In 1967, during the wave of anti-Jewish violence that swept Libya in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, King Idris personally intervened to evacuate the family of Corinne Elgai's great-aunt (EP 36).
The Six-Day War of June 1967 between Israel and its Arab neighbours triggered violent reprisals against Jewish communities across the Arab world. In Libya, Jewish homes and businesses were attacked. The community, already diminished by earlier waves of emigration, faced immediate physical danger.
Corinne's great-aunt, known as Aunt Tony, was King Idris's personal cook — a position that placed her inside the royal household. When the violence began, King Idris sent a car to collect the family. At the airport, they were hidden behind green curtains inside a hangar — a deliberate concealment from the crowds and the danger outside. From there, they were evacuated to Italy, and subsequently to Israel.
The act was personal, not institutional. It was a king protecting people he knew, using the resources available to him. It does not represent a broader state policy of protection — the Libyan state, in this period, was failing its Jewish citizens. But within that failure, an individual act of intervention saved lives.
Aunt Tony named her son's middle name Idris. The gesture was quiet and permanent — a name carried through generations as a record of what was done when it mattered. No public statement, no political alignment. Just a name given to a child, encoding gratitude into the family line.
The story complicates the standard narrative of Jewish departure from Libya. The departure was not a single event driven by a single force. It was a process shaped by state failure, mob violence, geopolitical forces, and — in this case — individual acts of protection that cut across the dominant pattern.
King Idris was deposed by Gaddafi in 1969. The Libya that Aunt Tony's family left ceased to exist in the form they had known it. The rescue behind the green curtains was one of the final acts of a monarchy that would be erased within two years.