Zionism and Judeo-Islamic Relations in the Middle East: Libya’s Position · 313moves, primarily the renewed accusation that Libya was manufacturing
chemical weapons and that it was involved in international terrorism,
most prominently, the suspicion that it was responsible for the explosion
of Pan-Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988. The
successful military operation of the U.S.-led coalition in the Gulf, which
defeated Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and reflected the funda-
mental power shift to the detriment of anti-American Arab states includ-
ing Libya at the beginning of 1991, further enhanced Qadhafi’s anxieties.
Meanwhile, the Lockerbie sanctions, which were imposed by the UN
on Libya in April 1992 and which, in tandem with the unilateral U.S.
sanctions imposed upon Libya in 1986, continued to exert particularly
heavy pressure on Qadhafi’s political position as well as on the country’s
socioeconomic well-being. In spring 1993, a year after the imposition of
the UN sanctions, and in a totally surprising deviation from his chronic
antagonism, Qadhafi made extraordinary overtures to the Jewish world,
particularly to the Jewish lobby in the United States and indirectly to
Israel as well. He invited all Jews who had left Libya in the late 1960s to
return to “their country” as residents or visitors. He also announced that
he would soon implement a law passed in 1970 providing compensation
to Jews who had left property in Libya that had been expropriated by
the state. Moreover, he declared that Libya would soon host a confer-
ence in Tripoli for representatives of the three major monotheistic faiths,
including Jews from Israel. Lastly, he announced he would permit Libyan
citizens to perform a pilgrimage to Muslim holy sites in al-Quds, i.e., Je-
rusalem.^18 Nevertheless, he still carefully avoided mentioning “the state
of Israel” when elaborating on these events.
This series of unprecedented declarations was soon followed by the
arrival in Jerusalem of approximately two hundred Libyans, portrayed
by Tripoli as pilgrims, who came to “al-Quds instead of Mecca” at the
end of May 1993. Pro-American Saudi Arabia, which fully complied with
the UN sanctions, including an embargo on air travel to and from Libya,
prevented any Libyans wanting to perform the hajj in Mecca from enter-
ing the country directly from Libya by air. The Libyan pilgrims crossed
the Egyptian land border into Israel and were greeted by Israel’s minister
of tourism, ̔Uzi Bar ̔am, and by the Israeli businessman Ya ̔akov Nim-
rodi, who had engineered their trip with the help of the Saudi tycoon
̔Adnan al-Khashoggi. It is not clear whether this visit had any connec-
tion to the alleged Libyan rapprochement attempt of 1990, but separate