Yugoslavia and the Palestine Question

Before World War II, Yugoslavia was a monarchy ruled by a Serbian dynasty whose nationalism had links with early Zionist thought and maintained a generally positive stance toward the creation of a Jewish state. After the war, Yugoslavia became a socialist federation. It eventually broke diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967 and strongly supported the Palestinian cause. In 1992, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia dissolved and the successor states redefined their relations with both Palestine and Israel. While all former Yugoslav republics maintain relations with Israel, three—Croatia, North Macedonia, and Kosovo—do not recognize Palestine.

The Ties between Serbian Nationalism and Zionism

The family of Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, originated from Zemun, today part of Belgrade. His grandfather and father were followers of Judah Alkalai, a rabbi from Sarajevo whose philosophy is considered one of the precursors of Zionism. In his book Shema Yisrael, published in Belgrade in 1834, Alkalai theorized the unification of the Jewish diaspora in its “ancestral” land. Contrary to traditional Jewish thought, he argued that the collective return of the Jewish people to their land is the decisive redemptive step, and that individual spiritual renewal follows and deepens afterward. At that time Belgrade was capital of the Principality of Serbia, which gained its autonomy after two national uprisings against the Ottoman Empire. Ideas of national unification were widespread in nineteenth-century Europe during the age of national awakenings.

The Kingdom of Serbia was the first country to officially endorse the Balfour Declaration, largely due to the diplomatic activity of David Albala, a Serbian Jewish diplomat active in the United States. In a 1917 exchange of letters, Serbian Ambassador Milenko Vesnić confirmed Serbia’s acceptance of the declaration, noting that Jews would remain a “tie between free Israel and Serbia,” marking one of the earliest official uses of the term “Israel” to designate the future Jewish state.

After World War I and the unification of the South Slavic territories, the Kingdom of Serbia became part of the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, ruled by the Serbian Karađorđević dynasty. In 1929, the country was officially renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

World War II and the Establishment of Israel

During World War II, Yugoslav Jews were decimated by Axis occupation and collaborationist regimes. Of approximately 80,000 Jews living in pre-war Yugoslavia, about 66,000 were killed during the Holocaust.

During the Axis occupation and dismemberment of Yugoslavia, Josip Broz Tito’s Partisans proclaimed the Democratic Federative Yugoslavia in 1943, laying the foundations for the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia established in 1945. (In 1963, the country was renamed the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.)

After the war, the communist authorities initially facilitated Jewish emigration to Palestine, partly as a response to the Holocaust. This process was also supported by Jewish figures within the Yugoslav leadership, including Moša Pijade.

Yugoslavia played a distinctive role in the United Nations’ approach to Mandatory Palestine. As a member of UN Special Committee on Palestine, it opposed the partition plan and, together with Iran and India, proposed a binational federal state with Jerusalem as a shared capital. The proposal sought to reconcile Arab and Jewish national aspirations, both considered legitimate, and was influenced by Yugoslavia’s own multinational model of governance under the motto “Unity and Brotherhood.” Yugoslav diplomacy, represented by Vladimir Simić, argued for a UN-led transitional regime guaranteeing equal rights and protecting the civil, political, religious, and cultural rights of all inhabitants. The approach was rooted in anti-colonial critique, particularly of British rule, which was seen as having neglected social and institutional development in Palestine.

At the same time, Yugoslavia supported both Jewish and Arab claims to self-determination, shaped in part by its experience of wartime devastation and the Holocaust. In particular, Yugoslav communists recognized Palestinian anti-colonial aspirations, aware that no Arab country in the region would have accepted the partition of Palestine.

However, the proposal remained a minority position. In 1948, following the proclamation of the state of Israel, Yugoslavia was the second European country to officially recognize it, only one day after the Soviet Union.

The Non-Aligned Movement and the 1967 Turning Point

In June 1948, Tito and Joseph Stalin disagreed on several internal and foreign policy issues, and Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform, a Moscow-led organization meant to coordinate the political activities of communist parties in line with Soviet interests.

Until Stalin’s death in 1953, Yugoslavia built its own foreign policy, seeking a “third way” beyond the two Cold War blocs. This alternative diplomatic path was developed through engagement with many African and Asian countries that had recently freed themselves from colonial rule or were in the process of doing so.

The Non-Aligned Movement was officially established in September 1961 at the Belgrade Conference. The second conference was held in 1964 in Cairo, then capital of the United Arab Republic, a few months after the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded. The final declaration unequivocally endorsed the right of self-determination of the Arab people of Palestine and “their struggle for liberation from colonialism and racism.” Thereafter, the PLO was present at all Non-Aligned Movement summits, where the Palestinian question was consistently emphasized by Third World leaders who supported peoples under “imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, and Zionism,” as stated in the declaration adopted at the 1976 summit in Sri Lanka.

The relatively weak political support extended by Yugoslavia to the PLO before 1967 may be explained by its ideological profile as a movement that was first and foremost nationalist rather than Marxist. Moreover, Yugoslavia understood the Palestinian question through the lens of Arab states, none of which expressed the goal of creating a Palestinian state. It initially was reluctant to provide military support to the Palestinians, because it did not want to interfere in regional affairs closely associated with one of his key allies, Egypt, which had led the Palestinian cause.

Socialist Yugoslavia viewed the June 1967 war and the subsequent Israeli occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, and Golan Heights as an act of imperialism. It closed its embassy in Tel Aviv and retained only trade relations with Israel. From 1967 onward, the Palestinian question was no longer understood exclusively as a pan-Arab struggle: it attracted greater international attention, particularly among countries like Yugoslavia leading an anti-imperialist movement. Moreover, the Palestinian question ceased to be merely a humanitarian issue and became a political one, with its own frameworks, actors, and dynamics shaping the geopolitics of the time.

Yugoslav support helped the PLO to strengthen its international position, and it began acting as an independent diplomatic interlocutor with Belgrade. In his first meetings in Belgrade in the late 1960s, then Fatah leader Yasir Arafat negotiated with the Yugoslav authorities the provision of medical supplies, medical treatment for Palestinian fighters, and the opening of a PLO Information Bureau in 1971. It was the first such diplomatic office in Europe and contributed to the further development of relations between the PLO and Yugoslavia. During the 1970s, Arafat travelled to Yugoslavia several times. His first public meeting with Tito took place in 1974.

For Palestinians, Yugoslavia was a great partner in geopolitical terms: it was in Europe, it was a federation, and it was a model of peaceful coexistence of different national and religious groups. And, most important, Belgrade acted as a diplomatic bridge between the two blocs, helping to channel the Palestinian question to both sides and to bring the issue to the international arena through the Non-Aligned Movement.

In Yugoslavia, Yasir Arafat and the PLO were perceived as fighters against imperialism, while Palestinians drew inspiration from the Yugoslav Partisan resistance during World War II, to the extent that, as historian Žiga Smolič recalls, many of them adopted “Tito” as their war name.
The secular, multiconfessional country established by Yugoslav Partisans after they fought the occupation thus served as a political model for the Palestinian cause.

But there were also other levels of liaison and cooperation. The most original was students exchange: granting scholarships to young students coming from non-aligned countries contributed to internationalize the image of the state in a continent where socialist countries were widely perceived as social cages limiting human contacts.

According to historian Smolič, “in the 1970s, Palestinian students formed the largest national group of foreign students in Yugoslavia and created an active intellectual and political community that directly connected events in the Middle East with the social life of the Yugoslav environment.” Smolič estimates that there were between 10,000 and 15,000 Palestinian students in Yugoslavia.

In the late 1970s, Yugoslav assistance to the Palestinian cause became more substantial also in terms of military support. According to Smolič, “from the second half of the 1970s, Yugoslavia sold and donated weapons to the PLO through Arab intermediaries—primarily Libya and Iraq—and even supplied more sophisticated systems such as helicopters and submarines.”

Another form of assistance consisted of training Palestinian military cadres in Yugoslavia. Rather than focusing on guerrilla warfare, these programs aimed at a longer term objective: the creation of a future Palestinian army. As Smolič notes, in the early 1980s, hundreds of Palestinians went to Yugoslavia to undergo specialized training, including air defence, aviation, and naval operations.
Among them was Captain Ghassan Yassin, the pilot who died in a 1992 aircraft crash in the Libyan desert, from which Arafat miraculously survived. By a twist of fate, while training in Yugoslavia, Ghassam Yassin had survived a similar accident.

Decline and Fragmentation

The Eighties marked the beginning of a decline in relations between Yugoslavia and the Palestinian cause. With the death of Tito in 1980, the Non-Aligned Movement lost its most charismatic leader and founding father. Yugoslavia entered a gradual collapse that would culminate in the federation’s violent breakup in 1991. The absence of a world-respected leader, together with economic recession and political fragmentation among the republics, inevitably affected Belgrade’s foreign policy and its ability to continue supporting the Palestinian cause.

Developments in Western Asia also reshaped the context. After the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987, the PLO shifted from armed struggle to a diplomatic, state-building strategy. On 15 November 1988, Yasir Arafat proclaimed the establishment of the State of Palestine in Algiers, with Jerusalem as its capital. The declaration, asserting sovereignty over territories occupied by Israel in 1967, was widely perceived as progress toward peace and led seventy-eight countries to recognize the newly proclaimed state. Yugoslavia was the first European country to do so. In April 1989, the PLO Information Bureau in Belgrade was transformed into the Palestinian embassy.

The wars in Yugoslavia marked a turning point, shaping a new political dimension in relations between its successor states and the Palestinian question. From 1992 onward, the successor states of Yugoslavia were the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, consisting of Serbia and Montenegro, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (officially renamed North Macedonia in 2019), and Slovenia. In 2006, Serbia and Montenegro became two independent states. In 2008, Kosovo proclaimed its independence from Serbia, following the Kosovo War of 1998–1999.

As nationalism came to prevail over Marxist and Third-Worldist thought, the new ruling elites in Belgrade reoriented foreign policy, which would soon face international isolation and sanctions. In 1992, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (made up of Serbia and Montenegro) resumed diplomatic relations with Israel.

The Non-Aligned Movement gradually lost its original commitment to anti-colonial movements, and under Slobodan Milošević Yugoslavia became a pariah state. During the Nineties, Belgrade’s nationalism relied on the myth of the Serbian “heavenly people,” echoing the notion of “chosen people” in Israeli political rhetoric. Another point of similarity is the interpretation according to which Serbia and Israel have fought for their national interests as linked to countering Islamist terrorism.

Notably, when Milošević’s Yugoslavia faced international isolation, Israel sided with Belgrade to avoid endorsing unilateral statehood declarations that might set a precedent for the Palestinians.
Moreover, some accounts argue that Israel bears responsibility for the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, citing military support to Bosnian Serbs. Accordingly, some Israeli Holocaust scholars have challenged the conclusions of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice, whose rulings recognized the Srebrenica genocide. Most notably, in 2019 Israeli academics Gideon Greif and Rafael Israeli were appointed by Republika Srpska—the Serb-led entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina—to lead commissions whose reports minimized the Srebrenica genocide and echoed Serbian revisionist narratives.

Over time, these dynamics helped to develop the core business of Belgrade–Tel Aviv relationship: arms trade. The collaboration surged since October 2023. Based on reporting by the Serbian news agency BIRN and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Serbia has emerged as a significant military partner for Israel during the Gaza genocide: its arms exports rose from €3 million in 2023 to more than €114 million in 2025. Despite calls from the international community to avoid supplying weapons that could end up supporting war crimes, including genocide, Serbia has provided ammunition and artillery and is currently planning a joint drone factory with Israeli defense company Elbit Systems.

These ties also help explain Israel’s relations with Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.

In 2020, Israel was one of the last countries that recognized the independence of Kosovo – a fact that temporarily froze diplomatic relations with Belgrade and was widely understood as a mistake by many Zionists, according to whom Kosovo is for Serbs what Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem are for Jews: their ancestral land. The recognition resulted from the Washington-brokered deal between Belgrade and Pristina, which mainly served as an electoral boost for Trump’s peacemaker image ahead of the US elections. Since then, the two states have had diplomatic relations, as Pristina opened an embassy in Jerusalem. Kosovo has never recognized Palestine, despite having experienced in the 1990s ethnic discrimination, apartheid, war, and serious human rights violations, similarly to the Palestinians. Against this backdrop, Pristina’s stance on the Palestinian issue closely aligns with that of the United States, its main political ally and key supporter of its independence. For this reason, Kosovo, which is not a UN member, last January decided to join the so-called Board of Peace and to send troops to the Gaza Strip.

Bosnia and Herzegovina presents an interesting case. While Bosniak (Bosnian Muslims) are among the most vocal supporters of Palestine, expressing solidarity shaped in part by their own experience of genocide, the country’s official authorities have generally adopted a more neutral stance. Bosnia and Herzegovina recognized the State of Palestine upon its independence in 1992, but in recent years its official position has reflected both the pro-Israeli stance of Republika Srpska—rooted in abovementioned wartime-era rhetoric—and the desire to remain aligned with the United States.

As for Croatia, which together with North Macedonia and Kosovo does not recognize Palestinian statehood, there has been substantial alignment with other European Union member states. However, the war on Gaza has also sparked a diplomatic dispute between Zagreb and Tel Aviv, as well as political divisions between the government and President Zoran Milanović. In August 2025, the head of state urged the government to recognize the State of Palestine and ordered a halt to defence cooperation between the Croatian and Israeli armed forces. Milanović reaffirmed this position last February when Croatian Defence Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Ivan Anušić met his counterpart in Israel, citing “the unacceptable conduct of the Israeli army and the unprecedented violation of all norms of international humanitarian law.”

Slovenia stands out as the former Yugoslav republic that has taken the most decisive steps since the genocide in Gaza began. In June 2024, Ljubljana recognized the State of Palestine, following similar moves by Spain, Ireland, and Norway. One year later, in July 2025, Slovenia became the first EU member state to impose a full arms embargo on Israel, banning all imports, exports, and transit of weapons to and from the country. Furthermore, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and two ministers from his cabinet have been barred from entering Slovenia, a decision justified by “serious violations of the human rights of Palestinians” and “their genocidal statements,” making it the only European Union member state to apply such targeted sanctions. Notably, Slovenian national television chose not to livestream the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest due to Israel’s participation, opting instead to broadcast films about Palestine.
However, following the inauguration of the new government led by right-wing leader Janez Janša, Slovenia reversed these steps. Sanctions against Netanyahu and his ministers, as well as an arms embargo on Israel, were lifted. In a particularly symbolic gesture, on the first day of Janša’s fourth term as Slovenian Prime Minister, the Palestinian flag that had been displayed at the government building since Ljubljana recognized the State of Palestine was taken down. The same flag appeared later at the presidential palace, reaffirming Slovenian President Nataša Pirc Musar’s condemnation of what she has described as genocide and crimes against humanity committed by Israel in the Palestinian territories.