Libyan Twilight: The Story of an Arab Jew - The Jewish Chronicle

By Raphael N Luzon (Trans Gaia Luzon)
Darf Publishers, £8.99

'Itbach al Yahud! (Murder the Jews!)" screamed the Benghazi mob, as they approached the author's house during the Six-Day War. Other Libyans murdered his relatives in Tripoli. Traumatised, his family fled to Italy, Israel, and London, where he lives now. Yet he returned to Libya recently. Militants abducted him. The Italian Consul intervened to save his life.

Lucky Luzon. But why was he so naïve as to come back, without bodyguards, to such instability and antisemitism?

This short, nostalgic memoir is a highly personal view of the destruction of Libyan Jewry in 1967 and the permanent danger to all Jews from fanatical enemies.

Jews settled there over a thousand years before Islam, and numbered almost 40,000 before 1948. But Libya is now Judenrein, and will remain so as long as Jew and Arab fight over Israel.

Peoples who treat their Jewish minority badly usually treat other groups badly, too. This led to civil war in today's Libya. Numberless victims were murdered, many others tortured. Messrs Cameron and Sarkozy intervened to destroy Qaddafi but they had no realistic plans for the post-Qaddafi period. Why did they not learn from Blair's mistakes in Iraq? Why did they desert Qaddafi, after he, alone of all dictators, voluntarily gave up his nuclear weapons' programme under Western supervision? Luzon does not ask these questions. He limits himself to his own family's experiences. The style of the book is that of an innocent idealist, often surrounded by enemies, yet nobly dreaming of reconciliation between Muslim and Jew. It reads well, with personal flashbacks immersed in Jewish ritual and Arab political culture.

Qaddafi, though a killer of many of his own people, and supporter of the Palestinian cause, courted the Libyan Jewish diaspora, and tantalisingly offered the prospect of compensation. But only when he needed Western support. Luzon was involved in the discussion, and provides some insight.

He could have told us much about divisions among the colourful characters of Libyan Jewry in Rome, which sadly enabled Qaddafi to give them all nothing. Jews should hang together, if they don't want to be hung out to dry.