The Mangoush affair, three years on: Palestine remains a red line in Libya’s foreign policy

When news broke, in 2023, that Libya’s first female foreign minister, Najla Al-Mangoush, had secretly met her Israeli counterpart, Eli Cohen, in Rome, most Libyans were stunned. It was, as far as is publicly known, the first official meeting between the two countries and the first known high-level diplomatic contact between Libya and Israel. It was not an accidental encounter or a chance meeting, but a deliberately arranged session with a specific agenda — apparently, both sides wanted the meeting. That distinction is crucial to understanding what became known as the Mangoush affair. The significance of the meeting was not simply that a Libyan foreign minister had spoken to an Israeli foreign minister. It was that the episode exposed a […]