The leader of a Jewish Libyan Diaspora group warned on Monday that the death
toll in the North African country may be much higher than reported.
“I’m
in touch with people in Benghazi especially, and the situation is worse than
appears in the press and on TV,” Raphael Luzon, the chairman of the Jewish
Libyan Diaspora in the UK, told
The Jerusalem Post. “This is a big massacre and
it’s even affected people who stayed home, who are now being hurt by use of
heavy weapons.”
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'appalling'Luzon, who was born in Libya and fled with his family in
1967 after a pogrom, said a source at Benghazi’s hospital counted about 160 dead
bodies over the past 24 hours. He said those were in addition to the 223
fatalities reported by Human Rights Watch between Friday, when riots broke out,
and Sunday.
“I feel we are going toward a civil war with a lot of
bloodshed,” Luzon said.
Members of the Jewish Libyan Diaspora around the
world have been following news of the anti-government protests in Libya with
rapt attention and mixed emotions.
During the 1930s, about 25,000 Jews
lived in Libya, but their numbers dwindled dramatically due to persecution by
Italy and Germany during World War II and a series of state-sponsored pogroms
after Libya became independent in 1951. The last Jew immigrated to Italy several
years ago.
Luzon, who has met with Libya’s flamboyant dictator Muammar
Gaddafi twice, most recently in September, said the uprising came at a time when
the Libyan government seemed willing to address some of the Jewish community’s
grievances.
“They agreed to give a proper burial to my family members who
are buried in common graves,” Luzon said. “Also, we came closer in the direction
of a settlement over a lot of money that my father left there. I proposed to
organize a convention between Jews and Muslims in Tripoli, and this was
personally accepted by Gaddafi. They wanted to prove they were open toward the
Jews, but now who knows what will happen?” In Israel, where there are an
estimated 100,000 Jews of Libyan descent, news of the uprising caught many off
guard.
“I’m not an analyst, but I must say I am surprised,” said Pedazur
Bennatia, who is the head of Or Shalom, a Jewish Libyan cultural center in Bat
Yam. “I thought he’d hold on to power longer. He might still emerge from the
chaos. He’s ruthless enough to reverse the situation.”
Or Shalom was in
the headlines last year when an Israeli- Belgian photographer it sent to
document the crumbling synagogues and cemeteries in Libya was arrested and held
in prison for several months, until the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem secured
his release via mediators.
Bennatia said he wasn’t necessarily encouraged
by the prospects that Gaddafi’s long reign may be coming to an
end.
“Political Islam, which is even more extreme, will enter the vacuum
created,” Bennatia predicted. “So as far as we’re concerned, I don’t see how we
can go back and visit there soon. Currently, the Jewish community in Rome has
ties to Gaddafi. Some say they even received reparations and a few community
leaders visited Libya.”
Retired Israeli journalist Chaim Arbiv was born
in Benghazi in 1934 and lived there until 1949, when he made aliya. He said
anti-government protests in that city may have been fueled by its long-standing
rivalry with Tripoli, the capital.
“Even in Israel there’s a basic enmity
between Jews who lived in Tripoli and Benghazi,” he said. “Benghazi was the
capital of Libya until Gaddafi came to power [in 1969]. These are two separate
centers of power, and Cyrenaica sees itself as being of a higher class. The
outcome depends on the balance of power.”
Arbiv has fond childhood
memories of Benghazi and said his efforts to visit his city of birth had failed
in the past.
“I’d love to visit Benghazi, see the street where I lived
and the neighbors we had and were on good terms with; see the Hebrew school I
attended,” he said. “I’d love to visit, but I’m not sure that a change in
Gaddafi’s regime is a good thing.”