Libya’s Politics to be Open to Women and Jews?

Raphael Luzon was driven from him home in Benghazi, Libya, during an anti-Jewish pogrom in 1967. Today he’s the head of Jews of Libya, UK. And he tells the Jerusalem Post that Mustafa Abdul Jalil, chairman of the National Transitional Council of Libya, asked him to come home to Libya and run in elections. The rebel leader reportedly says he wants Libya’s politics to be open to women and Jews.

We’ll have to wait and see how this pans out, but it wouldn’t even happen as a cynical public relations stunt next door in Egypt.

This reminds me of something Lebanese political analyst and publisher of NOW Lebanon Eli Khoury said to me years ago: “When political theories fail in the Middle East they fail hard. People who believed in them have a tendency to support a total opposite point of view later.”

Let’s hope it’s true. If Qaddafi’s cruel decades in power have managed to discredit one-man rule, socialism (in the Russian rather than Scandanavian style), anti-Westernism, and anti-Zionism, Libya just might be okay.