I, the Israeli visitor, was fully aware of his resentment. His friends – all Eritreans who had previously sought asylum in Israel – seemed less preoccupied with Netanyahu. They were similarly relieved that they no longer had to live under the burden of Israel’s asylum and visa bureaucracies but were more ambivalent with regard to other experiences they had in the Jewish state. As we were talking, a playlist that one of them set up was playing in the background, alternating between reggae and popular Israeli Mizrahi music.4
Yohanes migrated to Israel in 2010, travelling from Eritrea, via Sudan and Egypt. He spent five years working as a cleaner in malls and wedding venues, renewing his temporary visa every few months, before being ordered to relocate to an ‘open residency facility’ for ‘infiltrators’ in the middle of the Negev desert in southern Israel. After six months in the desert and thanks to the effective persuasion efforts of Israeli officials, like many other Eritreans, he decided to accept the Israeli government’s offer and leave for Uganda. He had never been there before and had no clear idea what he would do once he arrived, but he was willing to take a chance. Life in Israel seemed to have reached a dead end. A free one-way ticket and a departure grant of $3,500 were provided by the Israeli authorities as an additional incentive. Soon, he was living undocumented in the Ugandan capital – one of hundreds, if not thousands, of men, women and children in that city who had travelled through a similar route.
Reconsidering Israel in Africa
While the media has certainly taken note of Israel’s renewed interest in Africa in recent years, particularly after Netanyahu’s widely promoted visits to the continent during 2016–17, the issue is yet to attract any scholarly attention. In fact, there has hardly been any academic engagement with Israel’s foreign strategy in Africa since the end of the Cold War. A combination of factors can be said to account for this neglect. From the perspective of Israeli scholars, think tanks and the media, Africa is usually perceived as an uneventful sideshow to the politics of the Middle East. African Studies, once a popular discipline in some of Israel’s leading universities, is now a marginal field in Israeli academia, rendering critical knowledge production on Israeli activities in Africa or African issues in general rare. Israel’s own siege mentality and its tense relationships with its Arab neighbours mean that most Israelis view their country primarily as part of the Western world and experience Africa as much more distant than it really is.
Meanwhile, from the African perspective, Israel’s scope of involvement and impact are understandably viewed as marginal when compared to those of powers like China, the US or even European countries. Language barriers, overt secrecy and the fact that Israel has no articulated and publicly available ‘Africa policy’ or a coherent international development agenda are some other factors that render engagement with the topic challenging. Thus, with Israeli scholars and students of the Middle East detached from contemporary African debates and concerns or simply viewing them as entirely inconsequential, and with a preponderance of Africanists reluctant to deal with the messy politics of the Middle East and Israel/Palestine or simply unfamiliar with them,5 Israeli–African relationships seem to be no one’s focus. Structurally, as in the case of other cross-regional engagements, this neglect is also a consequence of the division between the Area Studies of the Middle East and Africa in academic institutions and the popular perception of these regions as largely separated from one another.6
But this neat division is uncomfortably artificial. Israel shares a land border with Africa: a line in the sand which was first negotiated between Britain and the Ottoman Empire over a century ago. It has a port on the Red Sea. It has been the destination of several significant waves of migration from Africa throughout its history. Perhaps more crucially, it has often sought to project its influence into the continent – far beyond its immediate neighbours – in order to safeguard its interests and undermine its adversaries. While it is true that Africa was never as central in Israel’s international strategy as were its relationships with Western states or with other Middle Eastern countries, the neighbouring continent in general, and its north-eastern countries in particular, have repeatedly featured in Jerusalem’s foreign policy calculations.
And this interest was not one-sided, or uninfluential, or limited to a small group of political or military elites. From imperial and later socialist Ethiopia, through post-independence Uganda and Sudan, apartheid South Africa, Zaire and later the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and all the way to contemporary Togo, South Sudan, Angola, Rwanda and Equatorial Guinea, African actors sought Israel’s support and Israel’s involvement has been highly significant. In some cases, it played a critical role in determining the trajectories of conflicts and the survival or rise to power of leaders. In recent years, Israeli–African (often clandestine) collaboration on migration management has impacted on the lives of tens of thousands of people. Support for Israel is an increasingly important theme in many evangelical churches in Africa, while the Palestinian cause remains a central concern for the Arab world and human rights groups.
There is a considerable body of literature that deals with the more distant history of Israel in Africa. Several studies have been written on Israel’s involvement in Africa from the late 1950s and until the mid-1970s, focusing primarily on its technical assistance programmes and on the decision of most African countries to break ties with Israel during the Israeli–Arab war of 1973.7 A few Israelis who worked in Africa during the 1960s also wrote illuminating memoirs.8 Israel’s alliance with apartheid South Africa and the slow restoration of ties with some African countries during the 1980s also attracted attention, but as Israel’s interests in the continent declined after the end of the Cold War, so did the scholarly interest in what Israel and Israelis do in Africa.9 In recent years, Israeli involvement in Africa during the 1960s has attracted some renewed academic attention, primarily from Israeli scholars.10 This resulted in several studies that are more critical and evidence-based than much of the older literature on the same period, but which unavoidably also further entrenched the notion that Israeli–African partnerships are largely a thing of the past.
This book seeks to contribute to the existing debates and literature in two ways. First, by presenting a new history of the interplay between conflicts, violence and processes of state formation in Israel/Palestine and in the African continent. Second, by critically examining Israel’s growing interest in and engagement with African countries over the past decade. The following chapters therefore aim to answer a set of interlinked questions: Why and how did Israel attempt to project its influence into Africa? What is behind the new Israeli ‘love’ for the continent? What developments in Africa and the Middle East brought about this new phase in the history of Israel in Africa, and what may the engagement between Israel and African countries mean for both the Middle East and Africa? How does Israel’s longer history of involvement in Africa inform and influence its current rhetoric and activities? And finally, how did African leaders respond to Israel’s forays, and why?
Securitisation, privatisation and states
From its independence in 1948, Israel was engaged in protracted conflicts and constantly saw itself – rightly or not – as facing existential threats.11 As historian Avi Shlaim shows, all Israeli governments since the country’s independence were guided by the conviction that Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East can only be guaranteed through force and deterrence, by making Israel so powerful that its adversaries will view it as unbreakable and, once sufficiently repressed and overpowered, give up their resistance to it.12 Shlaim calls this strategy ‘The Iron Wall’ – a reference to a hawkish doctrine first formulated by Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s and subsequently followed by generations of Israeli leaders regardless of their political leanings. One central argument advanced in this book is that Israel’s relationship with Africa should be understood as driven by the same rationale: in Africa, Israel repeatedly sought political and military alliances or influence that can be leveraged to pressure, weaken, undermine and deter its rivals in the Middle East.
Israel’s forays into Africa therefore consistently reflected its conflicts in the Middle East. From the late 1950s, the continent
