serbia?
Bodies of Palestinians at Nasser Hospital in Gaza in 2023
Yishai Halper writes in Haaretz on 31 October 2025
“Every time I make a foreign friend, I have to prove that I’m not a monster,” wrote Serbian journalist Zoran Ćirjaković in Newsweek in October 1998, in the midst of the Balkan wars that tore Yugoslavia apart. “We’re seen as the ambassadors of the new world order’s dark side: intolerance, ethnic cleansing and genocide.”
Ćirjaković was not wrong: In those years the world indeed held the Serbs accountable for the atrocities committed during the wars. Today, in the aftermath of the war in the Gaza Strip, Israel finds itself in a similar place: ostracized by the world and accused of war crimes. And yet in Israel, the debate is still mostly political and aimed at the approaching election: Who should receive the credit for the cease-fire and the return of the hostages, and who is guilty of foiling previous deals? Who was right and who was wrong all along? As in postwar Serbia, other, more difficult and painful questions are being marginalized.
And yet global opinion and international law will not absolve Israel from responsibility for its actions in the Strip: Even Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s envoy and son-in-law, describes it as a place “that look like it’s been hit by a nuclear bomb.” Israelis will ultimately have to answer for what the world sees as war crimes, and how they address these claims will impact the face of an entire society.
Experts on Serbia who recently spoke with Haaretz charted a painfully relevant case study that prompts one to ask how – if at all – a society can move forward in the wake of its involvement in a bloody and vicious war, and whether it can be welcomed back into the international community.
“The bad news for Israel is that Serbia has not reentered the family of nations, and has not come to terms with the war crimes that its army had committed,” said Jelena Subotić, a professor of political science at Georgia State University in Atlanta. According to Subotić, who experienced the years of war in her home country of Serbia, the predominant attitude there in the 1990s was “we didn’t do anything wrong. We are the victims here, everyone thinks we’re the bad guys, but in fact we are the good guys.”
Subotić remembers well what Serbia was like at the dawn of the 21st century: a country that had emerged from a decade of conflict inside the crumbling skeleton of Yugoslavia. Some 140,000 people were killed in the Balkan wars in the 1990s – a process that was sparked by the death of President Josip Broz Tito in 1980, continued with the collapse of the Soviet Union and culminated in a drive for independence on the part of the countries that had made up the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
The war crimes committed during the decade of conflict in the Balkans included genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced relocation (“transfer”) and other atrocities – mostly perpetrated by Serb forces. The bloodiest war was waged in Bosnia, where Serb forces slaughtered some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in the town of Srebrenica; it ended with the Dayton Accords in 1995. NATO’s military intervention in 1999 put an end to the Kosovo War, which also experienced its own share of war crimes. In 2000 the Serbian strongman, President Slobodan Milošević, was ousted and promptly extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In the years that followed, the tribunal indicted 160 more people for war crimes, most of them Serbs.
When the wars ended Serbia found itself struggling under economic sanctions and a cultural boycott, and the atrocities its forces had committed were etched into global opinion and discourse. “It’s embarrassing being a Serb these days,” wrote Ćirjaković in Newsweek, in an op-ed located in an archive by Dror Sharon, a PhD candidate in history at Tel Aviv University. Even though Ćirjaković has since distanced himself from this piece, he wrote then that “Once the heroes of World War 2, today’s Serbs are Europe’s pariahs.”
“I felt shame for things that were done in my name, even though I had never voted for Milošević,” said Dragama, a 63-year-old retired teacher from Belgrade. In a phone conversation with Haaretz, however, she added a rhetorical question that she’s asked herself: “How have we gone from the victims of World War II to the bad guys of the 1990s?”
For her part, explained Prof. Subotić, “Serbs have always perceived themselves as being on the ‘right side of history,’ but because we’re so just, we’re always victims. And as victims, we cannot be perpetrators.”
One step forward, two steps back
Standing at a crossroads at the dawn of the new millennium, Serbia took a brave turn. “You must do the hard work of confronting the past if you want to move forward,” said political scientist Ivan Vejvoda, from the Austrian Institute for International Affairs in Vienna, an adviser to former pro-Western Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić after the fall of Milošević. During Đinđić’s tenure, Vejvoda noted, the process of confronting the past took place on several levels. On the judicial level, the prime minister decided to swiftly extradite the “heaviest war criminals” to the Hague tribunal (chief among them Milošević, who was found dead in his cell in The Hague in March 2006); lower-level criminals were tried inside Serbia. At the same time, civil society organizations began exposing and shedding light on the war crimes committed during the Balkan wars. One of these groups is the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, or YIHR, a regional network of NGOs that work to educate people and promote cross-ethnic dialogue
“We try to inform young generations from different parts of the former Yugoslavia about the violent past that is still being silenced or romanticized and celebrated by the state authorities,” Marko Milosavljević, YIHR’s head of research and advocacy, told Haaretz, adding that his organization also seeks to tackle “what each of the post-conflict nationalistic narratives do, which is to establish a hierarchy of victims, and most often present war criminals as heroes.”
Serbia “had a small window” for launching a process of rebuilding and confronting the past, according to Subotić. “The new government was elected [in 2001] and that government was democratic, and it began a process almost like a truth commission,” she said. However, Đinđić’s assassination in March 2003 put an end to what Subotić and other experts see as Serbia’s most honest attempt to date to confront the war crimes that taint its past. “That was the end of that,” she asserted – as Serbia then took a conservative turn.
Ever since, “instead of reconciliation and national catharsis, we are witnessing the constant self-victimization of Serbs,” said Boško Jakšić, a Serb journalist who has covered many conflicts in the Balkans and across the Middle East. “The culture of memory is being replaced by a culture of suppressing the truth.” Indeed, the narrative that has taken center stage is not only centered around victimization and nationalistic – it also includes denial, efforts to cover up the truth and revisionism. Despite important steps taken in recent years such as visits by Serbian leaders to Srebrenica memorials and a partial, official recognition of the atrocities, Jakšić said that “the truth about what happened in Bosnia and then in Kosovo is being hidden. It’s a planned blockade of the truth has lasted for decades.”
Milosavljević of the YIHR explained that “our annual ‘State of Denial’ report documents the practice of denying war crimes and glorifying war criminals by government officials and the media” – a process that continues in full swing: Last year Serbia opposed the UN’s resolution condemning what it called the Srebrenica Genocide, which led to the designation of an international day of commemoration; moreover, a Serb war criminal, released for health reasons from his incarceration at The Hague, was recently given a hero’s welcome. The process of rewriting history is also ongoing, Subotić noted: For instance, she added, when asked about Srebrenica, many Serbs will say, “No no, these were not war crimes. These people [i.e., the victims] were terrorists, they were not civilians, they were combatants. And so this was self-defense.”
‘A terrible déjà vu’
The self-victimization at the heart of Serbia’s postwar narrative is also reflected in the political and geopolitical spheres today: “Serbia is a country that is stuck in a cycle of its own victimization, and that cycle is preventing it from becoming a better country,” said Subotić, who has also closely examined such processes in her 1999 book “Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance after Communism.” The book sheds light on how countries in the region exploited Holocaust remembrance as part of a political strategy aimed at resolving their own insecurities – regarding their identities, their precarious standing in the world and dealings with other international actors in general.
Vejvoda, from the Austrian think tank, was more direct: Serbia today, he stated, is a fragile and fragmented country that has not done enough to combat political corruption. “And suddenly you wake up, and you see that you are in a totally authoritarian dynamic.” Vejvoda recounted what the former prime minister and his good friend Đinđić used to say: “We have to create the institutional conditions and framework so that Milošević never happens again to us.” Referring to the current president, Aleksandar Vučić, who has been in power since 2017, Vejvoda described a feeling of “a terrible déjà vu.”
“Vučić,” he went on to explain, “thinks that we’re still this nonaligned country” – one that can pull off a balancing act by declaring that “we are militarily neutral, but not politically neutral because we support Ukraine.” Indeed, such ambiguity has also characterized the close relations between Serbia and Russia, as well as in Serbia’s ineffective efforts to achieve EU membership. Political scientist Ivan Vejvoda argues that acknowledging a sense of guilt over the Balkan wars does not make citizens complicit in the atrocities committed by Serbian security forces. “And that,” he adds, “is what I want Israelis to understand.”
According to Nikola Samardžić, a professor of history at the University of Belgrade, “the Serb narrative of denial and revisionism has become a tool of Russian hybrid influence, aimed at destabilizing neighbors and obstruction of Western Balkans EU integration.” At the same time, he said, “Serbia has a problem with the absence of a political commitment to EU integration, meaning the rule of law, democratic procedures, open economy and free market… instead of corruption and social demagogy.”
Although Serbia has never fully confronted or taken responsibility for its violent past, the world, to some extent, has apparently moved on. Perhaps Serbia has been held less to account for that than Israel is today for its conduct in Gaza because Serbia is seen as less geopolitically important than Israel (“The Russians are not stupid,” said Vejvoda. “They know this part of the world belongs to the West”). In addition, the drawing up of clear borders after the Bosnian war, as part of the Dayton Accords, could have also played a role. And then there is the fact, as Prof. Subotić put it, that “Israel has the curse of everybody having an opinion about it.” She also cited the antisemitic factor, which she said plays a part in the global criticism being leveled at Israel. “Belgrade can irritate many with its politics and it can continue to sink into isolation,” journalist Jakšić agreed. “But no one will attack the citizens of Serbia or burn their Orthodox churches around the world.”
Student uprising
More than two decades after Serb masses stormed their parliament building and toppled Milošević, the current president has brought the country’s ties with its neighbors to “the lowest level since the war,” Jakšić said. “And then the students appeared.”
The student protests in Serbia began in November 2024, following the collapse of a concrete canopy at the train station in the city of Novi Sad – an incident seen as symbolizing government corruption – in which 16 people died. The protests have only grown since. But so many years of feeble attempts to create a semblance of democracy in Serbia have left their mark. The students reject attempts by politicians from all sides to join their demonstration or assume sponsorship of them, while at the same time refusing to identify with any side of the political map. And yet experts say this aversion to politics doesn’t necessarily point to ideological laxness, but to an honest attempt to usher in change from the ground up.
“These students, who were born roughly 25 years ago, understand that this was a half-baked transition to democracy. They want to start anew… and really establish the basis of rule of law and constitutionalism,” said Vejvoda, the political scientist who at 75, has witnessed decades of tectonic changes in Europe; he himself even fought in the Yugoslav army.
According to Jakšić, the train station debacle was a moment when Serbia “woke up to find an apathetic country where the president captured all the institutions, subdued the judiciary and dominated the overwhelming majority of the media.” The collapse at the train station and the protests that ensued, he added, “have led to the deepest social and political crisis in Serbia in recent decades.”
The Serbian students’ reluctance to be politically identified is a matter of debate in Serbia, but historical memory is bound to play a role in the new country they seek to shape. “The student movement is a heterogeneous movement,” said Milosavljević, from YIHR, but added that even if some display an allergy to politics, “the student movement is tasked with dealing with the legacy of the crimes committed in the ’90s, such as hate speech, especially toward Albanians” – after many years of conflicting territorial and other claims.
Such comments lead one to wonder if there is one lesson that Serbia could and should have implemented after emerging from its wars that Israel should learn today – a question Haaretz presented to the experts interviewed here. Their answers, for the most part, focused on the necessity of taking a cold, brave look at the past, but they also warned against the triumph of a nationalistic narrative that holds that the victim can never be the aggressor.
Post-October 7 considerations “should include thinking about what Israel is as a society, what we [Israelis] want to be as a society, where we want to go, what our values are. Serbia never asked those questions,” Subotić noted, adding, “It’s very, very difficult for a society to accept that horrible things are being done in its name. It’s very difficult to get up in the morning and say, ‘I am complicit. My taxes are paying for this. I may have voted for this.”
For his part, Jakšić asserted, “The first lesson, however painful, is to face up to all that has been done in the Gaza Strip. Who is responsible for what happened on October 7, for the brutal military campaign that followed, for the media darkness that covered the Israeli army operation, for the international isolation of Israel, for contributing to the growth of antisemitism?” While confronting such issues “can be traumatic, it is the only effective [way] and leads to a collective catharsis. Israelis must see their mother naked, as the Serbian proverb says.” Hamas, the journalist added, may have betrayed the Palestinian people by launching the deadly massacre two years ago, but Israelis must not allow Prime Minister Benjamin’s Netanyahu’s “messianic brutality and trampling of democracy to go unexposed.”
Vejvoda stressed the critical role of civil society organizations in general when it comes to grappling with the past, and gave the example of the Joint History Project, as part of which historians from across the Balkans are collaborating in writing high-school textbooks that seek to “inspire students and empower history teachers with diverse perspectives” in order to “analyze and debate national narratives and foster critical thinking,” according to its website.
Milosavljević noted that such initiatives are critical in the struggle against the “militarization of the memory of the genocide” and mentioned the Israeli-Palestinian organization Standing Together as an example of a group that is seeking truth, reconciliation and accountability. Both of the latter emphasized that work at the NGO level must rise to and be translated into the level of government policy.
When Vejvoda was asked about Dragama – the teacher from Belgrade who said she felt guilty for what went on during the wars despite never having voted for Milošević – he replied that owning up to such feelings did not mean she was complicit in any way in the horrors committed by Serb security forces. “And that is what I want Israelis to realize.”
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