Immediately after Hamas launched a series of coordinated attacks from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel on Oct. 7, Israel’s Western partners coalesced around a demonstration of unified support for Israel that is reminiscent of their collective response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Last week, U.S. President Joe Biden explicitly linked the two conflicts in a televised speech in which he requested $106 billion in emergency funding for Israel and Ukraine. “The assault on Israel echoes nearly 20 months of war, tragedy and brutality inflicted on the people of Ukraine,” Biden said, adding that “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy.”
As the mounting civilian death toll in the Palestinian territories from Israel’s air strikes in Gaza—as well as attacks on Palestinians by Israeli security forces and settlers in the West Bank—triggered a global backlash against Israel’s response to the attack of Oct. 7, however, both the U.S. and its European allies complemented that unequivocal support for what they called Israel’s right to defend itself with calls for Israel to respect international law in its fight against Hamas. They have also begun to pressure Israel to allow immediate humanitarian access to Gaza and pause its anticipated ground invasion there to allow more aid to enter.
That shift reflects the contest for global opinion currently underway over the Israel-Hamas war. And in many ways, it too is unfolding along similar lines to the initial global response to Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine.
Western government officials have called for the broader international community to boost their support for Israel, wrapping their appeals in the language of international norms and defending the U.S.-led global order. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Sunday that “it would be good to hear the entire world speaking clearly and with one voice” against Hamas. Washington’s European allies have echoed the Biden administration’s talking points, arguing that there can be no excuse for the Oct. 7 attacks and shoring up trans-Atlantic support for Israel.
But as with the war in Ukraine, fault lines in the international system have emerged amid the latest fighting in Gaza. While few governments in the Global South have explicitly endorsed Hamas, neither have they mirrored the outpouring of unequivocal support for Israel from Western capitals. At the same time, their reactions are by no means monolithic.
This variation was perhaps most evident among the African Union’s 55 member states, whose positions on the conflict between Israel and Hamas range between three main, if not mutually exclusive, positions—namely, support for Israel, sympathy for Palestinian liberation and nonalignment marked by calls for a cease-fire and a reaffirmation of the two-state solution to the conflict. As should be expected on a continent of 55 countries and approximately 1.4 billion people, the responses by African states to the latest war in Gaza reflects their different histories, traditions and interests, as well as the preferences of national leaders tasked with crystallizing those factors into a coherent foreign policy.
Among Israel’s strongest supporters on the continent are Ghana, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya, whose governments all expressed solidarity with Israel after the Hamas attack. Palestine has historically found its strongest support in Africa among a group of states from the continent’s north and south led by Algeria and South Africa, respectively, both of which occupy prominent symbolic places in the memory of anti-colonial and liberation movements on the continent.
This bloc of countries, while stopping well short of supporting the Hamas attack, emphasized the wider context of the conflict, including Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territories, its blockade of Gaza and its repression of Palestinians more generally. A third, somewhat amorphous group—led by the AU Commission as well as countries like Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda—tried to walk a fine line by avoiding taking a direct position on the latest round of fighting, but rather mourning the loss of lives on both sides and calling for a cessation of hostilities and dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians.
Notwithstanding their improved bilateral relations with Israel, African governments are unlikely to look favorably upon Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.
The three positions staked out by African countries have a logic of their own. The countries that expressed solidarity with Israel—Ghana, Congo, Rwanda and Kenya—have strong bilateral relations with Israel, some of which date back to the period before those nations gained formal independence from European colonizers. In addition, these four countries are crucial nodes of Washington’s otherwise shrinking footprint in Africa, whether as security partners, key players in Washington’s race to secure critical minerals needed for the green energy transition, or both, as in the case of resource-rich Ghana and Congo.
The African countries that expressed sympathy for Palestine consist largely of Muslim-majority nations in the continent’s north as well as South Africa, whose ruling African National Congress has held power since the formal demise of apartheid in 1994. Since then, key state and ANC party positions have been filled by many veterans of the anti-apartheid struggle who vividly recall Israel’s support for the white-minority government that ruled the country with an iron fist from 1948 to 1994, to say nothing of the backing the apartheid government enjoyed from Israel’s key Western allies. Pretoria often stakes out a position as a prominent African voice in international affairs, and its apartheid-era regime has increasingly been used to describe conditions for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. As such, it regularly leverages the moral weight of its history in support of Palestine, including its call last year for Israel to be declared an “apartheid state.”
As for the third group, the nature of their responses can be explained partly by the evolution of their relationship with Israel. States like Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania have historically supported—at least officially—Palestinian liberation, and they broke off formal diplomatic relations with Israel in 1973 in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War at the urging of the Organization of African Unity, the precursor to the AU. Uganda, led by then-military ruler Idi Amin, was the first of more than 25 OAU members to sever diplomatic ties with Israel. Three years later, Uganda would make international headlines as the scene of a famous raid on Entebbe Airport by Israeli commandos to release Jewish hostages whose plane had been hijacked by Palestinian and German militants. Tanzania was home to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s first embassy in Africa in 1973, and it joined many other African nations in granting diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine in the late 1980s.
Relations between Israel and this bloc of states have improved considerably since the 1970s, however, and the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO marked a major turning point in Israel’s contemporary relations with African countries more broadly. That relationship has grown in leaps and bounds since then, particularly under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s premiership, whose diplomatic engagement culminated in the AU granting observer status to Israel in July 2021. Today, Israel has diplomatic relations with over 40 African countries, and the support it finds across the continent is powered by security cooperation, economic diplomacy and the remarkable rise of evangelical Pentecostalism across Africa over the past four decades.
In light of the turnaround in Israel’s diplomatic position and the weakening of support for Palestine across Africa, Israel might expect to easily win African governments’ support amid its ongoing conflict with Hamas, especially in international forums like the United Nations. But there is no guarantee that will be the case. Notwithstanding their bilateral relations with Israel, African governments are unlikely to look favorably upon Israel’s conduct of the latest war, including its relentless bombing of Gaza—which has now killed more than 6,000 Palestinians—and calls for the forced displacement of people in northern Gaza to the Sinai Peninsula in anticipation of a possible ground invasion by the Israeli army.
The tactics employed by Israel, including the bombing of a United Nations-run school in a refugee camp in Gaza and a mosque in the West Bank, as well as the restriction of water, fuel, electricity and aid entering Gaza, are regarded by many observers—including U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres—as violations of international humanitarian laws and have drawn comparison to Russia’s behavior in Ukraine. Those tactics have been widely condemned, including by regional states on good terms with Israel like Jordan and Egypt, even as Western governments have avoided explicitly criticizing Israel for its indiscriminate bombing.
African governments remember only too well the relentless pressure they faced from the U.S. and its European allies to strongly condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. They will also recall the West’s support for the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Russian President Vladimir Putin. They might reasonably ask why Western powers have not held Israel to the same standards they applied to Russia.
Irrespective of the nature of the relationship between African countries and Israel, many of their governments sympathize with Palestinian sentiments that Western powers—and the U.S. in particular—are far from honest brokers in the conflict but rather partisans with their thumb on a scale already heavily tilted to favor Israel. For many African countries, the West can either claim to support a rules-based order or affirm unflinching support for Israel—but not both.
Given the difficulty Western powers have had in winning the support of African governments for Ukraine amid its war against Russia, the choice by Washington and its European allies to link that conflict with the latest hostilities between Israel and Palestine is unlikely to broaden diplomatic support for Israel among African governments. To the contrary, the critiques of the liberal international order made by African governments vis-a-vis the war in Ukraine apply almost entirely to the conditions surrounding Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas.
As with the war in Ukraine, the reaction of African governments to the Israel-Hamas war will be driven by interests and historical factors. Ignoring that will do nothing to help Israel and its backers in the West make their case for support.
Chris Olaoluwa Ògúnmọ́dẹdé is an editor, analyst and consultant who writes about African politics, security and foreign relations, with a focus on West Africa. He was formerly an associate editor at WPR.