Israel in Africa. Yotam Gidron
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 war was over, more than 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced or expelled, primarily to the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, rather than to Egypt. For them, these events marked ‘the catastrophe’, or in Arabic, al-Nakba. Israelis, however, remember 1948 as their ‘War of Independence’, as it marked the establishment of the Jewish state. For them, the return of Palestinian refugees was, and remains to this day, unacceptable. When the war ended, there were some 156,000 Arabs and 716,000 Jews in Israel.3 Allowing 700,000 Palestinian refugees to return to their homes would have threatened the Jewish demographic majority. A moment of liberation for the Jewish people and a disaster for the Palestinians, the violence of 1948 resulted in one of the world’s greatest and most protracted refugee crises and led to one of its most persistent and politicised conflicts – both of which are yet to be resolved. It established a set of facts that continue to shape Israel’s domestic and international politics today and have been a defining factor in the history of its engagement with Africa as well.
It did not take long for the impact of Israel’s independence and the 1948 war to be felt in Africa beyond Egypt. The Arab League – comprising at the time Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria – refused to recognise the new Jewish state and boycotted it. Egypt argued that it had the right to ban Sudan, then under a joint Anglo-Egyptian government, from trading with Israel as well. Israel, however, saw in trade with colonial Sudan an opportunity to undermine the Arab boycott. Some Israeli officials even entertained the idea of seeking ties with the country, but this was never seriously pursued.4 With its independence in January 1956, Sudan joined the Arab League. Over the next two years Israel tried to appeal to Washington and Paris to extend their political and financial support to Khartoum in order to keep it out of Egypt’s sphere of influence, but its efforts did not bear fruit.5 To find allies in Africa, Israel had to look further afield.
Israel turns to Africa
Histories of Israel’s engagement with Africa most commonly begin a few years after 1948, with the resounding diplomatic shock of the Bandung Conference. In 1955 Israel was excluded from the first Asian–African Conference, which was held in Bandung, Indonesia, and brought together 29 young nations to discuss issues of mutual concern and political and cultural cooperation. From the African continent, Libya, Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, Gold Coast (now Ghana) and Sudan all participated. Israel was not only left out of this forum, but the participants formally expressed their support ‘of the rights of the Arab people of Palestine and called for the implementation of the United Nations Resolutions on Palestine and the achievement of the peaceful settlement of the Palestine question’.6 Similarly excluded from the conference was white-ruled South Africa – hardly a country Israel wanted to be associated with at the time.
A united Afro-Asian ‘Third World’ appeared to be emerging as a promising new force in the international sphere, and Israel was being branded as its enemy. The country’s foreign policy strategy, it became clear in Jerusalem, had to be reconsidered. Since independence