process of militarisation, securitisation and privatisation of Israel’s presence and diplomacy in Africa – a process that was influenced by the political and economic realities in both Israel/Palestine and Africa. One of the most enduring legacies of this period is the deep involvement of the Israeli business sector and arms industry in Israel’s activities in Africa. As noted above, after the end of the Cold War Israeli geostrategic interest in Africa declined and Israel’s presence on the continent was dominated by private actors, many of whom were former security personnel or military men with close links to both Israeli and African financial and political elites.
Chapters 3 to 5 all deal with more recent developments in Israel’s relationship with African countries. The third chapter discusses Israel’s attempts to ‘return’ to Africa over the last decade and their causes. It examines the emergence of Israel’s new geopolitical interests in Africa: curbing Iranian influence and undermining Palestinian diplomatic efforts to pressure Israel to end the occupation. It also considers the new rhetoric surrounding Israel’s African ‘comeback’, which focuses on counterterrorism and insecurity to consolidate and justify alliances, and, as was the case in the 1960s, seeks to position Israel as a developmental model for African countries. Finally, the chapter deals with Israel’s attempts to promote the involvement of Israeli or Jewish private sector actors and civil society organisations in Africa in order to project its influence into the continent, and the role of Israel’s development aid in this context.
The fourth chapter highlights the extent to which Israel’s involvement in Africa has been shaped by the various interests of its local partners and explores the loose and diverse networks of actors that advance these interests. It does so by presenting four interlinked patterns of interactions that characterise Israel’s contemporary engagements with African countries and shape its image and leverage on the continent. The first relates to security: the deployment of Israeli defence expertise by African leaders for propping up their regimes. The second relates to Israel’s position as a link to Washington and therefore to American material and political support. The third relates to the growing influence of Africa’s Pentecostal churches and other evangelical movements on Israel’s bilateral relations and standing on the continent; and the fourth concerns the deployment of Israeli expertise and investments for infrastructure development and state-building.
The fifth chapter investigates Israel’s efforts to control the movement of people between Israel and Africa. It describes, first, the debates around who should and who should not be allowed to cross this frontier and, second, the ways in which such movements have been managed by Israeli state institutions. The recent arrival of tens of thousands of Eritreans and Sudanese in Israel and Israel’s attempts to remove them from the country attracted considerable attention from human rights organisations and academics. These were primarily concerned with the (il)legality of Israel’s asylum policies and with the ways in which asylum-seekers were received by Israeli authorities. This book takes a different approach in analysing Israel’s treatment of these populations by situating the recent attempts to stop migration from the Horn of Africa within the context of Israel’s longer history of managing the migrations of populations from Africa, including of Jewish communities.
While this book deals with a wide range of themes, geographical regions and historical periods, I have limited myself here to the links and dynamics that shape the relationship between Israel and African leaders, states and peoples. This complex web of vectors is necessarily shaped by much wider flows of ideas and resources between Israel/Palestine, the Middle East and the African continent, but not all of these are discussed in detail here. Perhaps most significantly, the activities and efforts of Israel’s adversaries in Africa are only explored here to the extent that they influence Israel’s own operations and strategy. Those looking for a detailed account of Islamist politics in Africa vis-à-vis Israel/Palestine or a history of the Palestinian engagement with African countries and liberation movements – topics that certainly merit greater critical attention from scholars – will be disappointed. This is both a fair warning and a call for follow-up research that will investigate those fields that this book inevitably leaves uncharted.
The sources I draw on are as diverse as the themes explored. The historical parts make considerable use of secondary literature, though I also draw on some archival materials from the Israel State Archives and my research on Israeli–southern Sudanese relations during Sudan’s first civil war. More contemporary parts draw on various publicly available sources – newspapers and news websites, reports of UN agencies and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), industry newsletters, government statistics and press releases, cables released by WikiLeaks, court cases, social media posts – as well as on a small number of interviews I conducted with former or serving Israeli officials. The sections on Eritrean, South Sudanese and Sudanese refugees mainly draw on my work with human rights organisations in Israel and Uganda since 2010, including dozens of interviews (conducted in 2015 and late 2017) with Sudanese and Eritreans who left Israel for Uganda and Rwanda. The sections on evangelical movements and Messianic Judaism in Africa are informed by research conducted in Ethiopia among members of such groups during 2018–19.
As all of the above suggests, however, my main objective in this book is to connect the dots between different actors, trends and ideas into a wide and historically informed map of Israeli–African interstate politics, and not to present a thorough investigation of any specific event, policy or bilateral relationship. Some of the issues discussed here – Israel’s technical assistance programmes in Africa in the 1960s, the impact of the Israeli–Arab war of 1973 on Israel’s position in Africa, Israel’s relationship with apartheid South Africa, or the history and immigration to Israel of the Jews of Ethiopia – have been the subjects of significant bodies of literature. Readers who are interested in these topics will find useful references for further reading in the notes. I do not claim to be breaking new ground when discussing these topics here, but seek to fit them into the larger puzzle, primarily based on the very valuable work done by other scholars.
Other issues – Israel’s propaganda and public relations efforts in Africa in the past and present, the impact of the rise of born-again Christianity on its standing on the continent, the role of the private sector in shaping the political economy of Israeli–African engagements, or the spread and impact of Messianic Jewish doctrines – have attracted much less attention from academics. For obvious reasons, I could only explore some of these issues by drawing on my own research and experience, and hence the evident reliance in some parts of the book on various ‘para-scholarly’ sources and journalistic accounts. I hope that this book will inspire further inquiries into these underexplored topics and into other layers of Middle Eastern–African engagements. There is much we can learn from such inquiries, I believe, not only about the relationship between the two regions but also about the nature of contemporary politics in each of them.
Within four days at the end of April 1948, more than 1,100 Palestinian refugees arrived by sea at the Egyptian city of Port Said. Many of them were women and children, travelling on ‘small steamers, fishing smacks, rowing boats and caiques’.1 Coming from the coastal towns of Haifa and Jaffa, they were fleeing the violence that had erupted between Zionist and Palestinian armed groups after the UN General Assembly in November 1947 voted in favour of dividing Palestine into two independent states: one Jewish and one Arab. Most of the Palestinians who fled to Egypt were hosted in designated camps, but some of those who arrived early were able to settle in urban areas. On 16 May 1948, Hala Sakakini, the daughter of the Palestinian writer Khalil Sakakini who fled Jerusalem with her family, wrote in her diary that Cairo’s neighbourhood of Heliopolis ‘has become a Palestinian colony. Every other house is occupied by a Palestinian family’.2
By the time the Israeli–Arab
