Francesco Trupia’s “The Balkans and Palestine”: Selective universalism and the sprectre of coloniality

Intro

On 18 November 2025, at room 41 of the southern section of the main building of the University of Sofia, Francesco Trupia (PhD) held a lecture on the margins of his recent pivot book: Trupia, F. (2025) The Balkans and Palestine: New Convergences, Old Frictions. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 

The event was organized by the university professor of philosophy, Ognyan Kassabov (PhD), one of the most recognizable Bulgarian public intellectuals in the context of the two-year war of Israel in the Gaza Strip, touted as a “genocide” by a large number of international bodies and social sciences experts. 

Francesco Trupia is Adjunct at the University of Toruń (Poland), recently conducting research at the OSA of the Central European University in Budapest (Hungary). He holds a PhD from the University of Sofia and he has been also a columnist for Cross-border Talks. 

Summary of Francesco Trupia’s main lecture points

Francesco Trupia’s lecture uses the events in Palestine, particularly the genocide in Gaza, as a microcosm to critically analyze Western academia and diplomacy, as well as discuss the enduring structures of oppression and the reverberations of genocidal violence across the Balkans.

1. The Era of Selective Universalism

• Definition: Trupia introduces the concept of “selective universalism” to describe how Western political and academic discourse applies universal concepts, such as “genocide” and “human rights,” based on geopolitical interests.
• Contrasting Responses: He highlights the mismatch between the immediate and widespread academic and political consensus in labeling the Russian invasion of Ukraine as “genocide” and the struggle of applying the same term to the situation in Gaza in the wake of October 7, 2023.
• Complicity and Denial: This selective universalism is connected to the West’s economic interests and political complicity with Israel, citing Francesca Albanese’s report on “The Economy of Genocide”, where corporations like Microsoft, Google, Leonardo S.p.A, among others, are allegedly complicit in genocide. The silence in most academic environments also signals a structural complicity.
• The Srebrenica Paradox: He notes the paradox of the UN formally recognizing the Srebrenica genocide decades after the genocide in Srebrenica. While scholars in the Balkans questioned the point of this delayed recognition, there is the need to act to unmask the “intent of genocide” in Gaza.

2. Coloniality vs. Colonialism

• Moving Beyond History: Trupia argues that shifting the focus from colonialism (a historical, material condition/process) to coloniality of power (a philosophical and structural mechanism) can shed a better light on Gaza and its reverberations on the Balkans.
• Coloniality as Systemic Control: Coloniality is the subtle, enduring mechanism that shapes knowledge, controls people’s lives, and controls “people’s death” as a means of politics (drawing on Mbembe’s Necropolitics and moving beyond Agamben’s Homo Sacer).
• Visual & Structural Parallels: He uses visual parallels, comparing photos from the Nakba (1948) with images of Communist Bulgaria’s Revival Process (the ethnic cleansing of Turks and Muslims in 1989). He attempted to demonstrate how the mechanisms of dispossession and destruction transcend specific geographies and historical periods, mirroring one another.
• Balkan Coloniality: He links Israeli surveillance and control methods in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to similar practices across the Balkans, such as the use of curfews for ethnic discrimination (e.g., sealing off Roma neighborhoods during the COVID-19 pandemic) and the control of migrant routes. He suggests that Palestine reveals the latent coloniality operating within Balkan societies.

3. Balkan Zionism and Nationalism

• Repercussions in the Balkans: Trupia examines the robust pro-Palestinian solidarity movements in the Balkans (e.g., Sofia, Sarajevo, Pristina) and why this region, with its history of state socialism, has particular resonances.
• The Ideological Roots of Zionism: He argues that the history of Balkan Zionism is deeply connected to Balkan nationalism, suggesting early Zionist clubs in the region (like the Maccabi group in Sofia) learned how to construct a nation-state “against the empire” (the Ottoman Empire) by observing local national liberation movements.
• Ideological vs. Religious Zionism: He draws a distinction between the initially highly political and ideological Zionism in the Balkans (cooperating with local nationalisms) and the more modern, religiously-motivated messianic Zionism seen today.
• Post-War Exodus: The experience of Bulgarian Jews being stripped of their property after WWII and later emigrating to Israel paradoxically reinforced a Zionist sentiment, confirming their belief that only a Jewish state could guarantee their rights.

Welcome and Introduction 

Ognyan Kassabov: Welcome to today’s speech and discussion with Francesco Trupia, a researcher at the University of Toruń and the Democracy Institute at the Central European University. My name is Ognyan Kassabov, and I also teach here at the University of Sofia. Francesco Trupia is primarily a political scientist, but he completed his PhD in the English-language Philosophy Programme at the University of Sofia, so he also holds a philosophy degree.

This lecture, obviously, as most of these lectures go, will not happen in a vacuum; it’s against the background of events we’ve been practicing for two years.

It seems that Gaza is off the news headlines recently—maybe not today or yesterday, because we have a UN Security Council resolution, but as we know, or as we learned if we didn’t know before, genocide is not a one-time event; it’s a process, and it is continuing. It’s raining here in Gaza, it’s pouring, people don’t have homes, and this is not because of some sort of poverty, a natural event, or something of that kind. They don’t have homes because of the actions of the so-called Israeli Defense Forces, and they don’t even have tents, once more because of the actions of the so-called Israeli Defense Forces, who do not allow humanitarian aid there.

So, yes, now the resolution… some people were… It’s not yet clear how it’s going to be implemented. Israel is not happy about it, and a lot of actors from the Palestinian side and the other side are not happy either, because they see it as a step towards a new position of foreign rule in Gaza.

It’s obviously a good thing if international armed forces under a UN mandate would actually guarantee some safety for those people there; they have been suffering too much. But maybe that’s my own perception. Maybe I’ll be satisfied once we have a UN mandate forcing so-called Israel to hold accountable the perpetrators of this gruesome thing.

Another thing I want to mention in this short introduction is that, obviously, academia is complicit in this whole thing—Western academia. Bulgaria is part of Western academia. Maybe not so much for us from the humanities and social sciences, maybe not so much in Bulgaria as in Germany or the US, but still, there is pro-Zionist side propaganda in the university auditoria, I’m sure about that.

But there is also silence on the part of people who are qualified in various ways in their disciplines to speak out in these gruesome circumstances. And so, that’s part of the motivation for my presentation today. We have to keep talking about Palestine in various contexts.

Today it will be an academic one, as some of you are already aware. Today it will be an academic context, but it’s really important to discuss these things, not only in so-called activist terms but also in our own research-based, critical ones. One last thing, there’s a lot going on.

There’s an exhibition, which starts on Friday.

But we also have a new student informal organization, Students for Palestine, that asked me to introduce themselves and say a couple of words about their meeting tomorrow. First, they will just issue their short message, and then we’ll give the floor to Francesco.

Students for Palestine’s announcement before the lecture

(A person from Students for Palestine): Tomorrow at 6:30 PM in the space Magnit, we have a student discussion, a sort of open meeting where we will discuss different initiatives we’ve seen for Palestine or against Palestine. It’s a very open format, but we want to see how we can bring the student movement that we’ve seen all abroad to the area in a more visible context, in a more impactful way. And not only do we have this upcoming meeting, we also have an ongoing initiative.

We have started a petition against this academic whitewashing of the Israeli genocide on Palestine. So I would urge you to go sign our petition. Our Instagram is sfp_Bulgaria. And there we have the petition claims. We have ongoing research into specific institutional cooperation with Israeli academic or even state institutions. And yeah, we urge you to check it out. If you’re a student, we would love to have you tomorrow so we can discuss what we can do. And yeah, thank you. Thank you.

Lecture time

Ognyan Kassabov: So, once more, Francesco will talk for about 45 to 50 minutes, and then we’ll carry on a discussion on his presentation. Francesco, the floor is yours.

Francesco Trupia’s lecture: On Palestine, selective universalism, coloniality, and Balkan Zionism

Francesco Trupia: Thank you so much, Professor Kassabov, and thank you so much to you for coming here despite the weather that hasn’t been very kind to us today. I would like to talk not exactly about my book, even though the presentation and the issues I’m going to discuss today are a reflection of the book, published by Palgrave and released just a couple of days ago, in time for this presentation. We were wondering whether we should have organized a book launch without the book itself, but we managed to do that.

And I need to give you a disclaimer: this book can really upset you to a certain extent for two reasons. First of all, even though it has “Palestine” [as a title], it’s not about Palestine itself. I’m not an expert on the Middle East, nor on Palestine, but it is a follow-up project that I wanted to write exactly for another reason: [which has to do with my] academic position. When I started to receive the invitation to write something about Palestine, I started to feel myself in a very strange position in academia, especially living in a country, Poland, that is a post-Holocaust country, with lots of memories, lots of interesting history when it comes to Zionism and the identity of Jewishness, and so on. And since I have been working mainly on the Balkans, especially with minority groups, on minority rights, minority memories, and their implications for democracy, I started to feel, let’s say, a bit strange. All the time I’m the ‘other’ in the room, right? Because I research a region I do not belong to, I’m interested in people I’m not belonging to, and sometimes I have to justify myself about whatever I do [as a researcher] in academia, especially with the people I’m researching precisely. And when I was writing this book, I had just finished a fieldwork in Belgium and Germany, [where] I was interviewing young Muslims with a Balkan background, whose families actually had escaped the wars in Yugoslavia, and especially the ethnic cleansing here in Bulgaria in 1989. My project was about the ways they participate in politics, [and] what it means for a young Muslim with a Balkan migration background to live in Western society, dealing precisely with Islamophobia.

When I was doing this research, which has nothing to do with Palestine, October 7th happened, and I saw how my interviewees drastically changed. [For them, Gaza] was a new verbalization of being Muslim, a new verbalization of being political, and [even starting] to become Muslims to the public eye. [Let me give you an example here:] a guy who is born in Belgium to a family from Bosnia or Kosovo. He keeps religion private. After October 7th, everything became public [as he began standing for Palestine].

 I wanted to start with this photo. Perhaps you know this lady, Francesca Albanese. She is an Italian and the Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 1967. And for sure, you know how controversial she is in the way she writes the reports at the UN and the way she is also addressing the issue of Palestine. [Here,] she is standing with a graffiti of a lifelong senator, Liliana Segre. She is [also] Italian, and she is a Holocaust survivor. In Italy, the discussion on Palestine [in] a post-fascist country, a fascist country during the Second World War, every journalist and [every] public media discussion addresses Liliana Segre to ask about Palestine. And what she was doing all the time was just denying the genocide in Gaza or what was going on in the Palestinian territories [before October 7. So Albanese] went to stand next to [Segre’s] graffiti, which says, “indifference is much worse than violence itself.”

And when she took this photo, I found myself in a very strange position, unsure about writing this book, as I am not an expert on the Middle East or Palestine. But I started to understand how it was important for academia and for academics to start discussing something that is not only related to Palestine. Or it is not only related to the Middle East. Since I have always been interested in the Balkan region and Central and Eastern European countries, I started to understand how deeply moving it was, especially for the young generation [from and in these European countries]. As Andreas Malm from the University of Malmö in Sweden said, “Palestine became a microcosm through which everybody could understand all the problems in their own societies”.

Hence, I began to ask myself why the interviewees from my previous project had become so outspoken about Palestine. Why Islam was something to be discussed in our liberal democracy. What was the impact on our liberal democracies?

So I started to focus more on the Balkans. And I really liked, while I was doing the research, this citation by Abdelwahab al-Affendi, [I quote here:] 

After October 7, academics and intellectuals have become like those friendly neighbours and work colleagues who, like in a horror movie, turn out to be vampires in disguise

In general, this was the position of many scholars who became completely silent over Gaza. And I couldn’t understand why. Especially because we live in a time of extreme polarization, with extreme radicalization in our society. But I couldn’t understand why professors with years of experience in doing research became completely silent over the issues of Gaza. Sometimes they were not even able to comment on the situation. They were completely bypassing what was asked by the public or the media landscape.

Since then, I decided to write this book. And I started to interview again the people I was in touch with, to ask them why Palestine was extremely important for them. After all, they somehow shared my position [in condemning what was happening in Gaza]. They do not belong to Palestine. They were not Palestinians. Perhaps they were Muslims [but] not all. It was extremely interesting to me to position myself, and also to create some kind of rupture within academia– going to talk about Palestine.

And I remember once I was in Germany, where the entire discussion [on Gaza] was completely silenced. Professor Kassabov already mentioned this. I was even asked by a professor “how my experience was?” And I thought she was asking me about my trip from Torun to Marburg in Germany. And we had a few seconds of confusion, [because] actually she was asking me “how was my experience in Germany wearing a keffiyeh,” given the situation and the atmosphere over Gaza.

In my presentation today, I would like to talk about three points that I discuss in the book [and also] I want to share with you more knowledge that I [discussed] in the book because I would like to reflect with you, and maybe we can have a quick Q&A session. 

First: selective universalism [in light of the] October 7 and then the situation in Gaza [that] started throughout the war in Ukraine. [This screenshot shows] that in a couple of weeks, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia was immediately labeled as a genocide. Full stop. There was literally no comment about how sure it was that it was a genocide. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. If I need to look at the Russian discourse over Ukraine—the complete denial and annihilation of the Ukrainian identity, Ukrainian people, Ukrainian language—I do believe that [the full-scale invasion of Russia] shows the intent of genocide. What I couldn’t understand was why it was so difficult for scholars to come up with the idea of a genocide happening in Gaza. But then, I understood why. And in my opinion it’s pretty much connected with this document that was published by Francesc Albanese: From the Economy of Occupation to the Economy of Genocide. It’s in my opinion a heartbreaking report. I don’t know how many of you have read it. But I would like to mention just the companies that according to [Albanese] are complicit of genocide. They are Microsoft, Google, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, and also Leonardo S.p.A., which is an Italian company that is producing, [among others], and manufacturing weapons to Israel.

And Now, [Albanese called for] as complicit of genocide. And let’s see here: any kind of complicity can be also shared not only with Italy, but also with Germany, with France and other countries. So at this point, I may have understood why many scholars and many academics couldn’t speak up about the genocide in Gaza.

[At the same time], I had to literally find the perspective through which I could speak about Palestine. And why many young people in Sarajevo took to the streets. Also, people from Kosovo took to the streets. And for those people who look at the Balkans, especially at the young generations, they often argue that [the latter] are not really politicized over certain issues, such as the foreign affairs or international politics. So, I started thinking of Edward Said. And he gave to us the means to talk about Palestine in a more globalized, in a more systemic, way. And I quote here Edward Said in The Question of Palestine: “The whole point of rational discussion is to attempt to change the terms and the perspectives in which problems are understood. Not as they are hidden, because of course they are not hidden [here, I mean Palestine and Gaza has been part and parcel of our public discussion] but how the[se problems] are ignored or denied.” And I think that the problem of denial here motivated me to understand more and more about this selective universalism.

And I think that what we are witnessing right now is the time of selective universalism. There are certain issues that are selectively understood as a genocide or as a human rights, and others that are not completely understood as such. This may be related to economic interests that concern Israel or the Middle East. We know how global politics is shaped around the concept of selective universalism now. But [in Gaza] the Western society or the democratic world was not interested in speaking on behalf of universalism.

Of course, there were some journalists and scholars who addressed the problem of selective universalism. I can tell a story of an Italian journalist, Gabriele Nunziati. Perhaps you have seen it. [He] was actually kicked out of the newspaper he was working in, because he said, he asked, I think, Kaja Kallas at the European Union, he asked: “The European Union is saying that Russia has to pay for repairing all damages in Ukraine. Are you willing to say so also for Israel towards the Palestinian territories?” She said, “I don’t want to comment on it.” After that, [Nunziti] received a letter [saying] he was no longer accepted in his newspaper, and he couldn’t work there anymore. [Previously] another signal regarding Srebrenica, [the Bosnian city] where the Serbian army killed more than 8,000 Bosniaks, so Muslims, during the war in Bosnia in the 1990s. In the summer 2024, the United Nations recognized the official day for the recognition of the genocide of Srebrenica. And there were some scholars here in the Balkans who were asking the academic community: “What’s the point? What’s the point of recognizing Srebrenica after 30 years? And what’s the point of recognizing the genocide of Srebrenica while we have a genocide under our eyes and we do nothing in order to recognize it now?”

The recognition of genocide [cannot come to count] the people who are dead. When the people are dead, you can perhaps mourn them. You can commemorate them. You can write something in their own memory. The problem of genocide is the intent of genocide and to stop countries or any kind of actor showing the intent to commit a genocide. And the International Criminal Court has already issued hundreds of warnings to Israel, to stop destroying part of the Palestinian people, mainly in Gaza. And I think the same mechanisms of destruction are about to happen in the West Bank. Hence, I started to understand why many young people of Bosnian origin started to be very vocal about Gaza and about the situation in Palestine. Because what they told me is that: “Francesco, we have seen these photos. We have seen these experiences. We have heard these stories. The stories of Gaza are the stories of my family, who was kicked out of their country, who were killed. We are still finding our [family’s] remains. And now they recognize my parents, they recognize my grandparents, who were killed in the war. But paradoxically, this kind of recognition doesn’t work for Palestine and for Gazans. So what is really the point of recognizing the genocide [in Bosnia]?”

This is what I call selective universalism: we recognize the Holocaust, and I do not deny Israel the right to exist, but we turn a blind eye on Gaza, and the recognition of Palestine as becoming a state. This is the question that Francesca Albanese, in the Italian audience, is always asked to reply to: “Do you recognize Israel?” She says, “Well, Israel does exist. It doesn’t need to be recognised, we don’t need to specify the fact that Israel has the right to exist. It exists. What is not existing is Palestine as a state. And right now the population of Palestinian territories are under the attack of another genocide, and we have to stop it from happening.”

In my opinion, what also this selective universalism is showing, is  – let’s be honest – the complicity of academia. We need to address the complicity of Western academia and our government in the killing fields. And when Francesco Albanese is writing about these corporations and huge industries that are somehow providing some help, military help to Israel, they are basically complicit in genocide [in Gaza]. It’s not only silence, actually. And I think that this concept of silence has been pretty much taken into consideration as an excuse. Yeah, there are people who are silent. But, actually, there are real and concrete issues that make silence somewhat outdated. We have it there. It’s visible. And we cannot really deny it or stay silent anymore.

This is my second point: Palestine and the Balkans share the repercussions of colonial history, as well as the long-lasting mechanisms of coloniality. Everybody is talking for sure about colonisation of Palestine: sure thing!. In the book, I try to change the perspective, perhaps in a more philosophical way. What I discuss is not the history of colonialism. The history of colonialism, as we know it. There are historians who have numerous publications and write eye-opening books about the history of colonialism. And what they argue is that colonialism is over to a historical extent. What is right now circulating as a form of power, of control, of destruction, and as a genocidal means, is basically the coloniality of power.

I don’t know. This might be a philosophical concept. Coloniality, and how it develops into means of destruction, control and coercion, gives us the idea that colonialism is over as a historical experience, but now we are shaped by coloniality. Coloniality is a subtle mechanism of controlling people, forcing them to adopt certain behaviors, accepting these behaviors in a normative way, and recognizing certain subjects only if they are removed from the core society. Coloniality is this subtle mechanism that is not only excluding but also killing people.

In order to understand this, many scholars are actually using photos. 

These are two photos from the Nakba 1948 and these are Gazans waiting to leave. And when I started looking at these photos, I immediately thought that I had seen this one somewhere. And it might be a good comparison to understand the ways coloniality operates. [On the right side of the slide above], the two photos from the Revival Process [in Bulgaria] help us understand coloniality, how that [Communist] coloniality worked. Of course, there was no colonisation here in Bulgaria. Perhaps there was in Palestine for sure, in these post-imperial conditions. But the means of power, of dispossessing, and of killing people, at the end of the day, are the same [in Bulgaria and Palestine]. 

Coloniality goes beyond space and time. That’s why I think that our debate is all the time sometimes outdated as well, because we discussed if there was colonialism, if there were colonies. It’s not about colonies as a historical condition. It was not about colonialism as a historical process. It’s about coloniality. It’s this subtle means of power spanning borders, killing literally and destroying populations in their own space, serving the vested interests that you can think of.

[This other visual comparison] is made by the Bosnian diaspora in the UK. As I said a few minutes ago, many young Muslims whose families escaped the genocide in Bosnia, they have seen these photos somewhere. And the way they compared them is really telling. Post-socialist legacies and post-colonial legacies operate through the Balkans and the Middle East. They are the same regions – of course, I do not think so, but the way coloniality has been impacting on the history of the two regions, I think there are lots of convergences. And now I come to the second point, or perhaps even the third one. I found very fascinating the philosophical discussion about Palestine, especially if you have a look at Achille Mbembe. He is a philosopher who authored Necropolitics. I found Mbembe’s idea very fascinating for two reasons: First, the way he spoke about Palestine in 2019, when Necropolitics was published. Literally, this is the politics of death, which is very interesting to me from a philosophical point of view, because the so-called discussion on Palestine has been all the time understood through the prism of Michel Foucault’s Panopticon -meaning, the surveillance of Palestinian people, and how the Israeli government is using even the most well-equipped methods of surveillance for dividing Palestinians [and ruling over their lands]. And also Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer – a man who has no right to have rights, [no longer provides us the correct answer to describe coloniality]. 

In my opinion, necropolitics moves beyond Foucault’s understanding of the “Palestinian laboratory”. There is an amazing report [titled this way] if you want to discuss these issues. [Necropolitics shows us the perspective of migrants, minority communities, people who are basically condemned to die. I here quote, very shortly, what Mbembe wrote about Gaza: “Gaza might well prefigure what is yet to come”. So, Mbembe understood immediately what was the destiny of Gaza in 2018, so five years before October 7 happened.

When describing the modalities by which people are supposed to die, Mbembe draws on Foucault’s biopolitics -, the ways power is entering every single piece of your private life, that is going to be completely controlled, and you[r actions are] driven even subconsciously by it. The typical Foucault’s theory, [in a few words]. We have to move beyond it. We are not controlled anymore. We are not supposed to be controlled in order to do something, in order to buy something, in order to vote for some political party. Now we are controlled in the way we die. When Mbembe was writing about Palestine, he argued that 

“These modalities can proliferate in other places on the planet [- namely,] restricting the number of Palestinians allowed to enter Israel and the occupied territories … the repeated imposition of curfews within Palestinian enclaves and controls on movement to the objective imprisonment of entire towns … … the number of the[se] dynamics of destruction whose essence lies in transforming the lives of Palestinians into a heap of ruins or a pile of garbage destined for cleansing”

Hence, I started to think how, for instance, the Israeli drones, or the Israeli equipment is surveilling our borders, especially in Europe. When everybody is telling me, why doesn’t the European Union talk about Israel? It is because we are deeply involved in making business with Israel and controlling the lifes of migrants, for example. In 2015, the Balkans became the “Balkan route” where people were controlled, and how they die [as well was controlled]. I don’t know if you [read of] Madina Hussini. I met her actually here in Sofia, in a refugee camp. She died hit by a train between Croatia and Bosnia when [her family] was pushed back. Of course, I am not accusing Israel of having killed Madina Hussini. But if you remember what I said a couple of minutes ago about coloniality, and how this power of controlling, and dispossessing, and to let people die functions, I see no difference between how Palestinians are pushed away from their lands, and they are supposed to die, and they are supposed to be completely slaughtered in their own lands, from the way migrants were pushed back from one point to another,  where they eventually died. Perhaps the Balkans are [a new corridor] for the migration route. I was born and grew up in Sicily, where I have grown up seeing refugees and migrants arriving and disappearing, appearing dead from the sea, being completely unrecognised. We now have so many monuments to the unknown people of the Mediterranean Sea…

When Mbembe wrote about how Palestinians are supposed to face curfews and restrictions, especially in the West Bank nowadays, I couldn’t not but think of a better explanation of how, for instance, Israel’s methods of surveillance are only imposed throughout Balkan societies. The spyware affairs on Serbian activists as a method of power and control, or imposing curfews in times of crisis or in times of turmoil in Bulgaria, [such as in the case of] Roma people, for example. During the state of epidemiological emergency in 2020, Roma areas were completely sealed off to stop the Covid-19 virus to spread. And I think that if Achille Mbembe is right in talking about the way Israeli coloniality functions, we already have coloniality functioning in our own societies. So [yet again], Palestine is not just about Palestine. Palestine serves as a microcosm through which we can examine our societal problems.

And when we discuss the destruction [of Palestinian houses], we may think also of [the eviction at] Zaharna Fabrica, of how certain people are supposed to die, not perhaps physically, but politically, culturally, sometimes linguistically. And this is what is happening in Palestine and the Palestinian territories nowadays.

I’m moving towards a conclusion now. Let me repeat that I was surprised by the ways the Balkans were shaken by the grassroots protests of pro-Palestinian activists, and their voices emerging from within society. Sofia was part of [the Balkan pro-Palestinian network] even in some other minor localities around the countries where people are starting to speak up about Palestine. This might be a matter of emulation to a certain extent, but when I started to look more and more closely at the protests in the Balkans, and especially in Sofia, I was a bit confused about who was speaking up about Palestine. The far right, for instance, and I said, “This is something completely new, because the far right or the conservatives in Europe have taken a pro-Israeli position.” So I started to investigate this [new phenomenon]. I came up with the idea that this pro-Palestinian support and solidarities might be not only something related with Gaza nowadays. After October 7, many scholars were completely denying any kind of solidarity campaigns, [thereby] saying, “Well, this is because these countries have had communism, and they remember from communist time how the communist regime was very attached to the Global South, to the Second and Third World.” [Now, people] re-elaborate and re-work the memories of the past in a way that they could easily pick up the history of the whole country and re-work the message of solidarity towards Palestine. Hence, I was very interested in this concept of nationalism from the perspective of selective universalism, and I started to think that actually it’s not true that societies such as Bulgaria or Serbia have been pro-Palestinian due to their own history of state socialism or even communism, nor the way the socialist state was oriented towards the Global South. Because if we have to look at the history of Zionism, which nowadays has been pretty much criticized, the history of Jewish people in Bulgaria can tell us something, something more.

This is a [photo above] that I found in an archive here in Sofia, basically showing Jewish soldiers who contributed to the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire. And then I started to come across this issue of Orientalism or self-orientalization in Bulgaria. And I think that actually not Palestinian history, but the Jewish history of Zionism is much more related to the Bulgarian and Serbian, and Bosnian nationalism: more than we can think of.

There is some historical research, conducted from a philosophical and more critical perspective, suggesting that the first Zionist clubs in the Balkans learned how to create their own nation from the experience of Ottoman liberation. Because there were [Jews] who contributed to the liberation of the Balkan states from the Ottomans through a decolonial way and spirit. So decoloniality or decolonialism is not only something related to Palestine and the issue of Palestinians, but it was also historically related to the history of nationalism here in Bulgaria. [For instance], the Maccabi club, [which] was a Zionist club here in Sofia [promoted] Bulgarian nationalism [as] a lesson on how to go to Palestine and create their own state against the [Ottoman] empire. And, paradoxically, the enemy was the same: the Ottoman empire from the Balkans through Palestine, what it was called before Palestine.

In the last chapter of the book, I discuss this double stage of nationalism where Zionism was not only born in the West and supported by the West, but it has a lot of connection and implication with the Balkan nationalism, and the way the Jews and Jewish minority and the so-called Bulgarian Zionists provided the lesson to create Israel in the Middle East, in Palestine in particular. At the same time, we know that not only Jewish people were attached to this concept of Zionism or nationalism. Because you have here a completely different image of the Jewish[ness. Look at Violetta Yakova, who was the lady who shot General Lukov when Bulgaria collaborated with Nazi Germany during WWII.

[To conclude quickly:] There are so many implications and repercussions of the situation in Palestine here in the Balkans that we can open up the discussion. So… 40 minutes precisely, thank you so much. Thank you all!

Photo: Francesco Trupia in Sofia (source: Vladimir Mitev)

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