Remembering the Holocaust in Serbia

In 1995, when Serbia was still at war with its neighbors and engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Croats and Bosnian Muslims, its government established a memorial at the Staro Sajmište concentration camp in Belgrade, which had been established by the Nazis in 1942. The inscription notes that its “victims were mostly Serbs, Jews, and Roma,” although in fact the vast majority of those put to death there came from the latter two groups. As Liam Hoare writes, this detail reveals much about the way the Holocaust is remembered in Serbia—a country where many fought against the Nazis, but that also produced numerous collaborators:

“The narrative in Serbia is that we were an anti-Nazi country, which in part is right. But we had a Nazi-Serbian government in Belgrade and concentration camps. Children don’t really learn about that,” [said the head of an organization trying to expand Holocaust education in Serbia]. . . . In Serbian textbooks, “Jews are mentioned but not as the focal point of the Nazi regime.” . . .

Serbian schoolchildren are far more likely to know about the Jasenovac concentration camp, established by the fascist Ustaše movement [in] Croatia in August 1941, than about Staro Sajmište. Present estimates . . . show that between 77,000 and 99,000 people were put to death in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945, around half of whom were Serbs . . . .

The emphasis on Jasenovac . . . serves an ulterior purpose. In electing to emphasize Serbian suffering at Croatian hands over Jewish and Roma suffering in Serbia, the government has been attempting to construct a national identity that places victimhood at the heart of the Serbian narrative [while emphasizing the wrongdoing of its enemies], in this case Croatia.

Read more at eJewish Philanthropy

More about: History & Ideas, Holocaust, Serbia, World War II, Yugoslavia

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF