deployment of the Israeli army for uniting the nation, reconfiguring the country’s social and physical landscape, making the state present in people’s lives and pursuing civilian tasks such as infrastructure development was seen as an inspiration for young African countries.38 Particularly appealing were the Israeli programmes of the Fighting Pioneer Youth (Nahal) and Youth Battalions (Gadna) which mobilised youths for paramilitary training, and, in the case of the Nahal, agricultural education and the development of new Jewish settlements. ‘In Israel I have seen youths trained so that they are a source of pride to the nation, and they are readily available for all sorts of national work programmes’, Tom Mboya, who visited Israel for the first time in 1962, later recounted. ‘We must plan this way.’39
Israel was not in a position to offer African countries financial support comparable to that provided by the US, the Soviets or even European states.40 The most celebrated aspects of its support were technical cooperation and training programmes. A section for technical cooperation was established in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1958, which was transformed into an independent department and came to be known as Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation (or MASHAV, the acronym of its Hebrew name).41 Between 1958 and 1970 almost 2,500 Israeli experts were sent to Africa to provide training or support local development projects, and by 1972 more than 9,000 Africans had travelled to Israel for courses and training.42 These commonly focused on agriculture, rural settlement projects and youth organisations, but covered numerous other areas, from health, through education, taxation, law and administration, engineering, communication, social work, poultry framing, construction and architecture.43 And as much as the aim of Israel’s aid projects was to transfer knowledge from Israel to African countries, they often also represented an opportunity for Israelis to gain valuable experience and expertise.44
Government-led joint ventures in the fields of trade, farming and infrastructure development were another popular modus operandi. These initiatives were conventionally co-owned by Israeli companies (often but not always owned by the government or the Histadrut) and African governments and combined training of local African staff with what were supposed to be economically sound investments. The Ghanaian–Israeli Black Star Shipping Line mentioned above is one example of such a collaboration. Israelis initially occupied the main administrative and technical positions, but these were slowly transferred to local African staff, as African governments also assumed full ownership of the enterprise.45 Many of these collaborations left their mark on the urban landscapes of African capitals in the form of Israeli planned or constructed residential complexes, universities, hotels, government buildings and airports, some of which still stand and are in use today.
But as exported development models often are, many of the Israeli initiatives were wasteful and unrealistic. Israel and African countries had much less in common than political rhetoric suggested or than politicians or diplomats were willing to admit. While Israel was indeed a young country, the Jews in Israel were primarily settlers, immigrants and refugees, dominated by an educated European elite. The geographical and institutional conditions in Israel and in the African countries were also vastly different: Israelis inherited a far more developed state from the British than any African nation had.46 Moreover, the post-independence process of state-building in Israel took place against the background of ongoing violence along the country’s frontiers – a phenomenon that few African countries, if any, experienced.47 While in Israel the army fought external threats, in Africa it was utilised to distribute resources and consolidate state power or capture it from those who failed to managed it wisely.
The initiative that came to epitomise the naivety of Israel’s aspiration to transfer its nation-building experience to Africa was its aspiration to establish paramilitary youth organisations, which were loosely based on the Israeli Nahal and Gadna schemes. Israel assisted with the establishment of such youth programmes in more than 20 African countries,48 seeking to promote national consciousness, unity and discipline, ‘foster the spirit of national responsibility and pioneering among the youth and … educate them for good citizenship’.49 Assistance in the establishment of youth organisations was among Israel’s most popular and sought-after forms of support in Africa. But while in Israel these programmes were mythologised as the ultimate representation of Zionist state-building and pioneership, in Africa they achieved few if any of their imagined developmental goals and proved too expensive to sustain. Ethnic tensions, high desertion rates and the fact that fresh graduates moved to urban areas in search of jobs in the civil service (after participating in the programmes and acquiring agricultural skills) often rendered the initiatives rather futile.50
Propaganda, aid and their limits
Israel’s main objective in Africa was mobilising support for its position in the Israeli–Arab conflict. Along with direct assistance, therefore, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Mossad invested a great amount of energy and resources in public diplomacy, propaganda and international reputation campaigns – hasbara (literally: ‘explanation’), as these activities are collectively known in Hebrew. Israeli officials and diplomats closely monitored media coverage of the Israeli–Arab conflict and meticulously collected newspaper articles and foreign propaganda publications they came across. They also regularly reached out to local media outlets in order to promote stories that served Israeli interests and showed Arabs in a bad light (as anti-African, racist or sources of destabilisation and violence), share materials they wanted published and ‘brief’ editors and journalists about the situation in the Middle East. Their adversaries, of course, were doing more or less the same.
The Israeli–Arab competition over influence was therefore, from its very beginning, also an aggressive war of propaganda: a battle over the international narrative about Israeli–Arab–African relations and about the events unfolding in the Middle East, fought with brochures, newspapers, images, films, exhibitions, lectures and cultural events. Even technical assistance programmes, it was discreetly acknowledged, facilitated ‘the dissemination of positive propaganda’, not least because they projected an admirable image of Israel as a generous and peace-loving young nation, thereby countering the Arab propaganda that portrayed Israel as a cruel and violent agent of Western imperialism and equated Zionism with colonialism.51 The fact that the Mossad was discreetly involved in Israel’s image management efforts is a testament to the strategic importance Israel accorded to this issue.
At an early stage, Israel also tried to compete with Egypt over East Africa’s airwaves and radio listeners. In late 1960, the Israeli public radio service Kol Yisrael (‘Voice of Israel’) began broadcasting a daily half-hour programme in Swahili. The initiative came as a response to the activities of Radio Cairo, which had broadcast Swahili programmes several hours a day since the mid-1950s, spreading anti-colonial and anti-Western ideas. Radio Cairo was particularly popular among Muslims in Zanzibar and along the Swahili Coast.52 The Israeli broadcasts were managed from Jerusalem by two Tanganyikan students who translated texts that Israeli officials wrote for them, but the initiative was discontinued rather quickly, as the radio signal proved to be too weak to allow decent reception in East Africa.53
In the African postcolonial political order dominated by strongmen and centralised power, however, propaganda and public opinion had their limits. To begin with, the political sphere was small and hardly extended beyond urban areas, while political influence was concentrated in the hands of the few. Public displays of friendship and support were always important for Israeli diplomats, but for their efforts in Africa to be effective they also had to be close to the centres of power and to keep those who held power happy. Political support only mattered if given by the ruling elites of each country, and therefore these were the individuals with whom ties had to be cultivated. Rafael Ruppin, Israel’s first ambassador to Tanganyika, recalled:
As my familiarity with Tanganyika’s elite deepened, it became apparent to me, that as far as foreign policy is concerned (and the position of the government of Tanganyika on the Israeli–Arab conflict is included in this area) ‘public opinion’ in Tanganyika narrowed down
