refused to withdraw from it and soon began establishing military bases and civilian settlements in it. This made it increasingly difficult for Israel to fend off Arab and Soviet allegations that it is a colonial power or for African states to continue to claim that the Israeli–Arab conflict is of no relevance to Africa and should be kept off the OAU’s agenda. On the other hand, with Sinai under control, Israel secured an invaluable buffer zone that protected it from potential Egyptian attacks and regained free access through the Straits of Tiran – advantages it was not willing to give up easily.
In the months following the 1967 war, the future of the occupied territories seemed unclear, and African states remained divided on the matter. The only country to sever ties with Israel following the war was Guinea. When the UN General Assembly in July 1967 voted on two resolutions – one supported by the US and considered more Israel-friendly, and the other supported by the Soviet Union and considered more Arab-friendly – 17 African states that had diplomatic ties with Israel supported the US-backed resolution, and only 9 supported the Soviet-backed one.8 At least in this case, Israel’s Africa policy seemed to have paid off, even though neither of the resolutions achieved a sufficient number of votes to be adopted.
It was eventually the UN Security Council that set the tone for the post-1967 negotiations between Israel and its neighbours with Resolution 242, adopted unanimously in November 1967. In essence, the Resolution called for peace in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from the lands it had occupied during the war. A UN mediator, Dr Gunnar Jarring, was tasked with promoting the implementation of the Resolution, but the negotiations in the following years went nowhere. Israel insisted that it would only withdraw once a peace agreement was achieved following direct negotiations, while Egypt and Jordan insisted that first Israel had to withdraw from their territories.9 Meanwhile, Israel consolidated its control over the lands it had occupied during the war. After its remarkable military victory in 1967, its leaders believed that time was on their side.
At the OAU, however, the consensus was gradually shifting against Israel. In September 1967 the OAU issued a somewhat neutral ‘declaration’ expressing its ‘concern’ about the ‘grave situation’ in Egypt.10 A year later, a resolution was adopted calling for Israel’s withdrawal from ‘all Arab territories occupied’ during the 1967 war, and appealing to ‘all Member States of the OAU to use their influence to ensure a strict implementation of this Resolution’.11 In the following years, the Israeli–Arab conflict featured regularly in OAU meetings, as members reiterated their call for the implementation of Resolution 242.12 Behind the principled position on the territorial integrity of a fellow African state, there was another material reason for African concern with the issue. Following the 1967 war, the Suez Canal was shut down. For every year that it remained closed, East African nations were losing some $125 million: the prices of their imports increased and the revenues they earned from exports dropped, as ships had to travel all the way around the Cape of Good Hope. South Africa was therefore the one benefiting, and Israel’s refusal to withdraw from Sinai was seen as the main obstacle to solving the matter.13
One of the more interesting developments in the African position towards the Middle East at the time was the OAU’s ambitious yet ultimately failed attempt to mediate between Israel and Egypt in order to bring the politically uncomfortable and economically damaging stalemate to an end. In February 1971, in response to a proposal made by Jarring, Egypt agreed to enter peace negotiations with Israel. By then, Golda Meir had become Israel’s prime minister, having replaced Levi Eshkol, who died earlier in 1969. Replying to Jarring’s proposal, however, Meir’s government refused to commit to withdrawing to the pre-war borders, thus undermining his initiative.14 The OAU adopted a resolution deploring ‘Israel’s defiance to that initiative’, and requesting the OAU chairperson, then Ould Daddah of Mauritania, to ‘consult with the Heads of State and Government so that they use their influence to ensure the full implementation of this resolution’.15
A committee of ten African heads of state was formed. Its mandate was not clearly defined but it was decided that a group of four of these leaders – led by Léopold Senghor of Senegal – would travel to Israel and Egypt to obtain information and come up with recommendations. Israeli officials initially considered boycotting the initiative altogether, but eventually decided to cooperate, not least because they did not want to damage Israel’s relationship with African states and hoped that this would be an opportunity to prove that the Arab side was to blame for the stalemate in the negotiations.16 Indeed, Senghor was one of the African leaders most sympathetic to Israel and to Zionism at the time and his conciliatory approach towards Jerusalem drew criticism from Cairo.17 But by the time the mission ended even Senghor was frustrated with Israel’s intransigence, as Golda Meir still refused to announce that Israel was not interested in annexing any part of Sinai. ‘I must say, quite objectively, that the Egyptians made all the concessions they could’, Senghor said later. ‘Being an African, I understand the Egyptian position. Africa ends at the Sinai Peninsula. Territorial integrity has become a myth in our continent and both we and the Semites live on myths.’18
The OAU committee’s key recommendation was that Egypt and Israel should resume their negotiations under the auspices of Jarring. But when its proposal was brought before the UN General Assembly in December 1971, most African countries did not support it. The Assembly instead adopted a resolution that politely expressed its ‘appreciation’ of the African initiative, but explicitly called upon Israel to ‘respond favourably’ to Jarring’s proposal from February that year.19 The OAU summit in Rabat in June 1972 was the final nail in the coffin of the OAU mediation efforts and represented ‘a landmark in the shift of the OAU policy in respect to the Middle East crisis’.20 The OAU deplored Israel’s ‘refusal to respond favorably to the initiative of OAU’, and called on Israel to ‘withdraw immediately from all the occupied Arab territories’.21
Meanwhile, Muammar al-Gaddafi, who came to power in 1969, embarked on a calculated diplomatic offensive against Israel’s involvement in Africa. He achieved his first victory when Idi Amin, shortly after coming to power, decided to switch sides and dump Israel in favour of Libyan patronage, which now appeared much more lucrative. Amin began by refusing to allow the Mossad to continue using Uganda as a base for its operations in southern Sudan, and in March 1972 officially severed diplomatic ties with Israel. The embassy was closed, and hundreds of Israelis left the country. Israel initially blamed the decision on Amin’s erratic and unstable personality, highlighting the fact that before breaking off ties, the Ugandan president demanded unrealistic amounts of military support from Israel, which Israel could not and did not want to provide.22 But in November and December 1972, Chad and Congo (Brazzaville) severed ties as well, and were followed by Niger, Mali and Burundi in early 1973.
When OAU members convened again in Addis Ababa in May 1973, they adopted another resolution on the Middle East conflict, this time condemning the ‘negative attitude of Israel, its acts of terrorism and its obstruction of all efforts aimed at a just and equitable solution’ to the conflict with Egypt and calling for its ‘immediate and unconditional withdrawal … from all occupied African and Arab territories’.23 Hoping that a complete diplomatic collapse could still be averted Israel decided not to disengage from the continent,24 but did not seem to possess a coherent strategy that would allow it to reverse the pro-Arab trend in Africa while also sticking to its position on the occupied Arab territories. In September, the Non-Aligned Conference convened in Algeria, adopting a resolution that equated Zionism with imperialism and called upon all non-aligned countries to support the Palestinians’ ‘struggle against Zionist racist and colonialist settlements for the recovery of their full national rights’ and to ‘boycott Israel diplomatically, economically, militarily and culturally’.25 Togo severed relations with Israel less than two weeks later, followed, in early October, by Zaire.
The Yom Kippur War and its aftermath
On Saturday 6 October 1973, the Israeli calculation that its Arab neighbours would not start a war and that the status
