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INTRODUCTION

On 28 November 2017, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu embarked on a one-day visit to Nairobi. This was – Netanyahu made sure to mention multiple times – his ‘third visit to Africa’ in less than two years. The formal justification for the hasty trip was attending Uhuru Kenyatta’s swearing in ceremony for a second term, after he won a contentious election boycotted by the opposition. The main aim, however, seemed to be publicity – perhaps an improvised substitute for the widely celebrated Africa–Israel summit that was planned to take place in Lomé a month earlier and was ‘postponed’ amidst a political crisis in Togo and rumours that it was being undermined by pressure from Arab countries and calls for boycott. Netanyahu’s formal announcement upon his departure revealed little – merely that it was part of Israel’s efforts to ‘deepen ties with Africa’.¹

For security reasons, the Israeli prime minister did not participate in the main inauguration ceremony in Kasarani Stadium, where tens of thousands of Kenyans gathered, but he did attend the exclusive luncheon, where he also had the opportunity to give a short speech. Standing in front of several African leaders and hundreds of high-level government officials and diplomats, Netanyahu duly began by congratulating Kenyatta for his electoral success, but quickly moved on to singing the praises of Israel’s cooperation with African countries and his aspiration to enhance it. ‘We believe in Africa, we believe in Kenya’, he reassured the audience. ‘We love Africa.’ He also called on the present leaders to support Israel’s bid for observer status at the African Union (AU) and stressed the importance of cooperation in the face of terrorism. ‘There is a savage disease’, he passionately warned. ‘It rampages so many countries. Boko Haram, al-Shabaab … if we work together, we’ll defeat the barbarians!’²

That same evening, Yohanes was sitting in the small Eritrean restaurant in Kampala where he worked as a cook and a waiter.³ He was watching the news, and he was not impressed by Netanyahu’s statements. In fact, he was irritated – so much so that when I met him and some of his friends a few days later in that same restaurant, he brought up Netanyahu’s Kenyan speech without me even asking about it. ‘Here he says he loves Africa but there he treats us as if we are not human beings’, he protested, as if he was trying to make sure that 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 was the site of intense political and military competition between Israel and the Arab world (primarily Egypt). Israel largely lost this battle during the 1973 Israeli–Arab war, when most African countries severed diplomatic relations with it. After Israel and Egypt signed a peace agreement in 1979, the urgency of guaranteeing African support declined, and the Israeli–Egyptian rivalry in Africa was slowly replaced with the much less militarised Israeli–Palestinian one. After Israel began to negotiate with the Palestinians, and following the Israeli–Jordanian peace agreement in the 1990s, Africa lost much of its strategic importance from the Israeli perspective. However, following the collapse of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process in the early 2000s and as Israel’s international isolation grew again, it slowly began to ‘return’ to the continent, once again seeking alliances that would weaken its rivals in the Middle East. If previous rounds of Israeli–Arab/Palestinian competition in Africa were intertwined in global Cold War dynamics, today the battle takes place within the context of the ‘war on terror’, the growing popularity of born-again Christian and reformist Islamic movements, and the renewed geostrategic interest of both Gulf and Asian powers in Africa.

Securitised international objectives also influenced the evolution and workings of Israeli state institutions. Since Israel’s international strategy was always considered and presented as a matter of state or regime survival, the security sector came to dominate it and civilian institutions or bureaucracies, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, were regularly bypassed or obstructed. The military was always the most influential and respected institution in the Israeli polity, and Israeli society was always obsessed with security and defence. As the country grew older, however, and particularly since the wars of 1967 and 1973, the distinction between its military elite and civilian leadership became increasingly blurred, as former security personnel and generals began to occupy a growing number of senior positions in the government, state institutions, parastatals, the arms industry and, more recently, the closely linked high-tech industry. Ultimately, they formed what Sheffer and Barak called a ‘security network’ – a powerful group of like-minded security-oriented people that transcends formal institutions and shapes Israel’s international strategy and national priorities.¹³

From an early stage, the security sector was deeply involved in Israel’s Africa diplomacy, often dealing with issues that are not directly related to defence, such as propaganda or migration management. This matters not only because it indicates what Israel’s priorities in Africa are and the extent to which its foreign strategy is shaped by its defence interests, but also because it determines which Israeli institutions interact with African states and peoples and how they operate. As opposed to civilian institutions, security agencies not only tend to seek military solutions to political problems but have great freedom to act in secrecy, based on the discretion of their members, and at the margins of the law or entirely outside of its realms. While civilian bureaucracies take pride in their rule-bound nature and emphasise consistency, security and intelligence agencies glorify the creative circumvention of rules and rely on opaqueness, informality and unpredictability. As the following chapters demonstrate, the resort to ‘clandestine diplomacies’, covert action and special ‘operations’ has been a salient feature of Israel’s interaction with African states.¹⁴

Equally important, and closely linked to the securitisation and informalisation of Israel’s presence in Africa and the opaqueness surrounding it, is its privatised nature. In the early 1960s, Israel’s engagement with African countries was both state-led and underpinned by a distinctly ‘statist’ vision of modernisation and state-building. But in the following decades, private actors became increasingly dominant players. Some of Israel’s largest security firms are technically private enterprises, though they are led and staffed by former members of Israel’s security apparatuses and work closely with Israeli armed forces and intelligence agencies. Some of the most dominant Israeli civilian firms in Africa (operating in the construction and extractives industries) maintain close ties with Israeli officials to advance the business, defence and political interests of elites in both Israel and Africa. Politicians and private actors often work hand in hand in the process of profit-making. The distinction between national interests and private ones can be unclear.

Over the years, some Israeli civil servants, diplomats and politicians protested against these processes of securitisation and privatisation and the lack of transparency surrounding Israel’s operations in Africa, claiming that they undermine Israel’s political objectives, the integrity of its state institutions and its human rights obligations. Israeli Africanist, human rights activist and former member of Knesset (Israel’s parliament) Naomi Chazan wrote in 2006 that behind Israel’s Africa strategy was always ‘an overt struggle between the diplomats and African aficionados on the one hand and the defense establishment and private interests on the other’, which ultimately ‘has been won by the latter’.¹⁵ The rise and current operations of Israeli private actors and security firms in Africa is further explored in the following chapters. But while these actors certainly gained the upper hand, it is also important to acknowledge that their domination has not been uncontested. Beneath the surface of Israel’s engagement with Africa always lay an internal Israeli debate about the Israeli state, its institutions and its priorities.

However, it was not only Israeli interests and initiatives that drove Israeli–African engagements or determined their trajectory. Students of Africa’s international relations will be familiar with debates around the agency and leverage of African actors within the international system and vis-à-vis Western or BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. They will also be familiar with the argument – put forward by Christopher Clapham in the 1990s – that despite their economic and military marginality in the international sphere, African states are not passive victims of the whims of much richer external actors.¹⁶ Rather, they are often able to take advantage of the geostrategic needs of more powerful states, offering them assets such as political loyalty or military access to strategically important territories in return for resources and support which can subsequently be used to advance local African agendas.

This book naturally focuses on Israel more than it does on any specific African state. However, the following chapters also aim to show that just as much as the history of Israel in Africa is a story about Israeli leaders seeking influence in the continent in order to curb their regional adversaries, it is also a story about African leaders utilising the rivalries of the Middle East and North Africa in order to draw Israeli material and political support for their own local ends. As we shall see, what Israel and Israelis did in Africa was determined by the changing economic and political circumstances in specific African states just as much as it was determined by the conditions in Israel/Palestine. As strategies of governance transformed, as flows of resources shifted and as the tools for their accumulation and distribution changed in Africa, so did the ways in which different Israeli actors were seeking to establish their influence on the continent.

Structure, scope and sources

The first two chapters of the book deal with the history of Israel’s engagement with Africa. The evolution of bilateral relations in the longue durée is crucial for understanding their current trajectory and dynamics. Political narratives, like institutional knowledge and capacities (or lack thereof), do not emerge out of nowhere. It is impossible to understand Israel’s contemporary strategic interest and the rhetoric Israelis deploy on the continent without considering Israel’s relationships with African countries in the early post-independence period, from the late 1950s and until the mid-1960s. Israeli foreign minister at the time, Golda Meir, referred to this period as Israel’s ‘African adventure’.¹⁷ It was characterised by extensive Israeli civilian and military assistance to African countries as part of a geopolitical competition between Israel and the Arab world, underlined by Israel’s attempt to establish itself as a legitimate member of the international community in general and the postcolonial ‘Third World’ in particular. This period is the focus of the first chapter.

The second chapter explores the transformation of Israel’s engagement with African countries from the 1967 war, during which Israel occupied territories in Egypt, Jordan and Syria, through the Israeli–Arab war of 1973, during which most African countries severed ties with Israel, and until the early 2000s. This period saw a gradual 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.