At exactly 2 p.m. on 6 October 1973, thousands of Egyptian soldiers surged across the Suez Canal under the cover of one of the largest artillery bombardments in modern warfare, targeting the nation of Israel. At precisely the same moment, Syria unleashed a massive attack, including a ground invasion of the Golan Heights, stunning a nation observing Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
The war that followed would redraw the political landscape of the Middle East. Less visibly – but no less profoundly – it would also unravel Israel’s flourishing relationships across Africa. The diplomatic rupture was particularly striking because only a decade earlier the trajectory had been very different.
When many African nations emerged from colonial rule in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Israel was among the first countries to actively engage the continent’s newly independent states through development cooperation. Having achieved statehood only in 1948, Israel saw in Africa a community of young nations grappling with many of the same challenges: building institutions, expanding agricultural production, educating a skilled workforce, and fostering economic self-reliance.
This vision was championed by some of Israel’s most influential leaders. Long before she became Prime Minister (1969–1974), Golda Meir served as Israel’s Foreign Minister from 1956 to 1966. She believed that Israel’s own experience of nation-building gave it something practical to offer newly independent countries. In 1958, she embarked on a landmark tour of West Africa, visiting Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire. Moved by the developmental, agricultural, and healthcare struggles of newly sovereign African states, she returned with a firm resolve: Israel would generously offer its specialized, cost-efficient technology and knowledge – laying the groundwork for MASHAV, Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation.
President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (1952–1963) reinforced this commitment through state visits to newly independent African nations, symbolising Israel’s desire to build relationships based on mutual respect. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (1948–1954 and 1955–1963), meanwhile, viewed the emerging nations of Africa as natural partners for a young Israel seeking friendship beyond its immediate neighbourhood. His conviction that cooperation should be built on mutual benefit rather than dependency became a defining feature of Israel’s engagement with Africa throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.
African leaders responded with considerable enthusiasm. For many of the continent’s newly independent governments, Israel offered a partnership that resonated with their own aspirations for nation-building. In Ghana, which became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence in 1957, President Kwame Nkrumah welcomed Israeli expertise as he pursued an ambitious programme of national development. Israeli advisers worked alongside Ghanaian counterparts in agricultural cooperatives, youth programmes, housing, and fisheries, making Ghana one of Israel’s closest partners in West Africa during the 1960s.
In Kenya, following independence in 1963, cooperation centred on agriculture, water management, and professional training. During the 1960s, Kenyan irrigation engineers, agricultural extension officers, and senior civil servants travelled to Israel to study arid-land farming, irrigation systems, and rural development. Many returned to apply these techniques through Kenya’s expanding irrigation programmes, including projects under the National Irrigation Board.
Uganda, which gained independence in 1962, also forged close ties with Israel during its early post-independence years. Cooperation extended beyond agriculture to include aviation, infrastructure, and military training. Before relations deteriorated under Idi Amin in the early 1970s, Uganda was regarded as one of Israel’s most important partners in East Africa and a symbol of the confidence that characterised Israel’s engagement with the continent.
Thus, by the early 1970s, Israel had established diplomatic relations with more than thirty African states. But the Yom Kippur War fundamentally altered the landscape. In the months that followed, Arab oil-producing nations initiated the 1973 oil embargo – a strategic retaliation that weaponized oil exports, severely restricting supplies to countries perceived as supporting Israel during the war. They leveraged this economic stranglehold to compel governments around the world to distance themselves from Israel. For many African states – heavily dependent on imported oil and navigating the competing pressures of the Cold War – the cost of maintaining close ties with Israel became increasingly difficult to bear. One after another, governments severed diplomatic relations. Within a year, most of sub-Saharan Africa had turned away from one of its earliest development partners.
Yet the rupture proved neither permanent nor complete. The end of the Cold War created new diplomatic opportunities, while Africa’s own priorities began to evolve. Food security, climate resilience, healthcare, digital innovation, and entrepreneurship increasingly displaced ideological alignments as the defining concerns of national development. At the same time, Israel had become a global leader in water technology, precision agriculture, medical innovation, cybersecurity, and start-up entrepreneurship – areas of growing relevance to African economies.
Diplomatic ties were gradually restored throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Today, Israel enjoys diplomatic relations with more than 40 African countries, while cooperation spans agriculture, water management, healthcare, cybersecurity, renewable energy, and innovation. MASHAV once again trains African professionals, Israeli companies invest in sectors ranging from irrigation and renewable energy to digital health and financial technology, and African entrepreneurs collaborate with Israeli innovation hubs in ways that would have been difficult to imagine during the years of diplomatic estrangement.
Kenya offers a compelling example of this renewed partnership. Israeli companies continue to support irrigation, dairy farming, healthcare, and technology, while Kenyan professionals regularly participate in advanced training programmes in Israel. Rwanda has similarly embraced cooperation in agriculture, innovation, and digital transformation, recognising Israel’s expertise in building knowledge-based economies despite limited natural resources.
The relationship remains complex, however. The war in Gaza has prompted criticism from several African governments, and countries such as South Africa have adopted sharply different diplomatic positions towards Israel. Yet the geopolitical realities today are starkly different from those of the 1970s. Rather than maintaining a united front, the modern Arab world is heavily fractured, with deep divisions over regional threats such as Iranian influence. Just as the Yom Kippur War reshaped global alignments fifty years ago, the ultimate outcome of the current conflict could similarly pivot Middle Eastern and African diplomatic landscapes. Despite these political tensions, the practical cooperation that has quietly expanded over the past three decades has largely weathered the storm.
Reflecting on her visits to Africa, Golda Meir once wrote that Israelis and Africans understood one another because both had won their independence after a long struggle. More than half a century later, that observation still carries weight. The foundations of the relationship were never built solely on diplomatic agreements. They were built on shared experiences of nation-building, on the belief that knowledge could be more transformative than aid, and on the conviction that young nations could learn from one another.
That is why Israel’s return to Africa has been so quiet. It has not been driven by dramatic peace accords or headline-grabbing summits. It has taken shape through research centres, farms, hospitals, technology incubators, and professional exchanges. In an age increasingly defined by transactional diplomacy, the enduring strength of Israel-Africa relations may lie in something far simpler: a partnership built not on ideology, but on solving common problems together.
[Photo by Alexander Nedviga on Unsplash]
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