The Jewish Museum: The New Front in the Anti-American Battle After Zvërnec

By Ylli Pata

The debate over Vlora’s Jewish museum has never been a debate about what it is being sold as. As if it were a discussion about the Labëria club or about urban construction qualifications.

Once again an ultimatum is being used as a demand: suspend the works! Add to this the protest, which has drawn in politicians from the flamingo protest — it looks like a life-or-death battle over something that is not an Albanian issue.

Rather, it is a cause — an argument imported from abroad — to impose, through financial backing, decisions that Albania itself should make.

The Vlora debate started badly from the outset, when important political names stirred the environment with antisemitic language that had nothing to do not only with the issue but with normal logic either.

A former mayor of Vlora, a Democratic Party official elected during the pyramid-scheme era who fled Albania, added fuel to the fire by attacking his fellow citizen Ana Kohen over an interview that wasn’t even current.

Ana Kohen had given the interview to Rudina Xhunga several years earlier, talking about Vlora and the history of the arrival of Jewish families, who became an important part of Vlora’s life.

So the discussion wasn’t about a current fact, where polemics might arise naturally as a consequence of joining a debate.

It was the revival of a very old interview to fabricate a cause. One that has nothing to do with the cause, nor with Vlora, nor with Albania.

Then this so-called debate continued, opening the so-called problem of exaggerating Jewish life in Vlora.

Why protest against the Jewish museum? It is clear from the circles that start and push it. They are the circles of political Islam backed by Turkey, which has a political battle with Israel.

But why should it be a battle for Albanians? Albania, by irony of fate — not thanks to this political class but to the communist one — is more avant-garde than all European countries toward Palestine and has no reason to feel any guilt.

Not only did it fill them with shells, Kalashnikovs and TNT, and teach Yasser Arafat’s soldiers how to wage guerrilla warfare, which he called the Intifada — Albania legally recognized Palestine in 1991.

Meanwhile France, Spain, Great Britain and others recognized it only very recently, and only as a political reaction.

Why should Albania become a wrestling mat for a battle that is not its own? The Palestinians themselves — the Palestinian embassy, which has been in Tirana for 38 years — have nothing to do with Albanian politics, apart from bitterness over relations with Israel. Naturally that is not its business and it hasn’t expressed it, but why should the battle against the Jews be waged in Vlora, at least publicly?

Is there only one reason? For the interest of a power waging a battle of its own — namely Turkey.

But Albania, even the people who sympathize with it, have no reason to implicate our country in a war that doesn’t belong to it.

All the more so when relations with the Jews have historically been perfect. We even have cultural figures who, though Jewish, are carved into the treasure of national personalities. Rober Shvarc, the famous philologist and translator who brought us in Albanian the cream of world classical literature amid the misery of the dictatorship, is one of the colossi of the Albanian language. A typical Fannol-ian, or at least one of his disciples. Just as later the Canadian-German Robert Elsie and other names — as we enter this discussion that seems philological but is in fact geopolitical — give reason to halt this ugly battle, which moreover reeks of Anatolian antisemitism.

To push this discussion further: when an American organization like the AADF is involved in this enterprise, and when in Vlora itself there is the dispute over Zvërnec and Sazan, where Americans hold an important part of the investment, the matter becomes serious.

Because the so-called debate isn’t about, say, the form or content of the investment — instead an actor like the Americans of the AADF and the Israelis, who in this case aren’t even actors, are being attacked.

Fine — Turkey, or other actors, may play this game since it’s their right, but why do local actors get involved as proxies? This question is the same as in the Flamingo case, which as it turned out is not our issue but an anti-Trump agenda.

And what about antisemitism? The meddling of Albanian political elements, namely those of Tirana, drags them into a game that ultimately needs explaining, not hiding behind false causes.