TIRANA, Albania — The massive daily street protests rocking this Balkan capital began May 31 as a public outpouring of anger against a $4 billion coastal resort proposed by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — and quickly snowballed into demands for the resignation of longtime Prime Minister Edi Rama.
Somewhere along the way, not-so-subtle displays of antisemitism have emerged alongside the political and environmental grievances, unprecedented in a country that has long taken pride in having saved thousands of Jews during the Holocaust.
Posters have cropped up depicting Rama as a scowling Hasidic Jew, while others show maps of the country with slogans denouncing the creeping “Zionist takeover” of Albanian territory.
Organizers of the peaceful rallies insist they have nothing against Israel, Jews or Kushner’s father-in-law. They say their main target is Rama, 61, and increasingly, his archrival, 81-year-old Sali Berisha — leader of Albania’s main opposition party — who have together dominated Albanian politics ever since the fall of communism in 1990.
Yet trolls continue to blast fake news headlines and AI-generated videos via Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, such as one last week claiming that “Trump and Kushner are selling off the Albanian coastline to Jewish billionaires and the Israeli military.” Kushner, married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, is an observant Jew with strong ties to Israel.
Local observers blame Russia, Iran and Turkey for trying to sow unrest in the country, which is seeking membership in the European Union. Others call the antisemitism a false flag to discredit the protests.
Yet some of the antisemitic sentiment has jumped from social media to real life.
On Saturday night, a masked woman climbed over a wall separating the Israeli Embassy from one of Tirana’s main boulevards, removed the Israeli flag and ripped it apart as onlookers cheered. Both Rama and Berisha forcefully condemned the act, as did five of the protest’s key leaders and Galit Peleg, Israel’s top diplomat in Tirana.
Galit Peleg, Israel’s ambassador to Albania, says antisemitic elements have infiltrated the
current street protests in Tirana and do not at all reflect the sentiments of average Albanians. (Larry Luxner)
“As ambassador of a democratic state, I believe in the Albanian people’s right to exercise their civic right to protest,” Peleg said on X. “Yet an act of this nature disgraces the Albanian people and their proud heritage.”
She called on foreign embassies in Tirana to join Rama and Berisha in publicly condemning the incident “no matter what their government’s position is towards Israel.” But so far, not a single embassy has done so — and Peleg told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “I’m not holding my breath.”
Still, the ambassador, who has been posted to Albania for nearly four years, sought to put the incidents in perspective. “This is not a protest against Jews because proportionally, it’s really only a small group trying to provoke the crowd with antisemitic messaging,” she said.
The civic uprising actually began in Zvërnec, a village on Albania’s Adriatic coastline southwest of Tirana, after security guards dragged away a man protesting the appearance of a barbed-wire fence at the construction site of Kushner’s proposed luxury development. That area as well as the largely uninhabited island of Sazan are part of Kushner’s planned hotel and resort complex, which he’s financing along with several leading Arab investors from the Gulf.
Protestors say the development will damage fragile, protected coastal areas and allege that Rama’s government allowed backroom deals that bypass environmental regulations in favor of international investors. The flamingo — one of several endangered bird species whose natural habitat could be destroyed by development on such a massive scale — has quickly become the protest’s unofficial mascot.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is Jewish, praised Albania’s protesters on X for rising up against an “environmentally disastrous luxury resort planned by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his Qatari billionaire partners.”
A request for comment sent through the Sazan Real Estate Development LLC media portal received no response before publication.
Doriana Musai, 43, has been part of the protest since it began in Zvërnec. An architect and urban planner, she says the antisemitic provocations are part of what she calls a “witch hunt” launched by the Rama government to taint her fledgling movement.
“Our protest has only one objective: the resignation of the prime minister and his government, and a new republic with a constitution,” she said. “Even if Jared Kushner weren’t Jewish, the same thing would happen. Albanians don’t want to be treated as outsiders in their own country.”
Another anti-government activist, art curator Andi Tepelena, defended the protests — which last weekend reportedly attracted as many as 200,000 supporters, nearly a tenth of the country’s population — but said he has no idea who pulled down the Israeli Embassy’s flag.
“We cannot control all the crazy people. This is the responsibility of the state and its security services,” he said. “We’re focused only on Albania’s problems. This has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine or the USA. And this isn’t about Kushner. It could be anyone.”
Rama himself clearly doesn’t buy that. He told the Financial Times in an interview published Tuesday that he’s “not the Godfather of Albania” and that Iran is behind the unrest.
“People say that I am the leader of all this. I tell them f— you. That simple,” he said, adding that “if it were not Jared Kushner, nobody would give a s— about flamingos, about Albania, about nothing. It’s the whole hate against Trump that creates all this scrutiny.”
Much of that hate is also directed at Israel and Zionists. One video that quickly went viral purports to show Israeli soldiers beating locals opposed to the project.
The Israeli Embassy flag flutters next to Tirana’s House of Leaves, a museum dedicated to the evils of Albania’s half-century of Marxist rule. (Larry Luxner)
Others claim Israeli settlers will soon occupy vast tracts of land on the coast, and a digitally manipulated photo even depicts a sign marking the border between Albanian and Israeli territory. No such sign exists.
Dritan Goxhaj, who has emerged as an unofficial protest leader, referred to Peleg in a recent Facebook post as “the diplomatic representative of the genocidal state of Israel in Albania.”
Peleg, for her part, told JR that “in the margins of the protest are those trying to hijack it for their own purposes. It’s a minority, but there are useful idiots here who see these things on social media and then ask why Israelis are buying up territory.”
EU officials in Brussels have made clear that continued construction that violates its environmental standards will endanger Albania’s application to join the union. Even so, Rama won’t withdraw his support for the project; in one angry outburst soon after protesters began appearing in the streets of Tirana, he called them Nazis.
David Isaac, president of the Jewish Community of Albania, said he agrees that the demonstrations’ first and foremost aim is to stop what hundreds of thousands of Albanians view as an illegal project with little oversight.
But he said he had observed the antisemitic strains within the protests. “This has nothing to do with the Albanian Jewish community or with Israeli investors,” said Isaac. “We think Islamic fanatics who want to break Albania’s relationship with Israel are doing this so that everyone will think Albania doesn’t like Jews. This is all fake propaganda.”
Roughly half of Albania’s 2 million inhabitants are Muslim, yet most Albanians aren’t very religious — a legacy of half a century of Stalinist rule by dictator Enver Hoxha and his successor, Ramiz Alia, who turned Albania into one of the poorest, most isolated countries in Europe.
These days, between 50 and 200 Albanian Jews live in the country; it’s difficult to pinpoint a more accurate number. The country’s only Jewish house of worship is located just south of Tirana and is led by Yoel Kaplan, a Brooklyn-born Orthodox rabbi who was raised in Israel. He declined to speak with JR about the protests.
In addition to the local community, Isaac estimated that Albania is home to as many as 3,000 foreign Jews — mostly Israelis, Americans and Europeans who have relocated to the Maryland-sized country, lured by its extremely low cost of living, its spectacular natural beauty and its legacy of friendship and solidarity with the Jewish people.
The country’s singular role in hiding Jews from their Nazi occupiers is well documented. A new photographic exhibit at Tirana’s underground BunkArt 2 museum tells the story of the 75 Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox Christians who risked their lives to save Jewish refugees from deportation and certain death following Germany’s occupation of Albania in late 1943.
As if that’s not enough, Rama — who addressed the Israeli Knesset earlier this year — is overseeing the construction of two museums honoring Jewish history and Albania’s wartime rescue of Jews: one in Tirana, and the other in Vlora, not far from Kushner’s proposed resort.
In 2024, the country hosted its first-ever Holocaust education seminar for 25 high-school teachers in Elbasan. The Olga Lengyel Institute, which organized that event, plans a similar conference for late August in Tirana, in partnership with the Albanian History Teachers Association.
Last year, thanks to the March 2025 inauguration of El Al nonstop service between Tel Aviv and Tirana, nearly 60,000 Israelis visited Albania — a 570% increase from 2024 figures.
Isaac says he’s “100% sure” that Iran is behind the anti-Israel vitriol online, with funding also coming from Turkey, whose influence in the country dates from centuries of Ottoman rule. Iran especially has been known to use cyber information operations to try and destabilize its adversaries.
Arbana Xharra, a journalist from Kosovo and an expert on religious extremism, said it’s well known that antisemitic, anti-Western groups exploit these protests to advance their own agendas.
Plans to develop a resort in Albania’s Zvërnec coastal area, a protected wetland and lagoon complex, have generated the strongest environmental opposition because the area is home to flamingos and other protected species. (Pasztilla aka Attila Terbócs/Wikimedia Commons)
“This is not a new phenomenon. For years, such groups have operated not only in Albania but across Kosovo and other parts of the Balkans, attempting to inject ideological and geopolitical conflicts into local issues,” she told JR from New York. “The organizers of the protests have a responsibility to speak out clearly. They should condemn the targeting of the Israeli Embassy and reject antisemitism in all its forms.”
Yet prominent Italian Jewish journalist Maurizio Molinari, who currently teaches a class on hybrid warfare at Tel Aviv’s Reichman University, points the finger squarely at Russia.
“Whoever knows Albania knows very well that Albanians don’t hate the Jews,” he said. “But there’s another factor here: Edi Rama is very pro-West — probably the most pro-Western leader in the Balkans. So we have to ask ourselves where all these protests come from. They were unexpected, very aggressive, and very un-Albanian.”
Molinari worked for Italy’s La Stampa from 1997 to 2020, the last four years as the newspaper’s editor-in-chief. In that capacity, he traveled to Albania at least 10 times, reporting on everything from immigration and corruption to the country’s ongoing efforts to join the EU.
“The whole point is to generate turmoil,” said Molinari, who became editor-in-chief of La Repubblica in 2020 but quit in late 2024 after Italian public sentiment soured on Israel. “Since Russia cannot win technologically against the West, the only way to make the West implode is from within. We saw this trend in the UK during Brexit in 2016, then in Europe during COVID, in France against [president Emmanuel] Macron, and in Germany against [former chancellor Angela] Merkel.”
He added: “What’s going on in Albania right now is an example of how dangerous hybrid war is. After Oct. 7, the same pro-Russia bots and trolls against Ukraine became pro-Hamas against Israel. This is a worldwide strategy.”
But even if the antisemitism is being manufactured, it is finding a global audience.
“I love Albania for this,” Candace Owens, the far-right influencer and antisemitic conspiracy theorist, wrote on X this week. “This is how it began for the Palestinians — the Rothschilds and their agents buying up land.”
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