Israel, Serbia, and Genocide Denial

Leaders of both countries openly incited genocide. When accused, they reach for the fainting couch.

Former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević (left); Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right). Wikimedia Commons

Last week, thousands of Serbs turned out for the funeral of Ratko Mladić. Mladić commanded the forces of Republika Srpska, the self-declared Bosnian Serb republic, during the Bosnian War (1992-95). He died while serving a life sentence in The Hague—most infamously for the genocide of more than 8,000 Bosniaks (also known as Bosnian Muslims) in the town of Srebrenica.Many Serbs consider Mladić a war hero, viewing his conviction as the product of an anti-Serb vendetta by an illegitimate court.

Not all Serbs agree. A number of opposition leaders, including Marinika Tepić and Dragan Đilas, denounced the commemorations for glorifying a convicted war criminal.

Such candor is less evident in another country facing genocide accusations: Israel. There, the opposition broadly defends the government’s crimes against Palestinians.

Both states are responsible for crimes against humanity: Israel, on the one hand; Serbia and its onetime Bosnian client-state, on the other. Both have also been credibly accused of genocide. Dozens of Serbs, including Mladić, were convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for murder, extermination, persecution, and, in the case of Srebrenica, genocide.

Court proceedings against Israel and its officials have yet to advance beyond the charging phase. That said, the International Court of Justice determined there to be a plausible risk that Israel’s assault on Gaza will violate its obligations under the United Nations Genocide Convention.

The International Criminal Court, for its part, has issued arrest warrants against prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. The two are charged with “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

Judicial cases aside, scores of human rights experts and organizations, including Israeli ones, have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Investigative journalists in Israel and around the world have assembled a mountain of evidence backing the claims, much of it from Israeli sources.

When dozens of specialists who have built careers investigating genocide say, “it’s genocide,” replying “no, it’s not” doesn’t qualify as a legitimate counterargument.

While this should go without saying, it unfortunately does not. Despite massive evidence to the contrary, both countries reject the allegations.

Before moving on, let us get some mandatory disclaimers out of the way. Hamas’s October 2023 terrorist attack was barbaric. According to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Hamas not only committed war crimes but also crimes against humanity. The International Criminal Court found “reasonable grounds to believe that [Hamas military commander Mohammed] Deif … is responsible for the crimes against humanity of murder; extermination; torture; and rape and other form[s] of sexual violence” as well as numerous related war crimes.

Notwithstanding what many Israel supporters seem to think, however, Hamas’s crimes do not somehow justify Israel’s. It is also worth reiterating that Israel considers itself a democratic state—dubious though that claim is—and regularly asserts that it has “the most moral army in the world.”

Such pretensions are difficult to square with the crimes it committed both before and after October 7^th. The latter alone include mass executions; the rampant, arbitrary, and intentional killing and maiming of civilians, including preteen children; the deliberate starvation of Gaza’s population; and the rape, torture, and starvation of detainees, many of whom are held without charge. This is all in addition to the indiscriminate destruction of Gaza’s structures, an estimated 82 percent of which have been damaged and over half destroyed completely.

That is why I am writing today about Serbia and Israel instead of Serbia and Hamas. It is also why I have little patience for those who deny Israel’s crimes—or the crimes of anyone else for that matter, including Serbia and Hamas.

But deny they do. That is to be expected. What’s remarkable is that they deny these crimes despite their own officials openly admitting their intent to carry them out.

Let’s take a look.

“We Are Going to Commit Genocide!”

In a July 1995 meeting with Dutch UN officers and a local Bosniak representative, Mladić laid out two options for the Bosniaks of Srebrenica: flee the territory or “disappear.” While walking with Serbian soldiers that same day, he proclaimed, “We give this town to the Serb people as a gift.” Invoking a common slur for Bosniaks, he added that “the time has come to take revenge on the Turks.”

Mladić’s civilian counterpart, Republika Srpska president Radovan Karadžić, put the issue in starker terms. In October 1991, he declared that “Sarajevo will be a ‘karakazan,’ a black caldron, where 300,000 Muslims will die.” Speaking around the same time to the Bosnian parliament, he warned Bosniak representatives that they were leading their people “to their annihilation.” In a March 1995 directive, Karadžić ordered Serbian forces to “create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica.”

The same sort of eliminationist rhetoric is ubiquitous among Israeli officials. Consider just a handful of the many examples:

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, May 6, 2025:

[The Palestinians] will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.

Former chief of the Military Intelligence Directorate, Aharon Haliva (undated intercept):

For every victim of October 7^th, 50 Palestinians had to die. No matter if they are children.

Galit Distel Atbaryan, a lawmaker from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, November 1, 2023:

Erase Gaza from the face of the earth. Let the Gazan monsters rush to the southern border and flee into Egypt, or die. And let them die badly.

Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, May 5, 2025:

If the people of Gaza suffer, Hamas will suffer. There is no problem bombing their food and fuel reserves. They should starve.

Meirav Ben-Ari, an opposition deputy from the “liberal” Yesh Atid party, October 18, 2023:

The children in Gaza have brought this upon themselves!

A common theme in genocidal rhetoric is the denial of the target group’s existence. Take Russia, which invaded Ukraine on the presumption that Ukrainians are Russians at heart and would not fight back. When Ukrainians did resist, thereby repudiating the myth that they have no identity of their own, the Kremlin concluded that the only way out was to destroy Ukraine (a plan which, thanks to Ukrainian resilience and ingenuity, did not succeed).

Serbia’s genocide against Bosniaks was driven by just such a myth. Momčilo Krajišnik, the speaker of the Bosnian Serb Assembly, referred to Bosniaks as “a fake people,” adding “we do not accept this artificial nation.” In 1993, Vojislav Maksimović, a prominent member of the Serbian Radical Party, called Bosniaks “an Asiatic sect, sown by an erratic wind across the Balkans.”

Israeli officials use the same language about Palestinians. In 2025, Itamar Ben-Gvir, minister of national security, claimed that “there is no such thing as a ‘Palestinian people.’” Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich echoed this view, calling Palestinians “a fictitious people” that was invented to “claim fictitious rights in the Land of Israel.”

“We Would Never!”

To sum up, leading members of both communities are not shy about inciting genocide and other war crimes. Yet, when confronted with allegations of those crimes, they roundly deny them.

“Israel has no starvation policy,” declared Benjamin Netanyahu in August 2025. This statement would appear to conflict with his earlier claim at a January 2024 press conference: “We provide minimal humanitarian aid. … If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid.”

To find evidence that Israel has deliberately starved Gaza’s Palestinians, one need not rely on reports from international aid organizations. Israeli soldiers and officials have admitted it themselves to outlets like the New York Times and Haaretz. Going by the proclamations of Israeli leaders above, moreover, imposing mass suffering is an explicit objective of state policy.

Still, whenever Israel is accused of such violations, these same leaders recoil in faux indignation. When the UN added the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to its official list of global offenders against children, Netanyahu slammed the move, tweeting: “The IDF is the most moral army in the world; no delusional UN decision will change that.”

The same pattern is evident among Serbs. In March 1992, Vojislav Šešelj, the founder of the Serbian Radical Party, urged his compatriots to “clear up” Bosnia of the “pogani” (filth) and the “balijas” (a derogatory term for Muslims). Later, he called the very genocide he once encouraged a “made-up crime.” Likewise, Milorad Dodik, a former president of Republika Srpska, labeled the Srebrenica genocide as “a fabricated myth.”

Elsewhere, however, Dodik has admitted that Serbian forces were responsible for war crimes—just not genocide. In fact, like Dodik—and unlike leading Israelis—most Serbian leaders today accept that their forces committed war crimes in Srebrenica while denying the more serious finding of genocide.

There are two reasons for this hedge. The first is the staggering evidence of Serbian culpability, which makes the charge difficult to reject. Srebrenica stands out among The Hague tribunal’s prosecutions. The court itself called it “the biggest crime scene that the Tribunal would investigate.” The massacre of over 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica resulted in the court’s longest and most heavily resourced trials. The proceedings featured aerial and satellite imagery, military intercepts, captured documents, forensic evidence, video footage, and over 1,000 witness testimonies. In the end, they resulted in four life sentences. Last but not least, Srebrenica was the only case that produced convictions for genocide.

Aside from the overwhelming evidence of its guilt, Serbia has long been in negotiations for membership in the European Union. If Serbian leaders were to publicly deny any responsibility for the flagship crime of the Balkan wars, it could put its E.U. candidacy in jeopardy.

Thus, if Serbia recognizes that war crimes occurred in Srebrenica, this is simply due to the politics around the issue. It certainly does not reflect some special capacity for self-introspection.

To see how, consider the way these same officials talk about another Serbian war crime: the January 1999 torture and execution of at least 42 ethnic Albanians in the town of Račak, in Kosovo. Like Srebrenica, the event has been meticulously documented by international investigators and organizations using independent eyewitness testimony and forensic cause-of-death findings.

In contrast to Srebrenica, however, Račak never resulted in any convictions. This was not for lack of evidence. Rather, the one defendant who was tried for his role—Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević—died during the proceedings. As for the other individuals who were charged, the tribunal judges, facing a loaded docket, decided on efficiency grounds to exclude Račak from the case.

Nevertheless, the fact that there were no convictions has given Serbian leaders the leeway they need to deny the crime. In 2019, Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić claimed that Račak was “fabricated by that global fraudster, scammer and swindler, Walker” (referring to William Walker, the OSCE official who first reported the massacre). Serbian internal affairs minister Aleksandar Vulin called Račak “a huge lie, a terrible forgery, a great insult to all humanity.”

War crimes denial is hardly limited to top-level leaders of the two countries; it is also widespread among the general public. The percentage of Serbs who believed that Srebrenica was a war crime dropped from 48 percent in 2001 to 33 percent by 2011. Such skepticism extends to the international tribunal as well. In a 2017 survey, 56 percent described the court as biased, with only 6 percent seeing it as impartial.

Similar opinions are evident among Israeli Jews. In an October 2024 survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, nearly three-quarters gave the IDF high marks for ethical conduct in Gaza. As with Serbs, a decisive majority regard the International Criminal Court as biased; a November 2024 poll revealed that 61 percent believed the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant stemmed from “long-standing anti-Israel bias at the Court.” Less than 10 percent believed the court was acting impartially.

American Jews are more willing than their Israeli counterparts to acknowledge Israeli culpability. Sixty-one percent of respondents to an October 2025 Washington Post survey agreed that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza, while a lower but substantial share (39 percent) stated it was guilty of genocide.

Conclusion

It takes gall to announce one’s intent to commit genocide. It takes even more to deny it afterward. That is exactly what leading Serbs and Israelis have done.

Nor are they alone. For years, Russia’s state airwaves have been filled with genocidal rhetoric by officials and lawmakers. Yet, when they are accused of that very offense, they brazenly deny it.

Few societies have properly reckoned with the crimes committed in their name. That includes my own, the United States. Even Germany, the country that has gone furthest in accepting such responsibility, recently saw a state election victory by a party that minimizes, if not denies, the Holocaust.

Unlike these other cases, however, Israel’s genocide is ongoing. (So, for that matter, is Russia’s.) I suspect few Israeli Jews—at least those familiar with the crimes of Serbian forces in the Balkan wars—would dispute the overwhelming evidence of Serbian culpability. Nor would they question the same allegations against Russia.

Yet, when faced with similar findings about their own country—from the very same sources—they chalk it up to antisemitism.

The contradiction is a glaring one. It underscores the profound unseriousness of Israeli denial—and the obligation of others, especially Jews like me, to call it out.