These days there is a lot of talk about the arrival of Jews in Albania. It seems as if Jews have decided to abandon Israel and settle here. Of course, this is not true.
That people has been waiting for two thousand years and fighting for eighty years for a few more centimeters of land. For that desert where not even an apple can grow, it has killed the children of another people, has been killed itself, and today is in conflict with most of the world.
Today, Israelis should be the most hated people on the face of the earth. Every coup d’état, every stock market fluctuation, every bankruptcy, every crisis, every fraud and every war is linked to them. Israelis appear as a nest of witches that destroy other peoples and take their money. Behind every event people do not understand, a Jew is hiding. Even in Albania.
The claims that Israelis will come to take our country are like the uprooted stones of Tirana’s boulevard. They serve to break the windows of our own faith. Whenever a people loses faith in itself, it finds the blame in another people.
Every people lives better when an imaginary enemy supplies the reserves of recycling nationalism with fuel. This is called low-cost nationalism. Cheap cost. When it cannot serve as gasoline, imaginary nationalism serves as a lubricant. It moves the wheel of political rotation a little faster.
But to give some comfort to all those who truly believe that we are in the middle of a Jewish conspiracy, there once existed a plan to create Israel in Albania.
Before Israel was founded in 1948, hundreds of Jews began to think about where their state would be created. In which region of the world? On which continent? Near or far from Europe, which killed 6 million Jews in the Second World War.
Terrified by the exterminating Holocaust, some proposed that Israel be in Africa, some in Kenya, that is, better among lions than among Europeans and especially Germans, some others in Madagascar, on the island of slaves, some in Mongolia as a sandwich between 1 billion Chinese and 300 million Soviets, another in Alaska with the Eskimos who eat live eels, and some in Argentina, at the most extreme corner of the world, in Patagonia, facing the South Pole.
Of course, the map of this hysteria could not lack our own hysterical country. One of the Jews proposed that Israel be created in Albania.
This was an English journalist of Hebrew origin who came to Tirana in 1935. His name was Leo Elton and he was a bit naive. And since he was naive, his plan, which foresaw that 3 million Jews would coexist with 800 thousand Albanians, was not taken into consideration.
If it had happened, we today might be like the Palestinians, and Tirana would be like Jerusalem. Divided by walls, zones and neighborhoods.
I do not know in which part Kavaja Street, where I live today, would fall, but I fear that the Lake Hills would be in the Jewish part. Jews really love water.
But although journalist Leo Elton’s itinerant plan was not accepted, it had an effect in Albania. It toppled a government. The conspiracy worked. From rumors one government fell and another rose.
This whole story about the arrival of the Hebrew journalist in Tirana and his secret conversations I have recounted in my latest novel “The Mad Stories of Tirana”.
Unfortunately, this book was written from January until early June, that is, before the stones of the conspiracy “Jews will take our country” turned into boomerangs.
Anyone who wants to learn more can read “The Mad Stories of Tirana”. The chapter is called “The Jewish Plan to Make Tirana Jerusalem”.
It is on page 245.