However, the study concluded that the establishment of a large settlement in Cyrenaica would have encountered considerable difficulties: these included limited water resources, local conditions and the attitude of the population.
Cyrenaica then returned to the centre of attention during the Second World War. After the Italian king abdicated in Rome and made his way to Alexandria in Egypt, British and American proposals for the creation of a Jewish entity or for the settlement of Jewish refugees in parts of Libya, as part of the search for solutions to the Jewish refugee crisis and the difficulties surrounding the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.
In 1945, the Allies discussed the future of the Italian colonies and, during those deliberations, the idea arose of using part of those territories for the settlement of Jews. The proposal was subsequently shelved in the face of political and demographic complexities and the opposition of the region’s inhabitants, including the Senussi, from whose ranks the resistance fighter Omar al-Mukhtar hailed.
Historical reconstruction
The Libyan historian Mustafa Abdullah Baio, in his book The Zionist Project for the Settlement of Jews in Libya, published in March 1975, reconstructs this first attempt and documents it using archival sources. According to Baio, this was set out in detail in the Blue Book published in 1909, in which the Jewish organisation recorded its initiatives to create a Jewish national homeland under the protection of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, following Victor Emmanuel III’s rejection of the project.
Baio, formerly the Libyan Minister of Education during the monarchy, writes that Theodor Herzl first met prominent Libyan Jews in Constantinople in 1892, to urge them to take part in his initiative. Herzl continued to correspond with them and invited them to his organisation’s congresses held in Vienna between 1900 and 1904.