Zionism and Judeo-Islamic Relations in the Middle East: Libya’s Position · 317bombing was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment, Qadhafi
faced new international circumstances that included extreme risks as well
as new prospects. He made a strenuous effort to employ this window of
opportunity in his country’s relations with the West to settle the chronic
dispute between them once and for all. Assisted now by his son, Saif
al-Islam, and exploiting the more tolerant attitude of the United States
toward Libya following al-Qaida’s terrorist attack of 11 September 2001,
the Libyan head of state made conciliatory gestures toward Washington,
and in the same context, he lessened his hitherto belligerent references to
the Arab-Israeli conflict and other related issues in order to placate the
Americans. In any case, Qadhafi’s attention to his Arab environs, which
had “betrayed” Libya by fully complying with the devastating UN sanc-
tions throughout the 1990s, were consigned to the margins of his foreign
policy agenda. Moreover, Qadhafi repeatedly threatened to withdraw
Libya from the Arab League in protest of what he perceived to be the
League’s complete impotence in dealing with the UN sanctions on Libya
and the League’s failure to take a radical line toward Israel and toward
the Arab states that had established diplomatic ties with Israel. While
generally adhering to a policy of decreased focus on the Arab-Israeli con-
flict, Qadhafi could not afford to remain silent on the Saudi Peace Initia-
tive, which was central to the Middle East agenda in early 2002, cynically
portraying it as “a gift from heaven to both the U.S. and Israel.”^27
Nevertheless, Qadhafi’s time was now taken up mostly by his attempts
to take advantage of the opportunities opened in Libya’s relations with
the West and with the United States in particular in the post-Lockerbie
sanctions era. Thus his public references to the Arab-Israeli conflict be-
came less frequent and less bellicose in nature. Instead of his previous
position calling for the annihilation of the “Jewish state,” he now pro-
posed that “the sole possible solution” to the prospects of the Jews living
in the “so-called Israeli state” was “to establish one democratic state for
both the Palestinians and the Jews,... a state lying between the [Jordan]
river and the [Mediterranean] sea... called Isratin.” Seizing upon the
public forum at the Arab summit in March 2005 to further promote his
“Isratin” idea, Qadhafi stipulated that “the so-called state of Israel... is
definitely an illegal state. In 1948, a group of people came and unilater-
ally declared they have formed a state. [But] that land has two owners.
Unilaterally declaring a state by any of the two owners is illegal. [This op-
tion is also illegal by international law, he elaborated, and thus it] cannot