Category Archives: Issues

On the world stage, Obama the idealist has taken fright

Simon Tisdall writes:

Candidates run on hope. Incumbents run on their record. But Barack Obama, lining up for a second term at the White House next year, has little to offer on either score. The heady optimism of 2008 has dissipated. At home, Obama is primarily associated with hard times: only 34% of voters approve of his handling of the economy, according to a recent poll. Abroad, his presidency has come to stand for impotence and incompetence. He promised new beginnings; what he has delivered, for the most part, is waffle, dither and drift.

If this verdict seems harsh, take a quick tour round the globe. Everywhere the pillars of American superpower are crumbling. The old habit of hegemony, formed in the postwar decades and confirmed in 1989 as Soviet power imploded, is fading as fast as a Honolulu sunset.

Part of the explanation is faltering industrial and financial clout, reflecting the rapid rise of rivals like China and India. But that is compounded by another central element: Obama’s persistent failure to stand up, in practical, substantive ways, for the values, beliefs and interests he so eloquently espouses.

Obama’s early, anguished indecision over keeping his promise to close Guantánamo Bay now looks like a grim portent. So, too, does his administration’s failure to support the Iranian students whose “green revolution” was so cruelly suppressed in Tehran in 2009. When the Arab spring took hold this year, the man who in Cairo had preached the pre-eminence of the democratic ideal took fright. Tunisia did not matter much. But when he faced accusations of becoming the president who “lost” Egypt, Obama’s dither default setting was triggered anew.

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Syria accused of torturing relatives of overseas activists — Amnesty report

Syrians in the UK are being threatened by Syrian embassy officials in the UK, apparently as part of a systematic effort by the Syrian regime to intimidate those who protest against the government in various countries, said Amnesty International today.

In a new report, The Long Reach of the Mukhabaraat (PDF), Amnesty cites more than 30 cases where activists in eight countries – Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the USA – have said they’ve faced intimidation from embassy officials and others, and that in some cases their relatives in Syria have been exposed to harassment, detention and even torture.

Syrian embassy staff have reportedly filmed and photographed protests outside the embassy, phoned protesters and visited them at their homes in the UK, made threats against them (including that they would face the death penalty on return to Syria and that their families in Syria would be harmed), and have encouraged them to spread pro-regime propaganda and join pro-regime rallies. Several have said that security forces have visited and questioned family members in Syria, in at least one case briefly detaining one of them and in another vandalising the family home.

After protesting outside the Syrian embassy in London one Syrian was phoned and told: “You are with the Israelis and the Muslim Brotherhood and so will get the death penalty too.” Soon after his brother in Dera’a was taken away from his home by men believed to be from Military Intelligence (part of the mukhabaraat, or network of Syrian intelligence services). He was released after four hours but has since gone into hiding.

Amnesty International Syria researcher Neil Sammonds said:

“Expatriate Syrians have been trying, through peaceful protest, to highlight abuses that we consider amount to crimes against humanity – and that presents a threat to the Syrian regime.

“In response the regime appears to have waged a systematic – sometimes violent – campaign to intimidate Syrians overseas into silence.”

“This is yet more evidence that the Syrian government will not tolerate legitimate dissent and is prepared to go to great lengths to muzzle those who challenge it publicly.”

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Saudi police open fire on protesters

Iran’s Press TV reports:

Anti-regime demonstrations in eastern Saudi Arabia have turned violent following brutal measures taken against protesters by security forces of the US-backed kingdom.

Clashes broke out in Qatif and Awamiyah in the Eastern Province after security forces opened fire to disperse hundreds of protesters chanting slogans against Riyadh policies.

Several protesters, including women, were injured during the clashes.

The demonstrators called for an end to the crackdown on dissidents and demanded the release of political prisoners.

They also condemned Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in the neighboring Bahrain to assist the US-backed Manama regime with the suppression of popular anti-government protests in the tiny Persian Gulf Sheikhdom.

This comes after hundreds of Saudis took to the streets in Qatif on Sunday to protest against the detention of two senior citizens. Saudi security forces took the two men hostage in a bid to force their sons, who are wanted by Saudi authorities for participating in anti-government protests, to surrender themselves to authorities.

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Former Mossad chief: Iran far from achieving nuclear bomb

Haaretz reports:

Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan said Monday that a military strike on Iran was “far from being Israel’s preferred option,” telling the Council for Peace and Security that “there are currently tools and methods that are much more effective.”

Dagan also said Iran’s nuclear program was still far from the point of no return, and that Iran’s situation is “the most problematic it has been in since the revolution” in 1979.

But Israel’s strategic situation is also “the worst in its history,” he warned, adding that Israel itself has contributed a lot to this deterioration. As an example, he cited Deputy

Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon’s decision to humiliate the Turkish ambassador last year by demonstratively seating him on a low chair.

Dagan made his remarks on the same day that visiting U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta passed on a clear message from his boss in Washington: The United States opposes any Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

At a joint press conference with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Panetta stressed that any steps against Iran’s nuclear program must be taken in coordination with the international community.

The United States, he said, is “very concerned, and we will work together to do whatever is necessary” to keep Iran from posing “a threat to this region.” But doing so “depends on the countries working together,” he added.

He repeated the word “together” several times in this context.

Panetta cited Iran’s nuclear program as number one on the list of issues he had discussed with Barak. He voiced concern not only about the nuclear program, but also about Iran’s support for terror, its efforts to undermine regional stability and the fact that it had supplied weapons that were used to kill American soldiers.

At the press conference, which took place at Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv, Panetta also stressed America’s deep commitment to Israel’s security.

His message for Barak, at their second meeting in two weeks, appeared to be simultaneously embrace and restrain: America is standing by Israel, but an uncoordinated Israeli strike on Iran could spark a regional war. The United States will work to defend Israel, but Israel must behave responsibly.

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Syrian import ban threatens trade with Turkey

CNN reports:

Turkish companies are reeling from a recent Syrian government decision to ban the import of products that have a customs tax of more than 5%. Meanwhile, the Turkish government is considering whether or not to slap punitive policies, such as possible economic sanctions, against its eastern neighbor and former close political ally.

The Syrian government announced on September 22 that it would suspend imports of high-tariff goods.

Last week, Syria’s minister of economy and trade described the partial import ban as “temporary and precautionary.” According to the Syrian state news agency SANA, Mohammad Nidal al-Shaar said the ban was aimed at preserving dwindling foreign currency reserves.

According to a list published by the Turkish Ministry of Economy, the products Syria has banned include mobile phones, contact lens fluid, and vehicles ranging from passenger buses and vans to ambulances and trucks used for construction.

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Tony Blair’s nexus of Middle East conflicts of interest

“It’s easy enough to see what Tony Blair has got out of the Middle East peace process: introductions to Arab rulers; a nice address in Jerusalem; a continued presence on the world stage. What’s more difficult to see is what the Middle East peace process has got out of Tony Blair.”

The Associated Press reports:

Since stepping down as Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair has built up a formidable work portfolio: He’s an international peacemaker, a consultant for investment bank JP Morgan, a pricey public speaker and a philanthropist.

He’s so many things to so many people that it’s starting to cause him trouble — with human rights groups, the Palestinian Authority, and even current British Prime Minister David Cameron, who described Blair’s deals with Moammar Gadhafi’s regime as “dodgy deals in the desert.”

Rights workers who have tried to track his activities find it’s sometimes unclear which job he is doing — or who is paying him to do it. Crucially, when he’s in the Arab world as the Middle East Quartet’s peace envoy some of the very parties he’s meant to be negotiating with aren’t sure whose interests he’s representing.

“The problem is a lack of transparency over how Tony Blair has organized his business affairs,” said Robert Palmer, a campaigner at pressure group Global Witness. “If former leaders are appearing on a public stage, it’s important that they do all they can to make sure they are seen to be open and clear over what they are doing.”

Blair’s effectiveness and impartiality in the Middle East are under attack from the Palestinian Authority, which accuses him of acting “like an Israeli diplomat” after he refused to support their decision to sidestep negotiations and to ask the Security Council for admission to the United Nations as a state. At the same time, the collapse of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime in Libya has led to the discovery of documents that show that Blair maintained ties to the Libyan leader even after he left office.

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Secret memo on Obama’s right to kill Americans

David Shipler writes:

The Obama administration should release the secret Justice Department memo justifying the placement of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, on the CIA’s kill list. The legal questions are far from clearcut, and the country needs to have this difficult discussion. A good many Obama supporters thought that secret legal opinions by the Justice Department—rationalizing torture and domestic military arrests, for example—had gone out the door along with the Bush administration.

But now comes a momentous change in policy with serious implications for the Constitution’s restraint on executive power, and Obama refuses to allow his lawyers’ arguments to be laid out on the table for the American public to examine. Shakespeare’s line in Hamlet on the “insolence of office” comes to mind.

The questions are legion. If U.S. government officials are being accurate and truthful in both their attributed and anonymous statements, Awlaki was placed on the list only in April 2010, after he had “gone operational” and had crossed the line between speech and action. Did the lawyers think that the First Amendment protected even his fiery rhetoric, easily available to potential jihadists by Internet, which had inflamed a few wannabe terrorists? Did they require that he actually take a hand in some planning before he could be considered worthy of the drone strike that killed him in Yemen? Hours after his death, President Obama awarded him a posthumous promotion, calling him for the first time “the leader of external operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”

What is the basis for this grand title? There is no doubt about his words—anybody can still hear and read them—but the picture of his actions is sketchy, derived from unverified intelligence. Given how wrong the CIA was about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is it really sufficient to base a death warrant on intelligence operatives’ untested assertions? How can their accuracy be checked? Does the Fifth Amendment’s right to due process extend to Americans overseas? Due process, after all, was the Framers’ effort to enhance the accuracy of the criminal justice system. Is there another way that an independent review can be done before a missile is sent in the direction of some named person who is not on a battlefield? Isn’t it strange that under Obama’s reasoning, the president can’t order torture but can order death, that he needs a judge’s authorization to listen to an American’s phone overseas but needs no such judicial approval to end the citizen’s life?

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Jailed Egyptian blogger on hunger strike nears death

The Daily News Egypt reports:

Maikel Nabil, a blogger and activist imprisoned by a military court since late March, has entered day 41 of his open-ended hunger strike.

“Death is better than living in an oppressive country,” Maikel told his brother Mark the last time he saw him on his 26th birthday on Saturday.

Fearing that Maikel might die as his health deteriorates, Mark told Daily News Egypt his older brother might not live to make it to his court appeal on Tuesday, Oct. 4.

After being sentenced to three years in prison for “insulting” the army and “spreading lies” about Egypt’s armed forces, Maikel has refused food and is only drinking water.

Mark said Maikel went from weighing 60 kilograms to 47 since he went on hunger strike.

Currently approaching kidney failure, Maikel is having trouble speaking and walking. He has also vowed to stop drinking water if his upcoming court appeal does not go in his favor.

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Key Syrian city spirals toward civil war

The New York Times reports:

The semblance of a civil war has erupted in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, where armed protesters now call themselves revolutionaries, gun battles erupt as often as every few hours, security forces and opponents carry out assassinations, and rifles costing as much as $2,000 apiece flood the city from abroad, residents say.

Since the start of the uprising in March, Homs has stood as one of Syria’s most contested cities, its youth among the best organized and most tenacious. But across the political spectrum, residents speak of a decisive shift in past weeks, as a largely peaceful uprising gives way to a grinding struggle that has made Homs violent, fearful and determined.

Analysts caution that the strife in Homs is still specific to the city itself, and many in the opposition reject violence because they fear it will serve as a pretext for the government’s brutal crackdown.

But in the targeted killings, the rival security checkpoints and the hardening of sectarian sentiments, the city offers a dark vision that could foretell the future of Syria’s uprising as both the government and the opposition ready themselves for a protracted struggle over the endurance of a four-decade dictatorship.

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Arab world indifferent about death of unknown American cleric

But the headline says: “As the West Celebrates a Cleric’s Death, the Mideast Shrugs.”

The New York Times, forever the trumpet of institutional power, apparently sees no need to draw a distinction between the White House and the West — even though most people in the West, like those in the Middle East, wouldn’t, until a few days ago, have been able name Anwar al-Awlaki, identify his photo or say anything about him.

The report itself is more clear-eyed:

Until about two years ago, few in Yemen or the Arab world had heard of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist for Islamic radicalism whose death President Obama celebrated as a major blow against Al Qaeda.

“A dime-a-dozen cleric” was one response, by Gregory Johnsen, a Princeton professor who studies Yemen. Another: “I don’t think your average Middle Easterner knows who Anwar al-Awlaki is,” said Emad Shahin, a scholar of political Islam at Notre Dame University.

While Western officials and commentators saw the end of Mr. Awlaki as another serious loss for Al Qaeda, a very different reception in the Middle East was the latest reminder of the disconnect between American aims and Arab perceptions. In a region transfixed by the drama of its revolts, Mr. Awlaki’s voice has had almost no resonance.

“I don’t think this will really get people’s interest, I can’t imagine why it would,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center. “It seems totally irrelevant to how Arabs view the world right now. They don’t care about Awlaki.”

It is a remarkable feature in the Arab world these days how little Al Qaeda actually comes up in conversations. Even before the eruption of revolts and revolutions, a group that bore some responsibility for two wars and deepening American involvement from North Africa to Iraq was losing its significance. When Osama bin Laden died, his killing seemed more an epitaph for another era. As is often remarked, the events of Sept. 11 seem a historical note to much of an Arab population where three in five are younger than 30.

In that atmosphere, many saw Mr. Awlaki’s death as an essentially American story: here was a man that American attention helped create, and its Hellfire missiles killed, in a campaign born out of American fears of homegrown militancy. What distinguished Mr. Awlaki was not his ideas or influence but his American upbringing, passport and perfectly idiomatic English.

“When the Obama administration and the U.S. media started focusing on him, that is when Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula pushed him to the fore,” Mr. Johnsen said, referring to the group’s Yemeni branch. “They were taking advantage of the free publicity, if you will. And any stature he has now in the Arab world is because of that.”

Another analyst, Michael Wahid Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation, echoed the idea that Mr. Awlaki’s fluency in English generated more interest about him. “The U.S. focus on Awlaki was a function of his language abilities and their understanding of his role as a recruiter and propagandist. If recent events can be said to further marginalize violent rejectionists such as Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, then there is very little room for a virtual unknown such as Awlaki to command any serious attention.”

Mr. Hanna said that was even more the case with the Arab world having plunged into what he described as “this transformational juncture.”

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Obama’s take-no-prisoners approach to terrorism

After Barack Obama began his presidency by deciding to close Guantanamo and ban torture, Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU said:

These executive orders represent a giant step forward. Putting an end to Guantanamo, torture and secret prisons is a civil liberties trifecta, and President Obama should be highly commended for this bold and decisive action so early in his administration on an issue so critical to restoring an America we can be proud of again.

What later became apparent was that Obama had less interest in civil liberties than he has in resolving the legal complications of dealing with terrorist suspects.

Should suspected terrorists be tried in civilian or military courts?

Should they be detained inside or outside the United States?

What kind of legal protections do they deserve when being interrogated?

What constitute legal interrogation methods?

For Obama, all of these questions have a simple answer: whenever possible, terrorist suspects should be killed rather than taken into detention.

He will never articulate his policy in such brutal and simple terms, but by this point the policy of the US government should be clear.

What has become apparent over the last two and a half years is that George Bush and Dick Cheney would have faced little or no criticism if there had been just one subtle difference in their approach to governance: had they been Democrats they could have avoided the political messiness of using torture and instead been global vigilante purists and said America will kill its enemies whenever and wherever we find them.

So, as Dick Cheney now applauds Obama, he does so with an apparent sense of envy and resentment.

But note also, Cheney is still promoting an old-school approach when he says: “I think you’ve got to go through the process internally, making certain it’s reviewed by the appropriate people in the Justice Department — that they take a good careful look at it — but I think they [the Obama administration] did all that in this case.”

Well, from what we know at this point, that careful review process was either not applied to Samir Khan, or, if it was applied, concluded he could not be targeted — but he got assassinated in any case.

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Why Israel can’t be a ‘Jewish State’

Sari Nusseibeh writes:

The Israeli government’s current mantra is that the Palestinians must recognise a “Jewish State”. Of course, the Palestinians have clearly and repeatedly recognised the State of Israel as such in the 1993 Oslo Accords (which were based on an Israeli promise to establish a Palestinian state within five years – a promise now shattered) and many times since. Recently, however, Israeli leaders have dramatically and unilaterally moved the goal-posts and are now clamouring that Palestinians must recognise Israel as a “Jewish State”.

In 1946, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry concluded that the demand for a “Jewish State” was not part of the obligations of the Balfour Declaration or the British Mandate. Even in the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, when Zionists sought to “establish a home for the Jewish people”, there was no reference of a “Jewish State”. The Zionist Organisation preferred at first to use the description “Jewish homeland” or “Jewish Commonwealth”. Many pioneering Zionist leaders, such as Judah Magnes and Martin Buber also avoided the clear and explicit term “Jewish State” for their project of a homeland for Jews, and preferred instead the concept of a democratic bi-national state.

Today, however, demands for a “Jewish State” from Israeli politicians are growing without giving thought to what this might mean, and its supporters claim that it would be as natural as calling France a French State. However, if we consider the subject dispassionately, the idea of a “Jewish State” is logically and morally problematic because of its legal, religious, historical and social implications. The implications of this term therefore need to be spelled out, and we are sure that once they are, most people – and most Israeli citizens, we trust – will not accept these implications.

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Convicted Bahraini doctors, nurses urge U.N. to investigate their protest-linked jail sentences

The Associated Press reports:

Bahraini doctors and nurses convicted of links to anti-government protests and sentenced to long prison terms appealed to the U.N. chief Saturday to investigate their claims of abuse and judicial violations in the trial.

The medical professionals — whose sentences range from five to 15 years — are appealing the security court’s ruling and speaking out against the wider crackdown by the Gulf kingdom’s Sunni rulers against protests for greater rights by the Shiite majority.

The trial has been closely watched by rights groups that have criticized Bahrain’s prosecution of civilians at the special security court, which was set up under martial law-style rule that was lifted in June. The U.N. human rights office and the U.S. State Department are among those questioning the use of the court, which has military prosecutors and both civilian and military judges.

The doctors and nurses worked at the state-run Salmaniya Medical Center close to the capital’s Pearl Square, which became the epicenter of Bahrain’s uprising, inspired by other revolts across the Arab world. The authorities saw the hospital’s mostly Shiite staff — some of whom participated in pro-democracy street marches — as protest sympathizers, although the medics claimed they treated all who needed care.

“During the times of unrest in Bahrain, we honored our medical oath to treat the wounded and save lives. And as a result, we are being rewarded with unjust and harsh sentences,” said a statement released by the medics after the court’s ruling.

The group was convicted Thursday on charges that include attempting to topple the Gulf kingdom’s rulers and spreading “fabricated” stories. In a separate trial, the security court sentenced a protester to death for the killing of a police officer during the clashes that began in February.

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Google knows

In the London Review of Books, Daniel Soar writes:

This spring, the billionaire Eric Schmidt announced that there were only four really significant technology companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, the company he had until recently been running. People believed him. What distinguished his new ‘gang of four’ from the generation it had superseded – companies like Intel, Microsoft, Dell and Cisco, which mostly exist to sell gizmos and gadgets and innumerable hours of expensive support services to corporate clients – was that the newcomers sold their products and services to ordinary people. Since there are more ordinary people in the world than there are businesses, and since there’s nothing that ordinary people don’t want or need, or can’t be persuaded they want or need when it flashes up alluringly on their screens, the money to be made from them is virtually limitless. Together, Schmidt’s four companies are worth more than half a trillion dollars. The technology sector isn’t as big as, say, oil, but it’s growing, as more and more traditional industries – advertising, travel, real estate, used cars, new cars, porn, television, film, music, publishing, news – are subsumed into the digital economy. Schmidt, who as the ex-CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation had learned to take the long view, warned that not all four of his disruptive gang could survive. So – as they all converge from their various beginnings to compete in the same area, the place usually referred to as ‘the cloud’, a place where everything that matters is online – the question is: who will be the first to blink?

If the company that falters is Google, it won’t be because it didn’t see the future coming. Of Schmidt’s four technology juggernauts, Google has always been the most ambitious, and the most committed to getting everything possible onto the internet, its mission being ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. Its ubiquitous search box has changed the way information can be got at to such an extent that ten years after most people first learned of its existence you wouldn’t think of trying to find out anything without typing it into Google first. Searching on Google is automatic, a reflex, just part of what we do. But an insufficiently thought-about fact is that in order to organise the world’s information Google first has to get hold of the stuff. And in the long run ‘the world’s information’ means much more than anyone would ever have imagined it could. It means, of course, the totality of the information contained on the World Wide Web, or the contents of more than a trillion webpages (it was a trillion at the last count, in 2008; now, such a number would be meaningless). But that much goes without saying, since indexing and ranking webpages is where Google began when it got going as a research project at Stanford in 1996, just five years after the web itself was invented. It means – or would mean, if lawyers let Google have its way – the complete contents of every one of the more than 33 million books in the Library of Congress or, if you include slightly varying editions and pamphlets and other ephemera, the contents of the approximately 129,864,880 books published in every recorded language since printing was invented. It means every video uploaded to the public internet, a quantity – if you take the Google-owned YouTube alone – that is increasing at the rate of nearly an hour of video every second.

It means the location of businesses, religious institutions, schools, libraries, community centres and hospitals worldwide – a global Yellow Pages. It means the inventories of shops, the archives of newspapers, the minute by minute performance of the stock market. It means, or will mean, if Google keeps going, the exact look of every street corner and roadside on the planet, photographed in high resolution and kept as up to date as possible: the logic, if not yet the practice, of Google Street View, means that city streets should be under ever more regular photographic surveillance, since the fresher and more complete the imagery the more useful people will find it, and the more they will therefore use it. If it doesn’t already have a piece of data, you can be sure that Google is pursuing a way of getting it, of gathering and sorting every kind of public information there is.

But all this is just the stuff that Google makes publicly searchable, or ‘universally accessible’. It’s only a small fraction of the information it actually possesses. I know that Google knows, because I’ve looked it up, that on 30 April 2011 at 4.33 p.m. I was at Willesden Junction station, travelling west. It knows where I was, as it knows where I am now, because like many millions of others I have an Android-powered smartphone with Google’s location service turned on. If you use the full range of its products, Google knows the identity of everyone you communicate with by email, instant messaging and phone, with a master list – accessible only by you, and by Google – of the people you contact most. If you use its products, Google knows the content of your emails and voicemail messages (a feature of Google Voice is that it transcribes messages and emails them to you, storing the text on Google servers indefinitely). If you find Google products compelling – and their promise of access-anywhere, conflagration and laptop-theft-proof document creation makes them quite compelling – Google knows the content of every document you write or spreadsheet you fiddle or presentation you construct. If as many Google-enabled robotic devices get installed as Google hopes, Google may soon know the contents of your fridge, your heart rate when you’re exercising, the weather outside your front door, the pattern of electricity use in your home.

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Libyan Jew returns home after 44-year exile

Reuters reports:

In the walled old city of Tripoli, Libya’s independence flag pokes through crumbling buildings and a gang of children wielding toy pistols tear through dusty alleyways.

In these run-down streets stands the empty, faded peach-colored Dar Bishi synagogue.

The interior can only be seen by climbing up the rubble of a collapsed house and the ark, which would normally shelter the sacred Torah scroll, is instead stuffed with a mattress.

The Hebrew inscription above it “Hear, O Israel” is barely perceptible from wear, and empty paint cans are strewn across the floor. The site of the Mikve baths, used once for ritual cleansing, is now a trash dump where stray cats scour for food next to a discarded washing machine as veiled women look on.

Libyan Jewish exile David Gerbi said he has dreamed of restoring this synagogue for 10 years, when smoke from New York’s burning twin towers evoked one of the most powerful memories of his Libyan childhood.

The 12-year-old Gerbi and his family fled Tripoli in 1967 when an Arab-Israeli war stoked anger against the Jewish state and led to attacks on Jews in his neighborhood.

Gaddafi expelled the rest of Libya’s 38,000 Jews two years later and confiscated their assets. Most Tripoli synagogues have since been destroyed or converted to mosques. Jewish cemeteries have been razed to make way for office blocks on the coast.

Gerbi says he is the first Jew to return to Libya since the revolt that ousted Muammar Gaddafi in August.

He said he knows this because he negotiated the extraction of the last one — his aged, dying aunt who stayed behind to protect the family treasures — from a hospice in 2002.

Now that Gaddafi is gone, Gerbi wants to help interim Libyan leaders rebuild the lost Libya of his childhood and foster the type of religious tolerance between Jews and Muslims that exists in other parts of the Maghreb such as Morocco.

And he wants the Dar Bishi synagogue to be the symbol of reconciliation between Jewish and Muslim Libyans.

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