U.S. Court Tosses Israel Lobby Lawsuit Against U.S. Scholars

KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Kosovo—A fight over license plates in the Balkans has gotten the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) involved.

Posters and graffiti can be seen throughout the Serbian-dominated part of the town of Kosovska Mitrovica in northern Kosovo that say, “No surrender—Serbian license plates and ID remain.”

Despite the European Union moderating bilateral talks, ethnically Albanian-dominated authorities in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, plan on September 1 to re-register vehicles featuring Serbian plates. However, recent protests jammed up border crossings between Kosovo and Serbia. Plus, a poll shows the majority of Kosovo-based Serbs plan to continue using Serbian-issued license plates.

“They will certainly provide resistance if Pristina attempts to ‘nationalize’ thousands of cars if their owners refuse to replace Serbian-issued license plates with Kosovan ones,” said Milica Andric Rakic. The project manager of Kosovska Mitrovica-based non-governmental organization New Social Initiative told Toward Freedom that Serbs may bow to a certain degree to pressure from Belgrade, but will not accept ultimatums from Pristina.

This dispute comes amid Serbia’s resistance to the European Union’s and the United States’ pressure to recognize the 2008 secession of Kosovo. But, as Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic recently pointed out, both entities refuse to acknowledge breakaway republics in Ukraine’s Donbass region.

Serbia-Kosovo Relations

Following the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, the Serbian police and army were forced to withdraw from the country’s southern province, Kosovo. Then NATO troops entered Kosovo in June 1999, having remained since. Nine years later, Pristina declared independence, a move recognized by most Western countries. In southern Kosovo, ethnic Albanians make up over 90 percent of the population.

Serbia’s defeat, however, did not mark the end of the presence of Serbian institutions in Kosovo. In the north, as well as in certain places in the south, Serbs make up the majority of the population. Despite the secession, Serbia has continued issuing license plates and identification cards (IDs) to Serbs living in northern Kosovo.

“For Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, those car plates are illegal,” Rakic said. “But for the local Serbs, they are the only ones they have.”

She said Serbs do not want to integrate into Kosovo’s legal and political system, despite occasional pressure that comes from Belgrade. For them, Kosovo is part of Serbia. That is Belgrade’s official position, too.

However, amid Western pressure over the years, Serbia has had to make concessions to Kosovo. For example, in 2011, Serbia agreed to create de facto border crossings with Kosovo, while Serbian police officers were integrated into the Kosovo police force. In 2013, Belgrade called on Serbs living in northern Kosovo to take part in Pristina-run local elections. Two years later, Serbia’s judicial authorities in northern Kosovo were integrated into the Kosovo legal framework.

“The Serbs in northern Kosovo never supported such actions. That is why Belgrade was always either ‘bribing’ them or pressuring them to integrate into Kosovo’s institutions,” Rakic said, referring to various deals Belgrade has offered Serbs over the years to de-escalate the situation.

‘New Generation Will Not Put Up with Terror’

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic expressed solidarity with ordinary Serbians at an August 17 joint press conference with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

“A new generation of young men in northern Kosovo will not put up with the terror that comes from Pristina,” Vucic said.

But, Sinisa Radovic, who owns a small souvenir shop in Kosovska Mitrovica, said he has no choice but to re-register his vehicle.

“Otherwise, they will confiscate it. Right now, if I drive a car with Serbian-issued plates south of Kosovska Mitrovica, the police can fine me and I would have to pay 250 euros,” Radovic explained.

In northern Kosovo, drivers have used stickers to cover Serbian state symbols on license plates. It is a temporary solution to the dispute.

On August 18 in Brussels, Vucic and Kurti failed to reach a deal, although EU High Representative for Foreign Policy and Security Josep Borrell claimed they have until September 1 to resolve the burning issue.

Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti has stated Serbian license plates are considered illegal. Rakic said it’s possible Kosovo’s authorities will force Serbs into Kosovo’s legal system without an agreement with Serbia.

“Such an attempt will undoubtedly lead to an escalation,” she pointed out.

‘Pristina Will Have a Big Problem’

Moreover, Pristina now requires Serbs living in northern Kosovo to replace their Serbian-issued identification cards with Kosovo documents.

Some challenges Serbians in Kosovo face are that Pristina neither recognizes Serbian-issued driver’s licenses nor Serbian-issued IDs.

Some Serbians hold Kosovo’s IDs, while others cannot get them for technical reasons. In order to apply for a Kosovo ID, one would have to attach a birth certificate. Serbians living in Kosovo would want a Kosovo-issued ID to be able to get Kosovo-issued driver’s licenses and plates to be allowed to drive south of the Serbian-dominated areas. Plus, to get paid by a Kosovo-based employer, they would need a Kosovo ID to be able to open bank accounts to receive direct paycheck deposits.

“But Pristina does not recognize birth certificates issued by Serbia’s authorities after June 1999, which means that someone who was born in Kosovska Mitrovica in 2000 does not legally exist for Pristina and cannot even apply for an ID,” Rakic explained.

Yet, some holdouts remain. One of them is local pensioner Mirko Trajkovic.

“This is Serbia. Why should I have any documents issued by illegal institutions in Pristina?” Trajkovic said, adding Belgrade will not betray Serbs in northern Kosovo.

This reporter found it difficult to find many Serbs who would comment. Many fear both the Serbian and Kosovo governments would retaliate.

Neither Belgrade nor Pristina effectively control northern Kosovo. The territory is a “gray zone,” where NATO’s Kosovo Force (KFOR) mission is expected to intervene in case of potential clashes between Serbs and the Albanian-dominated Kosovo Security Forces.

Meanwhile, panic has spread on social media and in Western media. Plus, the Kosovo prime minister speculated about an escalation leading to a new war in the Balkans.

Rakic thinks that’s unlikely, though. But she did suggest one possibility: Because Kosovo has rejected all Serbian proposals for a resolution, what could happen if no deal is reached by September 1 is Belgrade may call on the Serbian community in the north to boycott Kosovo-issued documents and license plates.

“Then Pristina will have a big problem, since it is logistically very difficult to confiscate thousands of vehicles.”

Nikola Mikovic is a Serbia-based contributor to CGTN, Global Comment, Byline Times, Informed Comment, and World Geostrategic Insights, among other publications. He is a geopolitical analyst for KJ Reports and Enquire.

The world is shocked by the image of an 11-story residential building in Gaza collapsing because of a bomb dropped by the Israeli Defense Force, one of the most advanced armies in the world thanks to U.S. support. But in the United States, Andrew Yang, former presidential candidate and now candidate for mayor of New York City, proudly proclaims he stands with the “heroic people of Israel” who are under attack from the vicious, occupied Palestinians, who have no army, no rights and no state.

But as politically and morally contradictory as Yang’s sentiments might appear for many, the alternative world of Western liberalism has a different standard. In that world, liberals claim that all are equal with inalienable rights. But in practice, some lives are more equal and more valuable than others. 

In the liberal world, Trump is condemned for attempting to reject the results of the election and indicating he might not leave office at the end of his term. But as soon as Biden occupied the White House, one of his first foreign policy decisions was to give the U.S.-imposed Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse, a green light to ignore the demands of the Haitian people and the end of his term in February. He remains in office.  

In the liberal world, the United States that has backed every vicious right-wing dictator in the world since the Second World War, orchestrates coups, murders foreign leaders, attacks nations fighting for independence in places like Vietnam, trains torturers, brandishes nuclear bombs, has the longest-held political prisoners on the planet, is number one in global arms sales, imprisons more people than any other nation in the world, has supported apartheid South Africa and is supporting apartheid Israel—while championing human rights! 

In the liberal world, the United States can openly train, fund, and back opposition parties and even determine who the leader of a nation should be, but react with moral outrage when supposedly Russian-connected entities buy $100,000 worth of Facebook ads commenting on “internal” political subjects related to the 2016 election. 

In the liberal world, Democrats build on racist anti-China sentiments and the identification of China as a national threat, and then pretend they had nothing to do with the wave of anti-Asian racism and violence. 

In the liberal world, liberals are morally superior and defend Black life as long as those lives are not in Haiti, Libya, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, all of Africa, and in the jails and prisons of the United States.

In the liberal world, you can—with a straight face—condemn the retaliatory rockets from Gaza, the burning of a police station in Minneapolis, attacks on property owned by corporations in oppressed and exploited communities, attacks on school children fighting back against police in Baltimore, and attacks on North Koreans arming themselves against a crazed, violent state that has already demonstrated—as it did with Libya—what it would do to a state that disarmed in the face of U.S. and European aggression. 

And in the liberal world, Netanyahu is a democrat, the Palestinians are aggressors and Black workers did not die unnecessarily because the United States dismantled its already underdeveloped public health system. 

What all of this is teaching the colonized world, together with the death and violence in Colombia, Haiti, Palestine and the rest of the colonized world, is that even though we know the Pan-European project is moribund, the colonial-capitalist West is prepared to sacrifice everything and everyone in order to maintain its global dominance, even if it means destroying the planet and everyone on it. 

That is why Biden labels himself an “Atlanticist”—shorthand for a white supremacist. His task is to convince the European allies it is far better to work together than to allow themselves to be divided against the “barbarians” inside and at the doors of Europe and the United States.

The managers of the colonial-capitalist world understand the terms of struggle, and so should we. It must be clear to us that for the survival of collective humanity and the planet, we cannot allow uncontested power to remain in the hands of the global 1 percent. The painful truth for some is if global humanity is to live, the Pan-European white supremacist colonial-capitalist project must die.  

This article was originally published in Black Agenda Report.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC). He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. He was awarded the U.S. Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.  

EAST JERUSALEM—Last month, a Jewish tourist toppled a wooden statue of Jesus in a church in the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem. This was the fifth attack against Christians in five weeks.

Following the act of vandalism at the Church of Flagellation, Father Nikodemus Schnabel of the Dormition Abbey, just outside the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem, tweeted, “Welcome to the new Christian-hating Israel, encouraged and supported by the current government!”

Violence against Christians isn’t a new phenomenon in Jerusalem. But since Israel’s most far-right government in its history has taken over, the problem has significantly swelled.

Dr. Amnon Ramon, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research and an expert on Christians in Jerusalem, explained how Jewish extremists attacking Christians run in the same circles as members of the Israeli government’s coalition. That’s the case with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who’s a disciple of Meir Kahane, a Jewish supremacist rabbi who was assassinated in 1990.

“[The perpetrators] feel quite safe because they think that, in a way, the state is with them,” Ramon told Toward Freedom.

According to Protecting Holy Land Christians, a campaign Christian leaders in Jerusalem have organized to raise awareness about the plight of the religious community, hate crimes against Christians vary. They include spitting on clergy and on religious items, as well as verbal abuse, seizure of properties and vandalism of holy sites.

In December, the campaign emphasized that 2022 was “one of the worst years for Christians in Jerusalem to date.”

Attacks Against ‘Non-Jews’

Miran Krikorian experienced this anti-Christian violence first-hand in January when his restaurant, Taboon & Wine, located in the Old City’s Christian Quarter, was attacked by people wearing clothes indicating Jewish identity. The group of about 30 ransacked the bar, breaking chairs, tables and glasses, as well as pepper-spraying employees and terrifying customers.

“There’s a systematic rise against non-Jewish institutions, people and places,” Krikorian said, noting the harassment isn’t directed toward Christians specifically, but rather against all non-Jews.

Krikorian said he wasn’t surprised by the attack, having grown up in the Armenian Quarter, where violence against Christians is a common occurrence.

“After that we saw these kinds of incidents started [to happen] twice a day, even in the Armenian Quarter,” said Father Aghan Gogchyan, chancellor of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

Gogchyan said he didn’t want to blame Israel’s new government for the stark rise in violence against Christians, but rather suggested the culture of impunity is responsible.

“We are complaining about anarchy,” Gogchyan said. “That everybody can and does whatever [they] want and nobody will be punished.

Lack of Protection from Police

Krikorian called the police during the assault on his business, but said law enforcement didn’t arrive immediately.

“Once the police came, they didn’t do anything,” Krikorian said. “They just pushed back the settlers and that’s it.”

After the attack, Krikorian filed an official report at the police station. He added that three suspects were arrested, but no charges have been filed. Israel Police would not comment to Toward Freedom, citing the pending investigation.

The police station is located next to the Armenian Quarter, yet Christians in Jerusalem have often accused law enforcement of inaction when dealing with anti-Christian violence.

“The biggest problem is no one is feeling safe by the police or by the authorities,” Krikorian said.

From Gogchyan’s perspective, the police are easily deceived by Jewish assailants.

“These extremists know how to behave during the attacks in order to make the police back them and support them,” Gogchyan said. “And the police, without realizing, are tricked.”

Gogchyan described how, in one example, after Jewish radicals spat on the Armenian convent and tried to tear down the Armenian flag there, they ran to the nearby police station and began shouting “violence.

By doing so, the police thought the Armenians were attacking the perpetrators.

The Armenian Patriarchate met with police in February to address heightened tensions, especially considering the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the Jewish feast of Passover and the Christian holiday of Easter will occur in April.

Gogchyan said police told the patriarchate that law enforcement will try to prevent atrocities from happening. But Gogchyan remains concerned, as police have implied they don’t have full control.

“In a way, they said ‘such crimes will happen, and we cannot prevent them because we don’t know if [Jewish fanatics] are going to do it or not. But when something happens, we will try to protect you,’” Gogchyan said.

Christian Presence in Decline

Palestine, the birthplace of Christianity, is rapidly seeing the population’s erasure from its land.

According to Protecting Holy Land Christians, Christians are estimated as making up less than 1 percent of Jerusalem’s population.

Not only does the community feel it doesn’t have police protection, but Christians have also lost representation in the government, as well.

“There is no address in the high level of the Israeli establishment for the Christian factions of Jerusalem,” said researcher Ramon, explaining how the Christian affairs department in Israel’s now-defunct Religious Affairs Ministry was once a powerful unit.

But, in 2003, when the Religious Affairs Ministry was dissolved and its duties absorbed by the Interior Ministry, Christian representation dwindled. Today, the department is run by one person.

Amid a loss of power against intensifying Jewish hegemony, Christians—and other minorities—see the state as working for only one people.

Krikorian feels this discrimination—and hatred of non-Jews—is legitimized through Israel’s current leadership.

“The extremists got the backing of the government and now they’re attacking all the time.”

Jessica Buxbaum is a Jerusalem-based freelance journalist reporting on Palestine and the Israeli occupation. You can follow her on Twitter at @jess_buxbaum.