Israel, Somaliland, and African Sovereignty
The charge that African engagement with Israel constitutes a betrayal of Pan-Africanism rests on a fundamental misreading of both African political tradition and contemporary African security realities. It assumes that Pan-Africanism is an ideological prescription requiring uniform moral alignment with causes external to the continent, rather than a praxis rooted in sovereignty, order, and self-determination. From the Horn of Africa to the Great Lakes, democratic and semi-democratic African states engaging Israel—and, in Somaliland’s case, finding reciprocal recognition denied by Palestinian actors—are not defecting from African solidarity. They are exercising it.
Pan-Africanism was never conceived as an obligation to subordinate African interests to external conflicts, nor as a mechanism for enforcing ideological conformity. It emerged as a doctrine of emancipation from imposed hierarchies, foreign diktats, and destabilizing dependencies. In the twenty-first century, fidelity to Pan-Africanism requires not symbolic posturing but strategic realism: the capacity to distinguish between partners that enhance African sovereignty and actors whose political behavior exports instability, contradiction, and coercion. Much contemporary criticism of African-Israeli relations is grounded in a moral absolutism that collapses all engagement into endorsement. Under this logic, cooperation with Israel—whether in security, agriculture, or technology—is treated as complicity in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This framing is not only analytically weak; it is profoundly un-African in its denial of African agency.
African states operate in a security environment defined by jihadist insurgency, maritime insecurity, state fragmentation, and economic vulnerability. Al-Shabaab’s attacks in Kenya and Somalia, the destabilization of Red Sea trade routes, the spillover of conflicts in Sudan and South Sudan, and the proliferation of transnational extremist networks constitute immediate threats to African lives and sovereignty. In this context, Israel is not engaged as a moral symbol but as a functional partner: a technologically advanced, intelligence-capable, democratic state with proven expertise in counterterrorism, border security, water management, and agricultural resilience. By contrast, Palestinian political actors—despite invoking the language of self-determination—have repeatedly demonstrated an unwillingness to support African self-determination when it does not serve their narrative. Somaliland’s experience is instructive. Having built one of the Horn of Africa’s most stable, democratic, and functional polities through indigenous reconciliation and constitutionalism, Somaliland has sought international recognition on precisely the grounds Palestinians claim for themselves. Yet Palestinian representatives have opposed or ignored Somaliland’s aspirations, revealing a selective application of self-determination that undermines their moral claims within Africa. This contradiction has not gone unnoticed by African policymakers. It exposes the reality that African solidarity is often demanded but rarely reciprocated.
Somalilanders, moreover, have no reason—historical, moral, or religious—to feel guilt for engaging Israel or to believe they have betrayed the Muslim world by doing so. Islam does not mandate political subordination, nor does Muslim identity require allegiance to any single geopolitical cause, especially when that cause fails to respect Somaliland’s own right to self-determination. Somaliland is a Muslim society that has built peace, constitutional governance, and social cohesion through indigenous processes, not external patronage. Its partnerships are grounded in reciprocity and respect, not ideological submission. The expectation that Somaliland must sacrifice its security, recognition, or development to demonstrate symbolic loyalty to a fragmented “Muslim world” reproduces precisely the logic of external coercion that Pan-Africanism and postcolonial sovereignty were meant to reject. Political dignity in Islam, as in Pan-Africanism, is inseparable from self-responsibility. Engaging Israel, therefore, is not an act of betrayal but an affirmation that Somaliland’s future will be determined in Hargeisa—not in distant capitals that deny its existence while demanding its obedience.
The insistence that African states must align unconditionally with the Palestinian cause reflects a broader pathology in global politics: the weaponization of victimhood. When recognition, legitimacy, and moral authority are treated as scarce resources, suffering becomes competitive rather than solidaristic. In this framework, African agency is constrained by an implicit hierarchy of suffering in which African priorities are expected to defer to external narratives. This dynamic is neither benign nor accidental. It functions as a disciplining mechanism, pressuring African states to conform to positions that may undermine their security and development. When African governments resist—by partnering with Israel or recognizing Somaliland—they are accused not merely of policy disagreement but of moral treason. Pan-Africanism, however, was forged precisely to resist such external moral hierarchies. Its purpose was to restore African peoples as subjects of history, not perpetual auxiliaries to the grievances of others.
The portrayal of Israel as an exclusively white, European settler project imposed upon a racialized “Global South” collapses under even minimal anthropological scrutiny—particularly in Africa. Jewish presence on the continent long predates modern Zionism and European colonialism. The Beta Israel of Ethiopia, the Lemba communities of Southern Africa, the Abayudaya of Uganda, and other Afro-Jewish populations testify to a deep, endogenous Jewish-African continuity. These histories matter politically. They destabilize the simplistic binary that casts Jews as perpetual colonizers and Africans as their natural antagonists. They also expose the incoherence of claims that African engagement with Israel represents racial or civilizational betrayal. In reality, African and Jewish historical experiences intersect through shared trajectories of marginalization, displacement, and survival under imperial domination. African identification with Jewish self-determination is therefore not an anomaly—it is historically intelligible. What is anomalous is the expectation that Africans must subordinate their own security and sovereignty to a nationalist movement that neither shares these historical continuities nor consistently supports African aspirations.
Pan-Africanism has always been intertwined with non-alignment—not as passivity, but as autonomy. In today’s multipolar order, strategic independence means diversifying partnerships to avoid dependency on any single bloc. African engagement with Israel must be understood within this broader calculus. Israel is one partner among many, but a distinctive one: a democratic state outside traditional Western imperial hierarchies, technologically innovative, and operationally responsive to African security needs. Engagement with Israel does not preclude cooperation with China, the Gulf states, Europe, or the United States. Nor does it require silence on Palestinian issues. It simply reflects a refusal to allow African foreign policy to be dictated by ideological enforcers—whether Arab nationalist, Islamist, or Western activist. The African Union itself embodies this nuance. Its ability to engage Israel institutionally while contesting specific Israeli policies demonstrates that African diplomacy is capable of differentiation. What critics label hypocrisy is, in fact, political maturity.
Beyond security, Israeli cooperation in agriculture, water management, health systems, and technological capacity has delivered tangible benefits across East and Southern Africa. These partnerships address structural challenges—climate stress, food insecurity, infrastructure deficits—that directly affect African populations. To dismiss such cooperation as mere “normalization” is to privilege ideological symbolism over material well-being. Not all partnerships are morally equivalent. Some actors export arms, debt dependency, or ideological radicalization. Others export skills, systems, and stability. Pan-Africanism does not demand blindness to these differences; it demands discernment.
African states that choose Israel are not choosing oppression. They are choosing order over chaos, reciprocity over rhetoric, and sovereignty over submission. The real threat to Pan-Africanism today is not African engagement with Israel or recognition of Somaliland. It is the attempt to transform Pan-Africanism into an ideological straightjacket—one that punishes African states for prioritizing their own survival, stability, and democratic development. True Pan-Africanism does not ask Africans to seek permission. It does not require moral uniformity, nor does it sanctify actors who speak the language of liberation while denying it to others. It affirms the right of African peoples and states to judge their partners by outcomes, not slogans.
In choosing Israel as a partner, and in asserting Somaliland’s legitimacy where others deny it, democratic African states are not betraying Pan-Africanism. They are practicing it—seriously, soberly, and on African terms.
