Tunis, Tunisia – Tunisian academic Habib Kazdaghli was sitting on a bus outside Ghriba Synagogue when the attack took place earlier this month.
Neither he nor any of his students on the bus knew what was happening. “At first we thought it was a fight between the police officers,” he later told a translator. “We didn’t know how many people were involved. We just lay in silence on the floor of the bus for over an hour and waited.”
Kazdaghli, a Muslim by birth, travels to the Ghriba Synagogue on Djerba Island every year to celebrate the Lag Ba’omer festival with the Jewish community.
“We just waited there, wondering if the shooter would come by bus. I hoped that none of the students would contact their parents or friends from the bus because the gunman could overhear. We just waited. We knew nothing.”
He paused, thinking. “A lot of this is about memory. We all experience and repress memories. Something like this, especially for Tunisian Jews, just brings it all back,” he said.
The Tunisian Jews have been present in the country for over 2,000 years, mixed with indigenous Berbers, Carthaginians, Romans and Arabs. From exile in Tunisia to persecution during the country’s Nazi occupation, few of these years have been free of incident.
Nevertheless, as the story of this latest attack spread through the Tunisian media, the government’s determination to view it as a criminal attack on the tourism industry, rather than an anti-Semitic attack on one of the region’s most vulnerable communities, , increasingly clear.
The facts as we know them are: Shortly after 8 p.m., National Guard Wissam Khazri, after killing another officer and stealing his weapon and ammunition, arrived at the synagogue, having traveled overland by quad bike for more than half an hour. traveled to achieve it. Once there, the Home Office said, he apparently opened fire indiscriminately, killing two pilgrims, cousins Avial and Ben Haddad, and two police officers, and wounding several others.
Two minutes later, he was shot dead by officers.
Over the next 24 hours, however, the government continued a policy of minimizing the anti-Semitic nature of the attack while emphasizing minimal disruption to the country’s tourism industry, of which the island of Djerba contributes a significant portion.
The problem, Kazdagli said, was not that the government was not used to responding to crises, but that they did not know how to respond to this crisis. “That the attack was aimed at Jewish people and that it took place in El Ghriba,” left them paralyzed, he said. “They don’t know how to explain it. They don’t know how to make it understandable to people,” he told a translator.
President Kais Saied, addressing the country a day later, characterized the attack as “criminal” rather than “terrorist”, a term he uses with relative ease against his detractors and critics. There was no mention of the gunman’s anti-Semitism or his specific targets of the Jewish community. In a brief press conference a few days later, the interior minister informed journalists of the attacker’s name and that the ministry considered the attack premeditated. Little more was added.
The truth, according to observers such as Hamza Meddeb of the Carnegie Middle East Center, is that despite reports of four arrests since the shooting, the reality, including the race of the targets, is just too messy.
“I can understand why they don’t want to call this a terrorist incident,” he said. “It raises too many questions. Let’s not forget that the attacker was a police officer, we know nothing about this man’s background. Was he radicalised? If so, by whom? How extensive was his network? If they say he is an anti-Semite, how widespread are those feelings within the police force? More importantly, how widespread are those feelings in society? That’s an awkward question.
“It’s much easier to just dismiss the attack as a criminal act and move on,” he said.
At present, the gaps in supermarket shelves across Tunisia are one of the best indicators of the variety of household goods that the government subsidizes. With each passing year, the burden on the Tunisian economy grows heavier as the national currency, the dinar, continues to shrink. It is crucial that healthy tourism revenues and the hard currency they bring could give the president and his ministers room to maneuver in their negotiations about a possible bailout by the International Monetary Fund.
Against this grim background, tourism, one of the few economic bright spots in Tunisia’s endless night, at least offered a seed of optimism. According to Tunisian economist Raddhi Meddeb, tourism would contribute about 7 percent to Tunisia’s gross domestic product (GDP) in a normal year. Taking into account supporting industries, from agriculture to catering, that number doubles to 14 percent. Receipts so far, up 60 percent from the same period last year, already point to a promising summer.
“In terms of tourism, Tunisia generally competes on price. Take into account the financial crisis currently taking place in Europe, as well as the instability in [competitor] Turkey and you see Tunisia becoming one of the main destinations for European tourists this summer,” said Meddeb.
However, all this threatens to be derailed by rumors of a violent attack on a community considered so vulnerable that a large proportion of Tunisia’s security forces are deployed every year to guard them.
“We know that for what we call sun and beach tourists, safety is an important feature,” said Grzegorz Kapuscinski, a senior academic in tourism management at Oxford Brookes University.
“And it’s not really about just one attack, but the frequency of incidents and the collective awareness of them,” Kapuscinski said. “So yes, I can understand why the Tunisian government chose to go about it this way. That said, I’m not sure it will work. I think full transparency is always the best idea.”
However, the hope that the world would just forget and move on seems less likely.
Another stumbling block to Tunisia’s efforts is an investigation launched in France, with which Ben Haddad shares nationality (Avial Haddad also held an Israeli passport), which may not take into account Tunisian sensibilities as much as President Saied would hope.
For now, however, the effect is more immediate. The families of the synagogue’s defenders, as well as those of Ben and Avial Haddad, must all reconcile with a cruel and totally unexpected loss. At least summer can wait for them.