How to Profit from Genocide (1)
N.B.: Since I have started describing the Albanian Mechanism, I have tried to keep a somewhat neutral, critical distance from my subject. These articles are meant to be long-form analyses of the Albanian political and social condition. But writing about the Albanian complicity in the Palestinian genocide, I found, in the face of the unfathomable human suffering that is caused and ignored right in front of us, it challenging to maintain this distance. This means more emotion than usual may shine through in the text below. Let it be so.
Historically, the Albanian state has maintained well-documented relations with the Palestinian liberation movement,1 whose struggles were seen as akin to the Albanian partisan struggles against fascism during National Anti-Fascist Liberation War of the 1940s. In his political diary, former communist leader Enver Hoxha wrote on July 29, 1970, toward of the end of the so-called War of Attrition between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the following:
The Palestinians, expelled from their land by the British colonialist government and the UN in favor of Israel, are living in tents, in great hardship in camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere. The latest Israeli aggression has further increased the number of Palestinian refugees, so the only road of salvation left to them was that of partisan war.
He further opined that as a result of the US–Soviet peace plan prepared to end the war, “What will happen with the Palestinian people will be what happened with the Albanian people before the First World War,” namely being divided and gobbled up by imperialist powers. “Only armed struggle unto victory settles accounts with the wolves who rampage populations,” his diary entry ends.
Relations with the PLO had commenced in 1967, when Albanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Behar Shtylla extended an invitation to then PLO chairman Ahmad Shuqayri to visit Albania. In 1970 the organization opened a representative office in Tirana, and in 1971 thirty Palestinian liberation fighters were invited to Albania to receive a six-month military training. This appears to have been the only time Albania provided material support to the Palestinian liberation struggle, as relations with the PLO cooled down in the aftermath of the Palestinian attack on the Munich Olympics in September 1972, which saw nine members of the Israeli team being taken hostage and eventually killed. Whereas the Albanian communist regime supported the Palestinian armed struggle for a sovereign state, it strongly rejected what it perceived as acts of terrorism.2
As a result, the following two decades saw a somewhat more ambivalent posture of the Albanian government toward the PLO. Nevertheless, Albanian always remained part of the international coalition supporting Palestinian sovereignty, and eventually in 1989 a Palestinian embassy was opened on Rruga Skënderbeg in central Tirana, in a small private villa next to the German embassy. Eventually, then PLO leader Yasser Arafat visited Tirana in 1996. As I will show below, there is, in a certain perverse way, a continuity between the communist foreign policy stance toward Palestine and Prime Minister Edi Rama’s current policy.
The part of this equation that has radically changed, however, is Albania’s rapport with the state of Israel. Even though the communist regime had recognized it in 1949, it came to consider Israel to be a puppet regime of imperialist powers, and no diplomatic relations were established until after the fall of communist regime in 1991. But in recent years the increasing fondness of the Albanian government for Israel has completely overshadowed its historical support for the Palestinian cause. On a rhetorical level, this love is predicated on the Israeli recognition of the Albanian protection of the Jews during the Holocaust. This historical fact was suppressed during the communist period, but has since become a staple of a national(ist) propaganda discourse of religious tolerance and hospitality, which has been extremely effective.
In turn, the support of a nominally Muslim-majority country has provided Israel with an invaluable rhetorical asset, allowing it to “Muslim-wash” its racist policies simply by gesturing toward Albania’s continued support: “no, no, we don’t have anything against Muslims! Look, Albania supports us!” That is the main reason that no Israeli news item about Israeli–Albanian relations ever fails to mention that Albania is a Muslim-majority country.
We can point at Rama’s first state visit to Israel in 2015 as a key moment in recent Israel–Albania relations. Then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated:
I think Albania is the only country whose Jewish population during the Holocaust actually grew because of the refuge and the sanctuary and the friendship and courage shown by the people of Albania. An estimated 200 Jews lived in the country before the war, a figure that swelled some ten times to more than 2,000 afterward, many of them Jews who fled to the country from other European lands. We never forget our friends, and we appreciate that display of humanity, civility and courage in our darkest hours.
Prime Minister Rama in turn stated to be “proud to have been a country where no Jew was released to the Nazis, and where there are incredible stories of Muslim families who protected Jewish families.” He was hopeful he could turn this historical credit into bilateral cooperation in the fields of cybersecurity, innovation, and foreign direct investment.
More recently, Albanian–Israeli relations accelerated in the wake of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. After 75 years of apartheid regime, 56 years of illegal occupation, and a 16-year-long economic blockade that turned the Gaza strip in the world’s largest concentration camp, Hamas defended itself against this ongoing aggression by Israel on October 7, 2023. Israel retaliated with an all-out war against the Palestinian population. Below I sketch the subsequent events only in the broadest strokes.
On December 29, 2023, South Africa filed a case against Israel concerning its conduct in Gaza, and in its initial ruling of January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that it was “plausible” that Israel had violated the Palestinians’ rights under the Genocide Convention from 1948, which, ironically, was adopted in the wake of the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis. The ICJ further imposed several legally binding interim measures, including that Israel must “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza.”
Subsequently, on November 21, 2024, the International Criminal Court released an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for being “Allegedly responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” He currently remains a fugitive.
While Israel attempts to eradicate the Palestinian people from Gaza, it continues to build dozens of new settlements in Palestinian territory on the West Bank, which according to Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz is “a strategic move that prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel.” These settlements have been judged illegal in an ICJ ruling from 2004, which has been further confirmed by UN Security Council Resolution 2334 from December 23, 2016 as having “no legal validity,” constituting “a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to […] lasting and comprehensive peace.”
None of the above illegal actions have been convincingly denied by the Israeli government, which in fact has expressed its genocidal intent quite openly. Former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant spoke of “fighting human animals” and Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi wrote about “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth,” while Minister of Heritage Amichay Eliyahu openly mused about dropping nuclear bombs on Gaza. Echoing US President Donald Trump, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir openly spoke of simply ethnically cleansing the Gaza strip in its entirely. This abject discourse of “voluntary migration” has now gone completely mainstream, following the global resurgence of fascism.
But despite this rapid escalation and a daily news avalanche of the untold horrors unleashed upon the Gazan population, the Albanian government has been actively complicit in the war crimes of the Israeli government. According to a 2024 study from Oil Change International into Israeli fuel imports supplying its armed forces, Albania furnished 10% of the total petroleum shipments to Israel between October 2023 and July 2024. This amounts to a total of 68,700 tons, of which 79% was shipped after January 26, 2024, which suggests that Albania increased its share after the ICJ’s ruling. Thus by continuing to facilitate fuel shipments to Israel in violation of the ICJ interim measures, the Albanian government itself is complicit in genocide and crimes against humanity.
In October 2024, BIRN further reported that a cargo vessel, the MV Kathrin, with a suspected shipment of explosives, had been spotted at a private Albanian harbor, after having been denied entried in multiple other European ports. As with the fuel shipments, any Albanian support for arms trafficking toward Israel is a prohibited under international law.3
In recognition of this unwavering ideological and material support for Israel, its President Isaac Herzog conducted the first ever visit of an Israeli head of state to Albania on September 19, 2024, and Albania in turn opened a commercial liaison office in Jerusalem.4 On April 6, 2025, Rama made a return visit and on the occasion received the Presidential Medal of Honor from President Herzog for his “refus[al] to yield to international pressure and demonstrat[ing] deep friendship and vital support for Israel.”
In a more recent interview for The Jerusalem Post, Albania and Rama are qualified as “two of Israel’s closest allies.” The interview is of particular interest, because it shows Rama attempting to articulate a set of policy points that despite their incoherence form the ideological core of the official Albanian position. At the same time, I am aware that by offering an analysis of Rama’s interview, I provide it with the semblance of reason, which obscures the fact that my initial encounter with his insincere and callous words in the face of the thousands upon thousands of Palestinians that have been massacred in one of the largest bombing campaigns in human history and the willful starvation of those who were lucky enough to remain alive, was a bewildering experience. So with that caveat, let’s have a look.
First of all, we find clear evidence of Albania’s historical foreign policy line, already articulated by former Prime Minister Sali Berisha in 2011, in support for Palestinian sovereignty and a “two-state solution” – a solution which the past and current acts of Israel aim to render forever unsalvageable:
Of course, there is a very strong sentiment among the Albanians regarding the victims of the war in Gaza. As a country, we have been supporting the idea of a two-state solution for a long time now.
This is then combined with the communist-born “anti-terrorism doctrine,” in which the hostage-taking by Hamas during the October 7, 2023 attack is met with the same rejection as in 1972:
I find it too easy to lecture Israel from a distance. When you put yourself in the shoes of the people who had to experience this day [October 7, 2023] and go through this torture, having their innocent kids, parents, and relatives taken as hostages, it makes you unable to breathe. I never thought about this day and what followed in terms of your politics or your government, because the closer you scrutinize the attitude of governments, the more you can find reasons to criticize their actions, but, on the other hand, the more mistaken you can be, judging from afar.
Note how in the second part of this statement Rama actually says something utterly scandalous: “I’ve never given thought to what you did after October 7, because I’d might find that your actions have included war crimes and genocide, but what do I know?” Then, there is the recognition of Albania’s special historical relationship with Israel dating back to the National Anti-Fascist Liberation War, reimagined as the result of some kind of perennial religious tolerance and even an invented “old tradition” of “fighting antisemitism”5:
Fighting antisemitism is an old tradition in Albania, and the Albanian people are, in general, very much supportive of this fight and stand against anything that is discriminatory and singles out people because of their religion, origin, color, or other reasons.
This toxic cocktail of talking points makes it impossible for Rama to recognize the simple truth: that the October 7, 2023 attack of Hamas was an act of self-defense against decades of racist apartheid policies and innumerable forms of military and police violence of an imperialist state that was the direct outcome of Western colonialist doctrine. Instead, Rama conjures a mirage of the Palestinian people are living under “an evil dictatorship” that should be somehow saved from themselves, or as he has said elsewhere: “Hamas is not a resistance movement. Hamas are the Nazis of the new century, and as history has taught us – there is no compromise with Nazis.” Partisans are Nazis; war is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.
Rama’s blindness to the obvious fascism that is rampant in Israeli contemporary politics and which is the diametrical opposite of the anti-fascist resistance history he holds so dear is then, to top it off, garnished with the following utterly disgusting quip:
And it is even more disturbing when you see students and illuminated people in the oldest democracies protesting with the most heinous slogans against Israel while waving the LGBT flags, while if there is a hell for the LGBTs, it’s in the Gaza Strip under Hamas.
I can barely express my revolt at hearing a man who has done absolutely nothing for the Albanian “LGBTs” try to pink-wash his way out of supporting genocide – as if any discrimination or mistreatment of LGBT people in Gaza would justify the wholesale extermination of its entire population, including the LGBT people in question. Let us instead put close attention to what one such Palestinian LGBT person actually had to say:
Idk how long I will live so I just want this to be my memory here before I die. I am not going to leave my home, come what may. My biggest regret is not kissing this one guy. He died two days back. We had told how much we like each other and I was too shy to kiss last time. He died in the bombing. I think a big part of me died too. And soon I will be dead. To younus, i will kiss you in heaven
Whenever I read this, I can only weep.
Having established the historical and more recent context of Albanian–Israeli relations, we now turn to the following question: what does Rama gain from openly siding with and supporting a government that by its own admission is involved in war crimes and genocide – apart from a presidential medal?
This I will discuss in the second part of this article, to be published next week.
The Albanian Mechanism is part of Manifesto GREAT WAVE.
See Klejd Këlliçi, "The PLO and Communist Albania: Cold War Relations." Journal of Palestine Studies 50, no. 4 (2021): 53–66. DOI: 10.1080/0377919X.2021.1970965.
“Albania did not want to be involved, as it did not wish to be labeled as or accused of being a Communist country that supported terrorism.” Ibid., 57.
Weapons trafficking between Israel and Albania is nothing new. During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Israeli circumvented an international weapons embargo by supplying arms via Albania, then ruled by Sali Berisha, to the Rwandese Armed Forces. According to a 1995 report from Amnesty International:
In November 1994, four pilots employed by a UK company admitted publicly to having flown four large charter plane-loads of small arms, mainly hand grenades, rifles and ammunition of Chinese and Russian origin, from Israel and Albania to Goma during April 1994. The supplies are said to have included Israeli-made weaponry such as Uzi sub-machine guns, as well as weapons such as grenades captured by the Israeli army from the Egyptian army in 1973 and Chinese ammunition obtained through Tirana. […] One pilot told Amnesty International that he was "tricked" into flying 36.5 tonnes of arms and ammunition into Goma airport at night, thinking it was a delivery to the Zairian government, but said it was in fact for the exiled Rwandese army. A UK company organised the flights, one from Tel Aviv and other flights from Tirana, the Albanian capital, where Israeli and Albanian officials are alleged to have supplied the arms and ammunition.
By opening the mission in Jerusalem rather than in Tel Aviv, where the Albanian embassy resides, the Albanian government clearly follows the lead of the Trump administration, which in a major policy shift moved its embassy to Jerusalem in 2017 and officially recognized the contested city as the Israeli capital