Two days after Israel announced a historic meeting with Libyan Foreign Minister Najla Mangoush, Tripoli has been thrown into chaos, while Mangoush has been suspended and left the country. Among all the reports about how this affair came about and whether it was fumbled, there has not been much concentration on the Libyan side and how the reactions in Tripoli may be cynical, and exploited by extremists.
This would not be the first time that extremists in Libya exploited a political vacuum to generate chaos. Under the guise of “protests” in 2012, extremists attacked a US diplomatic outpost and murdered US ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi.
So the lessons are important. Antisemitic and anti-Israel rhetoric has long been a staple of Libyan politics, making them much deeper and a stronger part of populist and extremist rhetoric in the country.
Libya is divided, and its divisions have divisions
One lesson is that countries that are divided, as Libya is, cannot fully conduct foreign policy like more cohesive countries can. Libya is run by two different competing political forces and armies. One of them is based in eastern Libya and run by Khalifa Haftar, and the other is the government in Tripoli, backed by the UN, which is generally seen as the legitimate “government” of Libya.
But even the government in Tripoli is divided. Libyan Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah has refused to hold elections and leave office, while his control over his government is questionable. There are also many other forces and factions at play in Libya, so much so that the political situation there is only really fully understood by people who are experts in the field. At the end of the day, for a country that is militarily and politically divided, any kind of controversial foreign policy will be politicized.
Politicization and extremist exploitation are two factors that underpin the situation in Libya. Extremists who use the guise of protests to threaten politicians are active in the country, which is why Mangoush reportedly fled.
Antisemitism: Underpinning much of Libyan politics
Another factor is how anti-Israel hatred remains such a strong catalyst of the activities of some, including politicians. For decades, the anti-Israel cause, usually clothed with “anti-Zionism,” was a method used in the Middle East, and also in other places, like the Soviet Union, Venezuela, and by Islamist extremist groups.
Being anti-Israel served the politicians in that it allowed them to hide their own failures. Many regimes in the Middle East would compete to be more anti-Israel than their neighbors. This was the case with Saddam Hussein lobbying Scud missiles at Israel in the Gulf War, trying to divide the international coalition by rallying Muslims to his cause. The Iranian regime has also adopted anti-Israel rhetoric as a way to justify its use of militias to harm Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Yemen. The Houthis in Yemen, for instance, adopted anti-Israel and anti-Jewish slogans.
While the Abraham Accords appeared to reverse some of these trends, they will take time to catch on and really infiltrate down to the social and popular levels. Israel’s peace with Egypt and Jordan didn’t generally lead to wider public acceptance of Israel in those countries; the fact that Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat was assassinated after making peace with Israel was used as a fear tactic against others in the region.
In the past, critics of peace deals with Israel often claimed that authoritarian regimes make peace with Israel in spite of local demands. This claim misses the other side of the coin, which is that authoritarian regimes – like in Iran, Syria, or Iraq – also were anti-Israel and exploited this rhetoric to distract the masses from their own failings.
This kind of rhetoric seeps into the minds of people. During the Arab Spring, for instance, some of the protesters in places like Libya or Egypt would accuse their political opponents of being “Jews.”
In Libya in 2011 one account published on the Australian website of AIJAC noted that “now that Gaddafi has fallen, many feel that they are finally able to talk freely about Gaddafi. And what many of them are now saying is that he was a Jew. In March, NBC‘s Richard Engel reported from Libya that one in five rebels was fighting Gaddafi because of the belief the Libyan dictator was Jewish.”
Consider this logic, that one in five people signed up to fight and die in a chaotic conflict because they were told someone was Jewish. Their hatred of Jews runs that deep. Often, the response to this kind of rhetoric is to note that the person in question is not Jewish, rather than ask why people run to fight just because they heard a Jewish person was present.
Overcoming this tendency of a knee-jerk hatred of Jews and Israel, based on decades of propaganda and cynical exploitation of these claims, will always be a hurdle for Israel and for Jews worldwide. In divided states like Libya, overcoming the issue becomes even harder, because politicians won’t commit to moderation if they are busy fighting each other.