A new light in Libya?

Editorial

The people of Libya voted last weekend in their first free election in decades. Unlike next-door Egypt, which elected the Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate last month, Libya, according to early reports, has turned to Mahmoud Jibril, a Western-educated leader perceived as a liberal, or moderate, by regional standards.

The results are a little more – or less – complicated than this. Voters apparently were motivated as much by tribal loyalties as by ideology. And, after four decades of repression under Muammar Qaddafi, the parameters of ideology are fresh and perhaps unclear. Nevertheless, Libyans defeated the Muslim Brotherhood, bucking a trend that has seen neighbors not only in Egypt but also in Tunisia and Morocco turn to Islamist parties.

This month is also a significant one in Libyan history, from a Jewish perspective, at least. It was 45 years ago that, in the aftermath of the Six Day War, the 2,000-year-old Jewish community of Libya was effectively chased from the country, running for their lives from murderous mobs. This was part of the second major wave of pogroms across the Muslim Middle East and North Africa in a generation, the first being in response to the creation of the state of Israel and the War of Independence in 1948-49. In both instances, synagogues and Jewish homes were destroyed, property confiscated and Jewish citizens murdered – more than 150 in 1948 and 18 in 1967. (This followed a catastrophic period under Italian fascist rule during the Second World War.) In 1948, there were about 50,000 Jews in Libya. At the beginning of 1967, there were 7,000. At the end of that year, there were none.

Across the region, as in Libya, Jewish communities that had existed across the region for millennia – since long before the advent of Islam – were wiped out in days. In Libya, particular effort was given to eradicating the significant and constructive history of Jews in that country.

Small groups like JIMENA – Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa – keep these memories alive but, from a realpolitik perspective, these stories have been erased. The Jews who were made refugees in that period – in numbers equaling or exceeding those Arabs made stateless in the same conflagrations – are effectively forgotten. They were absorbed, mostly by Israel, but also by other countries including Italy, Canada and the United States. They restarted their lives, mostly from nothing. They were not exploited for political expediency by their kin like those who decades later would become known as Palestinians and be used as geopolitical pawns, a dispossessed mass tragically stripped of their human potential in the interest of a (hugely successful) public relations campaign against Israel.

Of course, groups like JIMENA do not seek the kind of political impact demanded by self-appointed representatives of Palestinian refugees (and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who, in a definition completely unique in global affairs, are included under the same umbrella as the actual refugees). Suffice to say it would be the rare Jew who seeks any “right of return” to homelands across North Africa or throughout the Middle East.

While the fledgling state of Israel has emerged into a world-leading economy and a force in areas of academics, medicine, humanitarianism and almost every area of human endeavor, put-upon peoples elsewhere across the region have seen their potential stifled and their freedoms snuffed. The economies of places like Libya emerged with the discovery of oil (and its power as a geopolitical weapon) but, like Saudi Arabia and most other oil states, all that revenue has been squandered. The economies of the region have diversified beyond oil negligibly and, when the oil runs out – or an environmentally and economically feasible replacement is found – these countries will return to the dusty abyss. Israel, on the other, blessed with effectively no natural resources, has created a diversified economy based on human creativity. It would be a rare Jewish adventurer indeed who, seeing a light of hope in the election results in Libya, opted to return to the country of their origin.

But there is, perhaps, a different light that this election has shone. It was always the dream that Israel would be a force for economic, academic and cultural good in the region. First expressed by Theodor Herzl and reiterated by the chalutzim and even addressed in the preamble to Israel’s Declaration of Independence, the idea of the Jewish state as a source for regional growth and enrichment was, of course, rejected outright by its neighbors, in one of history’s greatest examples of prejudice defeating self-interest. Is it conceivable that, after 60 years of rejectionism, people like those in Libya who elected a perceived moderate, might realize that the route to a successful future lies in cooperation with the regional leader in agriculture, medicine, science and human rights?

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