But in Libya, which does not recognize Israel, and where public sentiment remains staunchly supportive of the Palestinian cause, it sparked an outpouring of anger and a scramble by Prime Minister Hamid Dbeibah to contain the fallout — including suspending the minister.
Protests broke out in western Libyan cities overnight on Sunday and Monday, with demonstrators setting fire to tires and Israeli flags — and, according to reports in local media, a home belonging to the prime minister. Protesters also stormed the gates of the Foreign Ministry in Tripoli, though security guards prevented them from breaching the building, according to local media reports.
The announcement from Jerusalem appeared to take the government in Tripoli by surprise. Dbeibah sought to pin the blame on Mangoush, whom he suspended on Monday and referred for internal investigation. Mangoush flew to Turkey on Monday after news of the meeting broke, the Associated Press reported. The state security service put out a statement early Monday denying having facilitated her flight.
The protests in Libya show how volatile the issue of relations with Israel is among the public in many Arab countries, even as a new generation of leaders in the Gulf and North Africa have been willing to improve relations to take advantage of Israel’s economic, technological and security assets.
But they have forged the ties despite enduring levels of anger in the Arab world over Israel’s decades-long occupation of the West Bank and expanding Jewish settlements in land that Palestinians hope will form an independent state.
In Libya, a 1957 law makes it illegal to normalize ties with Israel. Former strongman Moammar Gaddafi staked a strong anti-Israel stance throughout his more than 40-year rule. A decade after his ouster in 2011, only 7 percent of Libyans favored normalization of relations between Arab states and Israel, according to a 2021-2022 survey by the research network Arab Barometer.
News of the Rome meeting fast became a political scandal in the war-torn country, which remains divided between Dbeibah’s government in Tripoli and the rival administration backed by warlord Khalifa Hifter in the east.
In Libya’s west, opponents of Dbeibah have seized the opportunity to call for his ouster. Khaled Elmeshri, the former head of a top governing body, wrote on Facebook that the government must have known about the Rome meeting and had crossed “all legal, national and religious red lines” and therefore “must be overturned.”
Dbeibah likely pursued the meeting to curry favor with Washington, at a time when the United Nations is seeking a new interim government before a nationwide vote, according to Wolfram Lacher, a Libya analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.
“The entire meeting only makes sense as an effort by Dbeibah to mobilize U.S. support for his staying in power,” he said. But it was a risky gamble, and the leaked meeting now appears part of a “pattern of ill-judged foreign policy choices that seem to be out of sync with Libyan public opinion.”
Prominent Libyan figures from both rival centers have reportedly made contact with Israeli officials in the past, in what Libya analyst Anas El Gomati described as efforts “to exchange normalization for blocking elections.”
Dbeibah likely orchestrated the meeting with the hope of garnering American support for a joint government with Hifter, Gomati, director of the Tripoli-based Sadeq Institute think tank, said. Such a move would be highly unpopular with residents in Tripoli and other cities who are tired of elite bargains and war.
The controversy has thrown the government into damage-control mode, with the Foreign Ministry seeking to downplay the discussion between Mangoush and Cohen as “an informal and unprepared meeting” in a statement late Sunday. Meanwhile reports surfaced that Dbeibah had been quietly laying the groundwork for the encounter for at least a month, including his own visit to Italy last month.
The government statement reiterated Libya’s “complete and absolute rejection of normalization with the Zionist entity,” and Dbeibah visited the Palestinian embassy in Tripoli on Monday to emphasize Libya’s support for the Palestinian cause. He conveyed that Mangoush’s stance “does not represent the government of Libya and its people,” according to a statement from the Palestinian Foreign Ministry.
In Israel, Cohen has been slammed for fumbling Israel’s diplomatic outreach to its Arab neighbors at a critical time. Jerusalem is eager to build on the new relations it has established with Muslim-majority countries in recent years, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
Israeli representatives even now are engaged in unofficial talks between Washington and Saudi Arabia on agreements that might lead to new ties between Riyadh and Jerusalem, according to diplomats familiar with the process.
Already, historically tense relations between the two countries have thawed amid the regional warming. Saudi Arabia has lifted restrictions on Israeli flights in its airspace, shaving hours off travel to the Gulf region and Southeast Asia. Late Monday, a flight experience electrical problems between Tel Aviv and the Seychelles was able to make a safe emergency landing in Jeddah, an occurrence that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
In the past, the run-up to these kinds of agreements between Israel and Arab countries followed years of unofficial, underground connections where discretion was paramount. Israel quietly worked with the Emirates for decades on security and intelligence issues, for example, contacts that were as secret as they were fragile, given the risk of just the sort of backlash that erupted in Libya.
By going public about the meeting with Mangoush, critics said Cohen endangered not only her safety, but risked spooking other governments that may be quietly eyeing a rapprochement with the Jewish state.
“Secret meetings that were never leaked built the relationships that over the years evolved into historic agreements with countries in the region. That isn’t what is happening now,” opposition leader Yair Lapid said in a tweet. “The countries of the world are looking this morning at the irresponsible leak about the Israeli and Libyan foreign ministers’ meeting and are asking themselves: Is this a country that we can have foreign relations with?”
Nursing better relations with Arab countries has always required finesse, according to Uzi Rabi, director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. And in the case of a volatile, nearly failed-state like Libya, the contacts are so delicate that they are more a job for clandestine intelligence agencies like Israel’s Mossad.
“We know these things are happening, but it should be under the radar. The diplomats should come later,” he said. “You can have the contact, but if you wave it about as an achievement, this is the backlash you’re going to get.”
If the United States played a role in encouraging or brokering the meeting, that would seem to run contrary to U.S. policy of pushing for elections — and it’s unclear how much legitimacy any normalization measures that emerged from talks with Libya’s weak and embattled government could have.
“So it’s highly doubtful what value, what legitimacy normalization undertaken by such a government could have,” said Lacher. “If the U.S. has really been pushing that government toward normalization, this is clearly a strategic mistake.”
The U.S. Embassy Libya did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hazem Balousha in Gaza contributed to this report.
