Libyan welcomes Jews

PAUL LUNGEN CANADIAN JEWISH NEWS

The leader of the Democratic Party of Libya is inviting Jewish Libyans to return to their “homeland” and is calling Israel a role model for a future democratic state in Libya.

Ahmed Shebani said the Jewish people’s 2,200-year connection to Libya “is written in the stones, and the stones don’t lie.

“Although Jews were expelled cruelly [after the 1967 Six Day War] and allowed to take only one suitcase, we call on Libyan Jews to forgive Libya. Libya is your mother, and you must forgive Libya for what happened.”

Shebani, a businessman and Libyan expatriate living in England, said Jews “will have the right to return to their homeland and make application for compensation for lost property and for suffering.”

Shebani made the offer in a telephone interview with the Canadian Jewish News, arranged by Walter Arbib, a Libyan Jew who left Libya in 1967. Arbib and his family were forced to flee after mobs rioted when early reports claimed Egyptian forces were in Tel Aviv.

“They thought they could get rid of the Jews all over the Arab world,” he said.

Despite his flight from Tripoli and the forced abandonment of several valuable properties, Arbib, a successful Toronto businessman and philanthropist, maintains an interest in Libyan affairs.

“He has been generous to the people [of Libya] in this revolution.... He has given a lot of help, including logistics and medicine,” Shebani said.

Arbib said he knew Shebani’s father, a former minister in the government of King Idris, which preceded the 42-year regime of Muammar al-Qaddafi. He met Shebani in Dubai a few years ago “and we’ve kept in touch ever since. He felt Jews were an integral part of the country.”

“He’s a democrat,” Arbib added.

Shebani was widely quoted recently playing an unlikely diplomatic card, reaching out to Israel for assistance.

“We are asking Israel to use its influence in the international community to end the tyrannical regime of Qaddafi and his family,” he told Haaretz. “Libya needs any help it can get from the international community, including from Israel.

His message toward Israel was certainly conciliatory: “The Democratic Party of Libya wishes to establish a functioning democracy similar to Israel’s. We feel the only democratic state in the region is Israel,” he told the CJN.

Shebani, who calls himself “a cyber rebel,” asserted that only a democratic Libya could normalize relations with Israel. To aid in the transition to democracy and to assist in “nation-building,” Shebani called for United Nations intervention. The blueprint for such a role is the Adrian Pelt UN Commission, which was established by the General Assembly in 1949 to help prepare Libya for independence.

UN involvement would lead to a democratic Libya, return of civil society – which Qaddafi destroyed – and a healthy economy, contends Shebani. It would be followed by a “truth and reconciliation commission” modeled on South Africa, with the goal of heading off a civil war, and Shebani called on the Canadian government to use its influence at the UN to pursue those goals.

Shebani said Libya’s Interim National Council shouldn’t be relied upon to usher in a democratic environment. Although supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which flew some 2,000 sorties against Qaddafi forces, the council is rife with Islamic fundamentalists, he asserted.

John Thompson, executive director of the Mackenzie Institute, a think-tank that focuses on terrorism and security issues, agreed that the Libyan opposition is saturated with Islamic radicals. Among them are veterans of the Afghanistan war of the 1980s, who were influenced by Wahhabi extremism and who have returned to Libya to fight Qaddafi.

In addition, the opposition is splintered along tribal lines, while a “frustrated middle class” remains powerless. As in other revolutions, “it is the committed, ideological cadres with the agenda for power” who usually come out on top, Thompson said.

As for Shebani, Thompson pointed out that he has lived outside Libya for many years. “He’s in contact with very few addresses in the Libyan street,” although he might have access to information outsiders would not necessarily share, Thompson said.

For more national Jewish news, visit cjnews.com.

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