Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press
With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu’s successful visit to four east African countries – Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Ethiopia -- earlier this summer, we might recall the ups and downs of the Jewish state’s seven decades long relationship with the continent it borders to its southwest.
In the first two decades of Israel’s independence, the nation worked assiduously at establishing a presence in newly sovereign African countries. After all, the Jewish state had itself emerged from colonial control in 1948.
Israel was involved in multiple foreign-aid projects in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s as part of its quest to gain political allies and determine its place in the decolonized world.
Israel dispatched diplomats across the continent, opening two dozen embassies. The first was opened in Accra, Ghana, when that country attained independence. Soon Israeli ambassadors operated in 33 countries and the country was, for a period, a major aid donor. Israel had at times the second-largest diplomatic presence in sub-Saharan Africa.
Not long afterwards, then foreign minister Golda Meir made a five-week trip to Africa and had the first high-level discussions with African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, William Tubman, and Felix Houphouet-Boigny.z
She believed that Israel had experience in nation-building that could be a model for the Africans.
“Like them, we had shaken off foreign rule; like them, we had to learn for ourselves how to reclaim the land, how to increase the yields of our crops, how to irrigate, how to raise poultry, how to live together, and how to defend ourselves,” she wrote in her autobiography My Life.
Israel could be a role model because it “had been forced to find solutions to the kinds of problems that large, wealthy, powerful states had never encountered.” She added that “we had something we wanted to pass on to nations that were even younger and less experienced than ourselves.”
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion told the Knesset in 1960 that “Our aid to the new countries” is not a matter of philanthropy. “We are no less in need of the fraternity of friendship of the new nations than they are of our assistance.”
In the late 1950s and 1960s, Israel sent experts in agriculture and development and helped establish agricultural cooperatives, youth training programs, medical infrastructure and joint industrial enterprises in a number of sub-Saharan countries.
Given the number of eye diseases on the continent, ophthalmology became Israel’s largest and longest-lasting medical aid program.
In 1962, Newsweek magazine called the Israeli program “one of the strangest unofficial alliances in the world.” But all that began to change as the Israeli-Arab conflict drove a wedge between African countries and the Jewish state.
Pressure from Arab nations, promising aid, and accentuated by the 1967 and 1973 wars between Israel and its neighbors, led most African states to cut their relations with Jerusalem.
Between June 12, 1967, and November 13, 1973, 29 African states broke relations with Israel; many also gave the Palestine Liberation Organization diplomatic status. After the Yom Kippur War, only Malawi, Lesotho and Swaziland maintained full diplomatic relations with Israel.
In November 1975, the nadir in Israeli-African relations came when 19 African countries voted in favor of the infamous United Nations General Assembly resolution identifying Zionism with racism, although five African countries -- Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Malawi, Swaziland, and the Central African Republic -- voted against the draft and sixteen other African countries abstained.
But since the 1980s, diplomatic relations with Sub-Saharan countries have been gradually renewed. By the late 1990s, official ties had been re-established with forty countries south of the Sahara, including a number of Muslim-majority states.
In June 2004, Israel and Ethiopia signed an agreement for cultural, educational and scientific cooperation, as well as a convention eliminating double taxation.
In April 2008, a trade agreement signalled a significant upgrading of Israeli aid to Africa. The joint declaration on trade and economic cooperation was signed in Jerusalem by government ministers from the African nations of Rwanda, Burundi, Benin and Liberia and Israel’s Minister of Trade and Industry Eli Yishai.
It included an Israeli commitment to help the African countries build infrastructure and technology, while also seeking to open new export markets for Israeli industries.
Since its establishment in 2008, Innovation Africa, an Israeli organization dedicated to improving the lives of rural villagers in Africa, has provided the people they serve with access to many Israeli technologies. Solar panels and drip irrigation systems have been installed in Malawan, Ugandan, Tanzanian, and South African villages.
In 2011, Israel formalized diplomatic relations with the newly established country of South Sudan. Additionally, it renewed its ties with Ghana after nearly four decades. In November 2012, Israel provided the University of Ghana with a $217 million loan to construct a 600-bed teaching hospital at Legon.
In May 2014, the Africa-Israel Initiative was launched in Ghana, with the expressed goal of lobbying and advocating for Israel’s strength and survival.
The Israeli Embassy in Senegal inaugurated a drip-irrigation farm project in the Senegalese city of Fatick in December 2014. Israeli firm Gigawatt Global began a project to increase solar energy capacity in Rwanda during February 2014.
On July 20 of this year, Israel resumed diplomatic relations with the Republic of Guinea, the small, overwhelmingly Muslim country in West Africa that had also cut ties with the Jewish state in 1967.
Foreign Ministry Director-General Dore Gold also met President Idriss Déby of Chad on July 14 at his presidential palace in the city of Fada, in the heart of the Saharan desert. The country had severed diplomatic ties with Jerusalem in the 1970s.
“Israel is calling on the countries that still haven’t renewed diplomatic relations to follow in Guinea’s footsteps so that we can work together to the benefit of all peoples in the region,” remarked Gold.
And during his African trip Netanyahu announced the intention of Tanzania to open its first-ever embassy in Tel Aviv. He also said the leaders of his host countries vowed publicly to push for Israel to regain observer status at the African Union. Chad this year holds the rotating chairmanship of the African Union.
All of this is good news.
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