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Monday, August 28, 2023

Libya, The North African Country Wanting Nothing To Do With Israel

 Nadene Goldfoot                                         

       Foreign Minister of Israel   Eli Cohen and  Foreign Minister Najla Mangoush of Libya

Libya's internationally recognized government dismissed Foreign Minister Najla Mangoush on Sunday after a meeting she held with her Israeli counterpart sparked an uproar in the country. Israel's foreign ministry announced on Sunday night that the meeting had taken place in Rome last week. Libya denied it all, saying it was just an accidental meeting, and now Najla has fled for her life to Turkey. She's been fired.  

Evidently Libya hasn't heard of the Abraham Accords.  If they have, they'll have no part of it, and who would want them?  Libya has a terrible reputation with the terrible President Gadafi, especially with Entebbe .  

Libya has fallen into chaos since a NATO-backed uprising overthrew former ruler Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. The country has been split into two rival governments, one in Tripoli and one in Benghazi, since 2014.The parliament backing the eastern-based government denounced Mangoush’s meeting with Cohen and called for a “harsh punishment.” Mangoush was Libya’s first female foreign minister-possibly the last, now.  Libya has no diplomatic relations with Israel. 

In ancient history, Jews lived in the land that is Libya when it was called Cyrenaica and TripolitaniaThe Berbers were the earliest recorded inhabitants of Cyrenaica. Remnants of the Berber languages spoken by their ancestors are still found in the Awjila language of the oasis of Awjila. The ancient Berbers founded a number of cities and settlements, both on the coast and in the inland oases. The native Berbers, who had inhabited the area locally for centuries before the arrival of the Arabs, established their own native Hafsid dynasty over Ifriqiya in the 13th century, and would control the region until it was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, who established Ottoman Tripolitania as a distinct province. Tripolitania became an Italian colony in 1911.

The history of the Jews in Libya stretches back to the 3rd century BCE, when Cyrenaica was under Greek rule. The Jewish population of Libya, a part of the Sephardi-Maghrebi Jewish community continued to populate the area continuously until the modern times. During World War II, Libya's Jewish population was subjected to antisemitic laws by the Fascist Italian regime and deportations by Nazi German troops.

 After 1948 when Israel was re-born, over 30,000 Jews left Libya for Israel.  At the time of the Six-Day War in 1967, there were demonstrations against the country's 6,000 remaining Jews who all left shortly thereafter. 

Muammar Gaddafi ((c. 7 June 1942 – 20 October 2011) was president and prime minister of Libya.  


In Uganda 47 years ago,  is the airport that was the scene of Operation Entebbe, a hostage rescue on 4 July 1976, when soldiers from the Sayeret MatkalParatroopers Brigade and Golani Brigade units of the Israeli Army freed over 100 hostages following a hijacking by a group of Palestinian and German militia.   Entebbe was an operation to rescue hostages held at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. 102 of the 106 hostages were rescued, but Yonatan Netanyahu, the leader, was killed in action—the only IDF fatality during the operation. He was Benjamin Netanyahu's older brother.  He was the only Israeli soldier killed during the raid (along with three hostages, all of the Revolutionary Cells members, all of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine members, and dozens of Ugandan soldiers). The commonly accepted version of his death is that Netanyahu fired on Ugandan soldiers, and was shot in response by a Ugandan soldier from the airport's control tower. The family refused to accept this verdict, and insisted instead that he was killed by the German commanding the hijackers. Netanyahu was shot outside the building being stormed, and would soon die in the arms of Efraim Sneh, commander of the mission's medical unit. The operation itself was a success, and was renamed as Mivtsa Yonatan ("Operation Jonathan" in English) in his honor.

Israel’s operation was the end of a saga that had started on June 27 with the hijacking of an Air France Airbus A300 en route from Tel Aviv to Paris. Palestinian and German terrorists, exploiting the then-laxer Greek security procedures, boarded the plane during its Athens stopover, and took control of the aircraft shortly thereafter.

The hijackers first diverted the plane to Benghazi, Libya where they were welcomed by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. From there, the terrorists took the aircraft to Entebbe, where Ugandan strongman Idi Amin likewise offered the hijackers succor, and as was pre-planned, additional terrorists joined the original hijackers.


Entebbe resulted in the 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya and United Nations–imposed economic sanctions. From 1999, Gaddafi shunned pan-Arabism, and encouraged pan-Africanism and rapprochement with Western nations; he was Chairperson of the African Union from 2009 to 2010. Amid the 2011 Arab Spring, protests against widespread corruption and unemployment broke out in eastern Libya. The situation descended into civil war, in which NATO intervened militarily on the side of the anti-Gaddafist National Transitional Council (NTC). Gaddafi's government was overthrown; he retreated to Sirte only to be captured and killed by NTC militants.

Then again, 11 years ago, the 2012 Benghazi attack was a coordinated attack against two United States government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, by members of the Islamic militant group Ansar al-ShariaOn September 11, 2012, at 9:40 pm local time, members of Ansar al-Sharia attacked the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi resulting in the deaths of both United States Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith.

File: Libyan Prime Minister Abdul Hamid al-Dbeibeh in Rome, Monday, May 31, 2021 (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia, Pool, File) an interim position but elections have been postponed-evidently indefinitely.  He is the cousin and brother in law of Ali Ibrahim Dabaiba, previously the mayor of Misrata and head of state-owned development contractor LIDCO during the Gaddafi era, who was in 2012 on a list of sanctioned officials, subject of an Interpol red notice and arrested in 2014. He is estimated to have embezzled as much as $7 billion at 2011 rates from contracts LIDCO had issued under his leadership, per Suisse secrets.

Do the Abraham Accords need Libya?  They are about the 29th largest Arab population with 6,173,579 in 2011, at that time 97% Sunni Muslims Islam is a state religion with a military power then of 76,000.  

Resource:

https://www.standwithus.tv/videos/jewish-refugees-in-the-middle-east/the-jews-of-libya/

JBS News on YouTube

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/28/middleeast/israel-libya-minister-dismissed-intl/index.html#:~:text=Libya's%20internationally%20recognized%20government%20dismissed,place%20in%20Rome%20last%20week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_Gaddafihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Benghazi_attack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Hamid_Dbeibeh

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Benghazi_attack

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-711503

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entebbe

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