Gaza and the Colonial Politics of Duplicity

Debating Ideas reflects the values and editorial ethos of the African Arguments book series, publishing engaged, often radical, scholarship, original and activist writing from within the African continent and beyond. It offers debates and engagements, contexts and controversies, and reviews and responses flowing from the African Arguments books. It is edited and managed by the International African Institute, hosted at SOAS University of London, the owners of the book series of the same name.

Israel in Africa, an African Arguments book

Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism describes a dying civilisation that wreaks havoc across the world and yet remains fully invested in discourses that justify its exploitations and brutality in the name of progress and humanism. It is, above all, a text about hypocrisy. It remains foundational and resonates powerfully today, I think, because of the way in which it points, with rage and a sense of urgency, at the deceptive nature of colonial discourses and therefore the duplicity of colonial politics. ‘Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of “reason” or before the bar of “conscience”,’ Césaire writes, and so ‘increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive.’

Césaire notes briefly and early in the essay that the colonial hypocrisy he describes is ‘of recent date’ – that it did not characterise earlier imperial conquests. From the distance of a few generations, however, it seems that this hypocrisy, perhaps like other ‘late colonial’ phenomena, has not only endured, but flourished to become a key characteristic of ‘post-colonial’ politics which, even more than their colonial predecessors, have been described as politics of duplicity, illusions, deception, smokescreens, and falsification. Reading Césaire’s text against the background of the war in Gaza is a useful reminder that Israel’s engagements with former colonies, particularly but not only in Africa, have long played an important role in its own politics of duplicity.

Césaire briefly mentions ‘the Jews’ alongside other oppressed groups, and makes multiple references to Nazism, although he does not make any reference to Palestine or Israel. By the time he wrote Discourse on Colonialism, the Zionist movement had firmly positioned itself on the side of imperial powers in its pursuit of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East, but this alliance was not uncontested. One of its more vocal and articulate critics, who also predicted its disastrous consequences for both Jews and Palestinians, was Hannah Arendt. ‘It will not be easy either to save the Jews or to save Palestine in the twentieth century,’ she wrote in 1944. ‘That it can be done with categories and methods of the nineteenth century seems at the very most highly improbable.’

Its reliance on colonial methods notwithstanding, the Zionist movement in its earlier days attracted the cautious sympathy of anti-colonial and pan-Africanist thinkers – from Garvey through Padmore and Nkrumah, to Senghor. This sympathy was rooted in the notion that the same ideologies and structures that enabled colonial expansion and oppression around the world also enabled the marginalisation and extermination of Jews in Europe. Israeli leaders never fully endorsed this idea, as Arendt controversially argued, because it conflicted with their notion of antisemitism as a unique, natural phenomenon that is destined to repeat itself in any political context, but they strategically drew upon it when they tried to position Israel alongside the young nations of the so-called Third World in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Africa was the main focus of these efforts, and arguably where they were also most successful. The rhetorical positioning of Israel as an ally of independent Africa was diplomatically significant: Israel hoped that a pro-Israel African bloc would bolster its fragile international position and allow it to undermine Arab initiatives at the UN, particularly with regard to the right of return of Palestinian refugees. But its reliance on imperial powers and its rivalry with Egypt quickly placed Israel in opposition to the more radical political forces in the continent – including Nkrumah, who turned from a key interlocutor into a diplomatic nuisance. Soon enough, its occupation of the Sinai Peninsula in 1967 rendered its humanistic rhetoric of liberation and brotherhood indefensible.

Throughout the decades, however, Africa remained an arena towards which Israeli leaders were compelled whenever they sensed that their own or their country’s legitimacy was at risk. If in the early decades of independence it was the somewhat forced language of solidarity between oppressed peoples that coated Israel’s engagements in Africa, this was quickly replaced by the language of security and stability afforded by the ideological and economic contexts of the Cold War and consequently the War on Terror: Israel emerged as a key intermediary for leaders in the Global South who wanted to utilise its arms or links in Washington to bolster their regimes, while securitised rhetoric allowed both Israel and its interlocutors to legitimise oppressive policies and political persecution.

Then came the discourse of digital modernity, innovation, self-sufficiency, and the economic resilience of our current era of oppressive neoliberal pacification. We have seen this rhetoric at play around the Abraham Accords – Israel’s normalisation agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, enabled by American arm twisting and patronage. We have also seen it at play in Israel’s engagements in Africa over the past decade, in which it had again strategically positioned itself as a model and an example to be followed. Like the older discourses of state-led development and securitised governance, the language of neoliberal pacification chimes with broader discursive trends, namely, the increasingly conspicuous preaching of entrepreneurship, innovation and digitalisation across sectors and fields in the development world.

In parallel, another important force that has come to shape the discourse around Israel/Palestine is Christian Zionism. This faith has long been influential in American politics of course, but it is increasingly becoming so in the Global South in general and African in particular due to the growing influence of born-again Christianity on political argumentation and institutions. Christian Zionism as championed by born-again elites in the continent insists that the redemption of African states and the African continent hinges on their uncompromising support of Israel. Crucially, while it fully justifies Israeli oppression and violence, born-again Christianity in Africa more broadly claims to represent a liberating political programme that is committed to truth and to uncovering the deceptions of those brands of Christianity introduced to Africans by colonial missionaries.

The ‘hypocrisy’ Césaire decried has proven to be remarkably adaptive, capable of creatively reinventing itself and mutating with the support of wilful ignorance, greed, and new communication technologies. Today, we see various strands of such colonial politics of duplicity coming together in Gaza, legitimising a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. What is perhaps ironic is that they are increasingly supporting the political programme of far-right messianic Zionists in Israel, who, among all the smokescreens and double-talk, are actually rather explicit and honest about their desire for bloodshed and their supremacist ideologies. As much as Césaire’s text reads prophetically, the current moment, in which taking refuge in hypocrisy appears to be less and less necessary, is perhaps even grimmer than the realities it describes.