The Jews of Libya

I found an interesting page on the history of the Jews of Libya, pages maintained by the UofC in Berkley on the history of Libya.

Jews had a history of over 2000 years in that North African country, not unlike the old communities of Iraq, Tunisia, Yemen, or Egypt. Like everywhere else, the 20th century was fatal to these communities. When the Germans occupied Benghazi, they deported more than 2000 Jews from there into the desert, a fifth of whom perished there. The effects of German propaganda and ideology persisted after the war (as it does to this day!), there were several deadly pogroms in the following years. And so, after Israel was born, most of Lybia's remaining Jews, over 30,000 of them, fled there. During the next couple of decades anti Jewish sentiments kept growing as a result of the Arab-Israeli wars and the growing Pan-Arabist ideology. In 1969 Qaddafi confiscated the property of all the remaining Jews and ordered them to leave.

The ethnic cleansing was successful, there are no Jews left in Libya today, just as there are hardly any Jews left in any of the other Arab countries. The plight of these Jewish refugees is ignored by the rest of the world in spite of the fact that they were fleeing from systematic, open persecution. Today more than half of Israel's population consists of the descendants of these Middle Eastern refugees. Yet we, the rest of the world, still choose to be blind to it, many of us feverishly supporting Gaza, shouting "apartheid" even though there is no Jewish presence there either any more, ignoring the rocket attacks that were and are the cause of the blockade on Gaza in the first place, ignoring the fate of Gilad Shalit.

Ignoring the fact that Arab children today everywhere are taught that there was never a country called Israel in the past, denying the fact that there was Jewish presence throughout the centuries in Byzantine/Arab/Turkish/British Palestine, raising an ignorant generation of Arabs who are indignantly claiming the illegitimacy of the country of the Jews. Such is the power of misinformation. I just hope that at least some of them (us?) will be able to calm ourselves just enough so we can look around with a clear mind, research the history books without prejudice, and rise above all the BS and hatred.