By Mike Wagenheim, JNS
Nemanja Starović spoke with JNS during his visit to Washington, which included meetings about Jewish issues with AIPAC and State Department officials.
Among those demonstrating against the Serbian government in the capital of Belgrade in late March was a protester who appeared, in video footage, to shout “death to Vučić and the Jews around him,” of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić.
That call drew fierce backlash from both Serbians and Israelis, especially given the strong ties between the countries.
“There are many novel challenges, especially in the last several years, with new types of antisemitism that are emerging in my country,” Nemanja Starović, Serbian minister of European integration, told JNS during a visit to Washington last week.
Starović, who is also chairman of Serbia’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said the country is “really proud because of the fact that we never had these traditional types and forms of antisemitism, whether we’re speaking about this far-right antisemitism, Christian antisemitism, Islamic antisemitism, Arab antisemitism.”
“We did not have experience with that,” he told JNS.
Newer forms of Jew-hatred, which come from far left, anarchist and “ultra-liberal” circles, are making modern antisemitism harder to define, according to Starović. Those forms also tend to originate at U.S. and Western European universities, where “it became kind of trendy to be politically anti-Zionist,” he said.
“There is some kind of a spillover effect, even in Serbia,” Starović told JNS. “If there is only one single instance, we need to address it. We need to condemn it, and our government is very strict in that way.”
“We need to work together to devise tools on how to counter that novel type of antisemitism,” he said.
‘Shared values’
Starović met in Washington with Jewish and pro-Israel organizations, including AIPAC, as well as lawmakers and State Department officials, such as Yehuda Kaploun and Ellen Germain, the State Department’s special envoys, respectively, for combating antisemitism and for Holocaust issues.
He told JNS that the discussions, broadly, centered on the free trade agreement between Israel and Serbia, which was announced last month. Serbian officials periodically rely on the United States to help triangulate Belgrade’s relationship with Jerusalem, which, according to Starović, is tied together by common values.
Those shared values include the “right of every sovereign nation to defend itself” and to fight against terror and any “ideology of hate, whether it is antisemitism, which produced so many horrors in the past, or any other type,” he said.
Starović told JNS that he is “very proud of the fact that all our friends from both AIPAC, but also the American Jewish Committee, have supported us in certain legislation that we have adopted in previous years.”
“We have worked closely together,” he said.
He also said Serbia is the first country to fully implement the Terezin Declaration, a 2009 non-binding, international agreement that addresses unresolved Holocaust-era injustices, including property restitution and social welfare for survivors.
“My country was the first to adopt the law and to start budgetary disbursement to the Jewish community in Serbia,” starting in 2017, “with significant amounts that improve the preservation of memory and culture and everything that is of utmost importance for Serbian Jewry,” Starović told JNS.
The Serbian minister is critical of recent “attempts of politicization of the work” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, the 35-member intergovernmental coalition formed to strengthen, advance and promote Holocaust education, research and remembrance globally.
Critics of IHRA say that its working definition of Jew-hatred, which most mainstream Jewish organizations and dozens of governments around the world have adopted, shields Israel from criticism. They argue that the working definition states clearly that Israel is not immune from criticism, provided that such criticism does not involve double standards or comparisons with Nazi Germany.
The alliance “is a very unique international organization in a way that it combines diplomacy with a real scholarly expertise on issues like the Holocaust and fighting antisemitism,” Starović said.
He lamented that, as recently as last year, “it was not easy to pass some common-sense resolutions condemning the surge in antisemitism in Europe, condemning the attacks on synagogues with the Jewish institutions and institutions devoted to the memory of the Holocaust, because throughout Europe, you see those tendencies trying to shift the blame, share the blame or even to a certain extent justify those phenomena, those manifestations of antisemitism, and even violent attacks, which I find to be utterly unacceptable.”
‘Intensified our relations’
Serbia was among the first nations to publicly support Israel in the wake of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks. It later served as a safe ground for Israeli sports teams to play internationally when their home ground in Israel was unavailable due to the war.
“We have intensified our relations in terms of trade, commerce, defense cooperation, and we have significantly aligned our foreign policies,” he told JNS. “People-to-people relations are really blossoming.”
That includes the new strategic dialogue and foundations of a free trade agreement announced last month during a visit to Jerusalem by Serbian Foreign Minister Marko Đurić.
Israeli companies are increasingly opening up shop in the construction, retail and defense sectors at a time when much of Europe has turned in the other direction due to political considerations.
“That is just more proof that we have elevated our bilateral relations to unprecedented heights, as it should be among friendly and brotherly nations,” Starović said. “Jewish and Serbian people go way through history.”
“We have experienced common challenges, common sufferings, but now in the contemporary setting, we identified the need to really stick together and to support each other in many various ways,” he told JNS.
There is a touchy issue of Kosovo, which established relations with Israel in 2020.
Serbia and Kosovo have been in conflict since the 1998–99 Kosovo War. Belgrade and several European Union states refuse to recognize the independence of the former Serbian province.
Starović called growing ties between Israel and Kosovo a “major hiccup in our relations” and something that the Serbian government believes “was not a very well thought-out decision” by Israel, which “we still regret.”
Despite that, “we have managed to increase our dialogue with the State of Israel, and that did not impact our value and principles-based approach to the issues that are of utmost concern for our friends,” Starović told JNS.
“We continue to communicate on that very issue, and hopefully, there will be more balance in the Israeli approach about this issue that is of most significance for us in the future,” he said.
