Serbian intellectual culture is marked by a deep mistrust of official narratives, whether national, imperial, or Western. The history of the Balkans is one of shifting borders, competing memories, and stories imposed from outside. By deconstructing the founding myths of Jewish nationalism and the modern nation-state, Shlomo Sand speaks to an audience accustomed to questioning the fabrication of history and doubting fixed identity narratives.
BREAKUP OF YUGOSLAVIA
After the breakup of Yugoslavia, many Serbs experienced the disintegration of a shared national narrative, international media criminalization, and a brutal questioning of their place in European history. Sand’s books, notably The Invention of the Jewish People and The Invention of the Land of Israel, resonate with this experience. They show how nations are modern constructions, often legitimized retrospectively through selective readings of the past. This idea finds in Serbia an already prepared intellectual terrain.
The political history of Serbia since the 1990s further shapes this landscape. Slobodan Milošević’s authoritarian rule exploited nationalist myths to consolidate power, leading to war and international isolation. His era left a deep imprint on Serbian consciousness, where the manipulation of historical narratives became associated with political survival. Zoran Đinđić, who obtained his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Konstanz in Germany in 1979 with a dissertation on Marx’s critical social theory, returned to Serbia with an intellectual formation shaped by Western Marxism and critical theory. At that time, he also supported the Palestinian cause, reflecting a broader engagement with anti-imperialist movements. As a reformist leader, Đinđić opposed Milošević and advocated democratic change, demonstrating how critical intellectual work could intersect with practical politics. In the contemporary period, Aleksandar Vučić’s consolidation of power and the centralization of media and political discourse continue to influence how history and national identity are debated. These three figures—Milošević, Đinđić, and Vučić—symbolize the persistent tension between nationalist mythmaking, reformist aspirations, and authoritarian control, providing a concrete backdrop against which Sand’s critique of “invented nations” gains particular resonance.
MYTH BUSTER
Sand directly attacks the idea of ethnic nationhood and the notion of pure historical continuity of an eternal people. In the Balkans, these concepts have been used to justify wars, instrumentalized by political elites, and exported as simplistic interpretive frameworks by the West. His work is therefore read not merely as an attack on Israel but as a universal critique of ethnic nationalism, which many Serbian readers recognize as a source of local tragedies.
In Serbia, Sand is read by left-wing intellectuals, critical academics, and sometimes even by nationalist readers paradoxically fascinated by his challenge to official history. This creates a cross-cutting reception in which each group projects its own fractures. Unlike in other countries, Sand is not perceived solely as a dissident Israeli intellectual but as a global demystifier of modern myths.
Serbia has retained a critical distance from the liberal West, particularly since the 1990s. Sand’s theses, which challenge the political use of history, selective universal morality, and the sacralization of certain memorial narratives, fit perfectly within this intellectual posture.
The success of Shlomo Sand in Serbia does not stem solely from his positions on Israel. It arises because he speaks to a society that has experienced the collapse of myths, provides intellectual tools to think of history as construction, and articulates a preexisting mistrust toward national and moralizing narratives. In Serbia, Sand is not read as a provocateur but as a critical mirror, sometimes uncomfortable, of a shared historical experience.
SERBIAN LEFT
Within part of the Serbian left inheriting Yugoslav Marxist-Leninism, there exists a tradition of ideological anti-Zionism that can at times slide into ambiguous or problematic forms. This tradition does not arise from popular or racial antisemitism, historically weak in Serbia, but from a doctrinal framework forged during the Cold War. In socialist Yugoslavia, Zionism was perceived above all as a bourgeois, national, and imperial ideology associated with the United States and the West. Israel was often analyzed not as a post-genocide refuge but as a colonial outpost within a Third Worldist interpretive framework. This vision, transmitted in certain left-wing intellectual milieus, survived the collapse of communism.
Among some Serbian left-wing intellectuals, criticism of Israel sometimes becomes a space for projecting post-Yugoslav frustrations, where resentment toward the West, rejection of perceived imperialism, and fascination with narratives of resistance intertwine. In this context, Sand’s work is sometimes used not to question nationalism in general but to delegitimize Jewish national existence, which constitutes a problematic slippage.
It is nonetheless essential to distinguish this drift from classical antisemitism. The majority of the Serbian critical left explicitly claims to be antiracist, universalist, and hostile to all ethnic or religious hatred. Judaism as a culture or people is generally not targeted; what is attacked, sometimes excessively, is the State of Israel as a condensed symbol of nationalism, the West, and domination.
The gray zone appears when anti-Zionism becomes exclusive, obsessive, and asymmetrical, when the deconstruction applied to Israel is not applied with the same rigor to other nations or regimes. Here, the Marxist-Leninist legacy can transform into an inverted dogma, reproducing what it claims to combat.
In this sense, Sand’s success in Serbia reveals both critical lucidity and the risk of ideological appropriation. His work can nourish emancipatory thinking about the construction of nations but can also serve as an intellectual warrant for unilateral hostility which, without being antisemitic in the strict sense, undermines the universalism it claims.
Among Serbian leftists, Marxist-Leninist antisemitism is neither structuring nor dominant, unlike in certain Eastern European or Middle Eastern contexts. It is rather a residual doctrinal anti-Zionism, sometimes fossilized, which can produce moral blind spots when disconnected from self-criticism.
This current does not target Jews as an ethnic or religious group but tends to essentialize Israel as the total figure of political evil, which constitutes less a hatred than an intellectual impoverishment. The danger is therefore not antisemitic violence, marginal in Serbia, but ideological rigidification, where critique ceases to be dialectical and becomes reflexive.
KOSOVO VS ISRAEL
One of the most revealing features of the contemporary Serbian left lies in a paradoxical and intellectually inverted position: contestation of Israel’s legitimacy as a state combined with full recognition of Kosovo’s independence. This position is not marginal; it is expressed within certain academic, intellectual, and activist circles claiming a Marxist-Leninist, Third Worldist, or postcolonial heritage.
This paradox rests on an inverted ideological logic rather than historical or legal coherence. Israel is perceived as a Western colonial and imperial creation even when examined outside its concrete historical context, while Kosovo is presented as a legitimate case of national liberation supported in the name of the right of peoples to self-determination. The analytical framework is therefore applied asymmetrically, guided by a preexisting moral hierarchy.
This reversal is striking given that, from a Serbian perspective, Kosovo represents a territorial loss experienced as a major historical injustice imposed through Western intervention and widely contested internationally. Yet, within segments of the Serbian left, this national wound is bracketed in favor of a selective universalist discourse that celebrates Kosovar self-determination while denying any Jewish national legitimacy.
The underlying logic is less juridical than symbolic. Israel is assimilated to the figure of Western dominance, while Kosovo is incorporated into the global narrative of oppressed peoples. This binary opposition deliberately simplifies both situations, ignoring European Jewish history, the Shoah, centuries of discrimination, and the necessity of a national refuge, as well as the historical, religious, and cultural realities of Kosovo within Serbian history.
This posture reveals a rigid Marxist-Leninist inheritance in which anti-imperialism becomes a mechanical reflex rather than a critical instrument. The West is always the primary culprit; its allies are always illegitimate, and those it supports are always presumed oppressive. Coherence is sacrificed in favor of a simplified moral narrative.
This paradox profoundly weakens the intellectual credibility of this segment of the left. By contesting Israel’s legitimacy while recognizing Kosovo’s, it reveals not a consistent commitment to international law or self-determination, but an asymmetrical ideological reading in which principles shift according to the object under examination. It is not universality that guides reasoning but symbolic alignment against the West.
This inversion also explains why Sand’s work resonates so strongly in these circles. His writings provide an intellectual warrant for delegitimizing Israel without forcing a confrontation with the internal contradictions of this position. Sand is then read less as a historian of complexity than as an instrument of ideological confirmation, betraying the critical spirit he claims to uphold.
Thus, the recognition of Kosovo and the contestation of Israel do not constitute a coherent progressive position but a symptom—a critical thought that has turned in on itself, inverted its principles, and now confuses deconstruction with moral selection. What is at work here is not antisemitism but ideological blindness produced by excessive fidelity to intellectual schemas inherited from the twentieth century.
Thus, the enthusiastic reception of Shlomo Sand in Serbia reveals both a living critical tradition and a terrain vulnerable to inverted simplifications, where the deconstruction of myths can paradoxically generate new dogmas.
*Author is former member of the UN senior staff