Bosniak and Serb politicians, intellectuals, and religious leaders in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s post-Dayton quasi-protectorate have a not particularly unusual talent for reducing geopolitics to a provincial costume drama. Bosniaks are a South Slavic people whose religious and cultural heritage is predominantly Sunni Muslim, while the Serbs are likewise South Slavic but predominantly Eastern Orthodox Christian. In their self-imposed isolation, these elites cultivate the illusion that powerful friends abroad stand ready to serve as the eternal “protectors” of their perpetually endangered peoples. Some pose for photographs with Israeli flags, while Benjamin Netanyahu’s government subjects the population of Gaza to mass killing, starvation, and the systematic destruction of the basic conditions of life; others have written to the king of Saudi Arabia praying that Allah grant him victory, even as the Saudi monarchy under King Salman spent years subjecting Yemen’s population to bombing, blockade, biological destruction, and starvation. Then both sets of deferential local elites return home to explain to an increasingly bewildered population that they, and they alone, constitute the last bulwark of civilisation in the Balkans.
To understand the essence of this routinely cheap political pageant, it is worth returning to an old interview with Ami Ayalon, the former director of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, and former commander of the Israeli Navy. Interviewed by Charlie Rose on 8 August 2012, Ayalon laid out his vision of the new regional order emerging after the Arab Spring. His proposal was for a coalition of Sunni-majority states, among them Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, which, together with a U.S.-led international order, would work to contain Iran. As early as 2011, Ayalon had argued that Turkey might serve both as a model of regional democracy and as a strategic counterweight to Iran.
For anyone who had been following the Middle East, then, this was no conspiracy theory but a perfectly transparent strategic concept. Indeed, Ayalon believed that resolving the Palestinian question was precisely what could open the way for such a coalition. Nor was his basic geopolitical intuition unique. By 2014, the Brookings Institution was already writing about the convergence of Israeli and Saudi interests vis-à-vis Iran. In 2015, Israel’s defense minister at the time, Moshe Ya’alon, spoke openly of a “Sunni camp,” including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and other states whose interests, he argued, were drawing closer to Israel’s because of the perceived threat posed by the expansion of Iranian power. And in 2017, Israeli minister Yuval Steinitz publicly acknowledged the existence of partly secret contacts with Saudi Arabia.
Yuval Steinitz, a long-time member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and Israel’s energy minister at the time, who had previously also held the strategic affairs portfolio, went a step further in 2017, publicly acknowledging that Israel maintained partly secret contacts with Saudi Arabia precisely on the basis of their shared concern over Iran. Nor, for that matter, does the latest defence pact among Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, signed in Mecca on 7 August 2026, and built around the principle that an attack on one member is to be regarded as an attack on all three, represent some sudden reversal in relations among Sunni-majority states. Rather, it marks a new phase in a much longer regional realignment centred on Iran, Gulf security, and the U.S.-led system of alliances.
And this is where political reality in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s post-Dayton quasi-protectorate becomes so absurd that even its own propagandists can no longer outdo it.
Milorad Dodik, for decades the dominant political figure in Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Serb-majority entity, now presents Israel not merely as a friendly country but as a model and strategic partner for Republika Srpska itself. In an article entitled “Survival Is Not Entrusted to Others,” he links Iran to wartime assistance provided to the Bosniak side during the 1990s, as well as to Hezbollah and Hamas, while portraying Republika Srpska and Israel as communities confronted by the same ideological enemy. As early as 8 October 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on Israel, Dodik declared that Republika Srpska “fully supports” Israel, while the Palace of the Republic in Banja Luka, the seat of the entity’s president, was illuminated in the colours of the Israeli flag. In March 2025, he met Benjamin Netanyahu and once again reiterated his support for Israel.
Željka Cvijanović, the Serb member of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s three-member state presidency, followed much the same diplomatic path. In Washington in March 2026, she met with representatives of B’nai B’rith, members of the American Jewish Committee, and other Jewish organisations, emphasising the friendship between Republika Srpska and Israel. Yet on that very same day, 4 March, she also sent letters expressing solidarity with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait following Iranian attacks on those countries. In May, again in Washington, she attended a celebration of Israel’s Independence Day at the invitation of the Israeli ambassador. These ties are now being translated into attempts at practical cooperation as well, encompassing security, cybersecurity, policing, and business.
Sarajevo’s Bosniak political and religious establishment, on the other hand, while officially appalled by the bombing and starvation of Gaza, displays a distinctly Dayton-era hypocrisy of its own: the same geopolitical arrangement, once it passes through Sarajevo’s rhetorical customs house, emerges on the other side as a certificate of moral superiority.
When Saudi Arabia launched its bombing campaign in Yemen on 26 March 2015, a group of Bosniak professors and Islamic intellectuals—Džemaludin Latić, Safvet Halilović, Šefik Kurdić, and Izet Terzić—described Operation Decisive Storm, in a surviving text of their letter to King Salman, as an action that had “restored dignity to the Islamic ummah,” meaning the worldwide Muslim community, and prayed that God would grant the king assistance in carrying it out.
Mustafa Cerić did much the same. Cerić, an influential Bosniak theologian and intellectual, had served for nearly two decades as the reis-ul-ulema, or grand mufti and head of the Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina. On 14 April 2015, the official Saudi Press Agency published his letter supporting King Salman’s policy toward Yemen, along with a similar message from the prominent Islamic theologian Bilal Dervišić.
A year later, another group of Bosniak theologians and professors—again including Latić, Halilović, and Kurdić, this time joined by Halil Mehtić, Fuad Sedić, and others—responded to a Houthi missile fired toward Saudi Arabia by congratulating the Saudi armed forces “under the leadership of King Salman and the government.” The Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country’s central institutional body of Sunni Islam, was still officially condemning Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia in September 2026, although its statement also called for an end to the war and a return to negotiations.
On that same 22 September, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s foreign minister, Elmedin Konaković, met Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel bin Ahmed al-Jubeir to discuss strengthening political, economic, and even defense-industrial cooperation. Konaković thanked Riyadh for its “long-standing political and material support” for Bosnia and Herzegovina and briefed al-Jubeir on the glorification in Serbia of Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb general convicted of crimes against humanity and other grave wartime offenses.
Thus the moral condemnation of Serbia’s relationship to war crimes was duly delivered to a monarchy whose record in Yemen had long since, and infamously, surpassed Mladić’s own.
Indeed, thanks in no small part to the monarchy Konaković had just briefed, Yemen had long since ceased to be merely a geographical designation and had become one of the most horrific places on the planet. The United Nations Development Programme estimated that, by the end of 2021, the conflict would have caused approximately 377,000 deaths. Roughly 154,000 were attributable directly to combat and violence; another 223,000—nearly 60 percent of the total—were indirect deaths caused by hunger, disease, lack of clean water, and the collapse of the health-care system.
The most horrifying figure is still to come. According to the same UNDP estimate, 259,000 of those conflict-attributable deaths—almost 70 percent of the total—were children under the age of five.
And these modeled estimates of the war’s wider human cost should not be confused with the narrower tally of civilians individually documented as killed or wounded in military violence. By 9 August 2018, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights had documented 6,592 civilians killed and 10,470 wounded in Yemen. Air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition accounted for the majority of those verified civilian casualties. The places struck included homes, markets, schools, hospitals and other medical facilities, wedding gatherings, and civilian vehicles—including buses carrying children.
None of this, of course, was the product of Saudi operations conducted independently. As early as 25 March 2015, Barack Obama provided the Saudi war with what, in the language of great powers, is called “support”: intelligence, logistics, and joint planning. Aerial refueling, arms transfers, and military advisers followed—a neatly administered package of assistance that allowed the destruction of a country to be conducted as a technically proper allied undertaking.
The Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, like the Bosniak theologians and intellectuals discussed above, does not, of course, support Israel. How could they, according to their own elevated moral worldview, possibly side with a regime whose actions they describe as monstrous? Fortunately, geopolitics requires no such unpleasant formality as direct support. It is quite enough to spend years backing Saudi policy toward the Houthis and Iran and eventually find oneself, by perfectly respectable means and without a single Israeli flag hanging in the office, on the same side of the regional ledger that Israeli security circles had been publicly laying out since the beginning of the previous decade.
Nor, however, do Republika Srpska’s self-appointed domestic “fighters against radical Islam” travel in any particularly different direction. They ride the same geopolitical train as Saudi Arabia, a monarchy that spent decades pouring enormous sums into the global export of its own Salafi religious orthodoxy and that today remains one of Washington’s key security partners and part of the same anti-Iranian regional alignment in which Saudi and Israeli interests repeatedly overlap.
The result is that the local defenders of Christian Europe against “radical Islam,” after delivering the requisite speeches about the struggle for biological survival, eventually take their seats in the same carriage as a state whose religious policy spent decades helping to spread precisely the ideological milieu they now claim to be fighting.
During election season, of course, this modest condition of dependency is temporarily suspended on the advice of hired political consultants. Voters are then invited to choose between slogans such as “Civic. Land of Lilies” and “Only SDA”—the latter referring to the Party of Democratic Action, the main traditional Bosniak nationalist party—on one side, and “Always with the People, Always with Srpska” on the other. For a few weeks, the citizen can therefore be forgiven for imagining that the fate of civilisations is being decided before his eyes, rather than the distribution of personnel among the offices of a remarkably cramped political order.
As soon as the ballot boxes close, however, it becomes clear that the guardians of the “land of lilies” and the guardians of “Srpska” are equally well integrated into the same American-Israeli networks of power in the Balkans, that they seek patrons at the same addresses, and that their grand historical movements in the opening decades of the twenty-first century are taking place within the walls of the same prison yard.
At that point, every local story about “our” friends and “theirs” falls away. What remains is the old question of how politically tolerable someone else’s civilian death becomes when the bomb is dropped by an ally and how easily geopolitics can be sold as cheap moralism when someone else is left to pay the bill.
And in this case, the bill for these grand geopolitical arrangements is delivered neither to Sarajevo professors nor to the dreary bureaucracy of Banja Luka, nor, for that matter, to the entire procession of self-appointed interpreters of the national interest on social media. It is sent to a very different address. In Yemen, it was received by people living under bombs, blockade, and deliberately manufactured hunger; in Gaza today, it is being received by those whose homes have been reduced to numbers in statistics of destruction, in a landscape where more than eighty percent of all structures have been damaged or destroyed, and where terrified orphans, their cheeks gnawed by rats as they sleep, cry for a piece of bread.
In the end, the dead on the margins of the world are simply entered under different headings in the ledger. When the perpetrator is an enemy, he produces victims; when he is an ally, he produces “collateral damage.” The former kills children; the latter carries out a “strategic necessity.” Conscience is then brought into line with the foreign policy of the day, the file receives the stamp of national interest, and the matter is archived.
And when some future historian one day opens those files, it may turn out that the greatest disgrace was not that the “great” killed the small—for that is the global habit of tyrants—but that our own truly small men, never smaller than this, shamelessly and servilely washed the little bloodied knives of those “great” powers.
