322 · Yehudit Ronen
“Isratin” formula as the only acceptable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict reflected the increasing constraints on his political autonomy,
at least with regard to airing his views on the highly charged issue of
Libya’s somewhat softened attitude toward Israel.^44 This was further at-
tested to by the statement released by a top Foreign Ministry official,
Sa ̔id ̔Uraybi Hafyanah, who stressed in June 2005 in response to Saif
al-Islam’s relatively pragmatic approach to Israel that the willingness of
“the engineer,” namely Saif al-Islam, to enter into dialogue with Israel
“does not reflect official Libyan policy but rather his own business.” In
any case, Hafyanah reiterated that Libya supports “a single state solu-
tion as the [sole] permanent means for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict” and “eschews efforts at normalization with Israel in the interim
as long as there is bloodshed in the region.”^45 Hafyanah’s statement fol-
lowed an earlier statement by Libya’s foreign minister, Shukri Ghanem,
which declared that Israel is “a mistake in the political geography.”^46
Conclusion
In spite of Saif al-Islam’s verbal breach of the ideological wall of his coun-
try’s rejection of Israel’s right to exist, Libya’s official position toward
Israel seemed to have remained substantially intact. At least publicly, the
Libyan government at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first cen-
tury did not release any official statement signaling a dramatic change
that explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist. Yet the negative intensity
of the rhetoric and the frequency of official verbal attacks aimed at Israel
have noticeably decreased, seemingly reflecting a greater degree of prag-
matism than hitherto exhibited.
More than anything else, it was the Libyan interest in a rapprochement
with the West, and with the United States in particular, that prompted
the ruling elite in Tripoli to reevaluate and readjust the country’s foreign
policy positions accordingly, a process in which Saif al-Islam has been
especially influential throughout the 2000s. It appeared that Qadhafi’s
son came to the conclusion that it was vital for Libya to update its pol-
icy positions to suit the post–cold war era and the consequent U.S.-led
“New World Order” and thus to rehabilitate the country’s enfant terrible
image and gain international respectability. Saif al-Islam’s extraordinary
breach, however minor, of the long-standing wall of antagonism toward
Israel primarily reflected Libya’s desire for diplomatic reconciliation with