4 - Exit from North Africa

Summary

This chapter examines how Jewish internationalists briefly flirted with constitutional reform and imperial oversight before deploying human rights to encourage Jewish departure from Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia during postcolonial transitions. They showed a profound distrust of the future disposition of Muslim rulers and called for pledges to allow North African Jews the right to leave, a claim that highlighted Jewish liminality in the postcolonial order. To argue that the future rulers of these new states had to pledge in advance to allow Jewish emigration rendered the integration of Jews into new North African states more difficult. Jewish activists ultimately wielded human rights in the service of Zionist aims, a marked contrast from other concurrent human rights activity that seeks to check the excesses of state sovereignty.