Ariel Bulshtein
Israel Hayom, Apr. 4, 2025
“It didn’t end with projecting the PLO flag on the government building in Sarajevo. With us in Banja Luka, and throughout Republika Srpska, such a thing could not happen. Support for Israel is absolute.”
When Milorad Dodik, the president of Republika Srpska, left the home of the Bachar family in Kibbutz Be’eri, he said one sentence, “I will never forget these words.” Previously, for long minutes, they sat facing each other in the living room that remained as it was on the morning of October 7, 2023 – the farmer Avida Bachar and the visiting president. Bachar spoke, and Dodik listened, as one listens to a brother.
Those words he will never forget described how the four members of the Bachar family locked themselves in the safe room when terrorists broke into the kibbutz, how Avida struggled to prevent them from opening the door, how the human savages surrounding the room began shooting and throwing grenades into the safe room, and how the stunned and wounded father saw his wife and son dead before his eyes, and his daughter wounded.
Outside the house, after embracing Bachar, the president was asked if he wanted to provide a statement to the media, and he replied with simplicity and honesty so rare in politicians, “I cannot. How can one speak after what I just heard?” After a few moments, he gestured toward Gaza and remarked, “No coexistence is possible with them, with those who came to murder innocent people and with those who support murderers.”
The president of Republika Srpska did not need his current visit to Israel to learn who stands against whom in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is well-versed in the facts and details, and especially brave and determined to recognize the cause that has fueled the conflict for about 150 years – the hatred and desire to destroy Israel.
Dodik has supported Israel for many years, but the October 7 massacre greatly sharpened his position and established him as one of the clearest voices for the Jewish state. Immediately after the massacre, he ordered the presidential building in Banja Luka, the capital of the Republic, to be illuminated in blue and white. “Just think about it – on that very day, the Serbian entity’s presidential building in Bosnia displayed the Israeli flag, while the government building in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia’s Muslim entity and the capital of the entire country, displayed the terrorists’ flag – the Palestinian flag,” Dodik (66) notes in an exclusive conversation with Israel Hayom, revealing some of the complexity that has surrounded his country since its establishment…..SOURCE