As one helplessly watches videos of the horrific crimes committed by the Israeli army against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a very different video has spread across the social network X, formerly Twitter: a video of part of a speech by Israeli journalist Gideon Levy from eight years ago. In it, Levy analyzes the state of deep denial in which Israeli society finds itself. As someone who had not heard that speech before, but has been dealing with the politics of memory in Serbia for a long time, I couldn’t help but notice the similarity between the dominant narratives about Israel and Serbia, national identity and history.
Levy points out at the beginning that the vast majority of Israeli Jews consider their people to be the “chosen people”, which encourages them in the belief that, as God’s favourites, everything is allowed to them. The motif of the “chosen people” corresponds to the motifs of the “heavenly people”, that is, the “heavenly Serbia”, which were dreamed up and spread by the ideologues of Serbian nationalism in the 20th century. Even today, this phantasm is current in public discourse, be it religious, political, or pop-cultural, and it is too often taken seriously. For example, earlier this year, in June, after his victory at Roland-Garros, the best tennis player in the world, Novak Đoković, said: “I think people need to understand that we really are a God-given nation. We don’t just say we’re the heavenly people for no reason, we truly are.”
Another element of denial of reality is self-victimization. The Jews, as Levy says, not only see themselves as victims, even though they have been occupying the Palestinian territories for decades, but as the only victims in the Middle East. The motif of the victim nation is also present in the official politics of memory in Serbia and has been relentlessly exploited for years. The Holocaust for the Jews is the same as Jasenovac for the Serbs. It is indisputable that the Holocaust is the most terrible crime in the recorded history of mankind, as well as that genocide was committed against the Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War. What is problematic is the abuse of these events as a kind of carte blanche allowing the Jews or Serbs to act as they please and to use them as a form of moral blackmail: if you criticize Israel’s policy, you are automatically a Holocaust denier.
In Serbia, the narrative about the victim nation is based not only on the historical experience of genocide in the NDH, but also on interpretations of later periods. Nationalist politicians developed a kind of anti-Yugoslav program, emphasizing that Yugoslavia was the biggest historical mistake of the Serbian people and that they paid dearly for it. The claim that Serbs were exposed to persecution and violence during the entire period of the SFRY intensifies the feeling of threat and renders any attempt to create a political community that is not ethnically determined meaningless. Such communities, if Serbian officials are to be believed, are doomed, and they can only bring harm to the Serbs.
“It is unheard of in the history of occupation for the occupier to present itself as a victim,” Levy continues in his analysis of Israel’s flight from reality. He is not quite right here, because something similar exists in Serbia. Serbian nationalism even bases its victimological narrative on the wars of the 1990s, during which Serbian forces committed mass crimes, including genocide. And yet, these dark episodes of national history were ignored or denied, which allowed the wars of the nineties to also become part of the construction of the victim nation.
The third element, and according to Gideon Levy the most essential and the most dangerous, is systemic dehumanization. Many Jews, he says, do not see the Palestinians as human beings equal to themselves, and take offense at any comparison with the Palestinians or the request to imagine themselves in their place. This is undoubtedly the result of propaganda, the work of ideological apparatuses. Today, eight years after Levy’s speech, Israeli officials refer to Palestinians as “human animals.”
Dehumanization can take many forms. For example, during the 20th century in Serbia, Albanians were represented as savages living at a tribal stage of social development, and their high birth rate was considered a form of aggression towards the Serbs – an idea that is repeated today when it comes to the Palestinians and their birth rate. In the Serbian media, the Albanians are still mostly seen as bloodthirsty terrorists, and, in fiction, even as beasts. Dehumanization of other nations of Yugoslavia was also evident for decades. During his testimony before the Hague Tribunal, Ivo Atlija from a village in the municipality of Prijedor talked about how, in 1991, Radio Prijedor broadcasted fake news about a Muslim doctor who allegedly, in order to reduce the male Serbian population, gave pregnant Serbian women injections that caused them to have exclusively baby girls. “They simply couldn’t help but believe in it,” said Ivo Atlija about some of his colleagues at the time, which shows that the propaganda machine often overrides common sense.
In his speech, Gideon Levy also mentions an “Israeli” contradiction that is easily reflected in the Serbian context. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Israel is the safest country in the world for Jews, only to talk about the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb just 24 hours later. President Vučić is known for making similar absurd claims: Serbia is allegedly stronger than ever, but at the same time threatened from all sides; we are on good terms with everyone, but we are also surrounded by enemies. Vučić claims that Serbia is an “economic tiger”, but when he spoke with war veterans living in difficult socio-economic conditions in June 2022, he told them that he could not fulfill all their demands because that would “financially ruin Serbia”.
One thing is certain: just as the position of the victim is not exclusive to Serbs or Jews, neither is the state of denial – even though these were the two contexts analyzed in this article. The ideological indoctrination that pushes us into mythomania and abuses identities has no ethnicity, it is possible anywhere and, to a lesser or greater extent, it happens everywhere. While wars have complex causes that mostly concern the control of territories and resources—in other words, profit, distribution, and enrichment—the ideological preparation for wars is what ensures consent and approval, what, as Levy points out, “allows us Israelis to live so easily with this brutal reality”.
Stopping the killing in Gaza and Israel is currently the priority, but we will have to talk about Gideon Levy’s words sooner or later. Otherwise, we are condemned to a vicious cycle of denial and violence.
Translated by Marijana Simić
Peščanik.net, 14.11.2023.
