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Written by Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts
Iranian-backed Houthi rebels claim to have targeted Israel with ballistic missiles over the Red Sea, causing Tel Aviv to respond last week by deploying missile boats. These recent developments may once again place the region under the spotlight. The issue of the Palestinian conflict in fact has long been a divisive matter in the wider African continent, and within the African Union (AU), as the South African condemnation of what it described as the Israeli “Apartheid” last year clearly showed. The dramatic situation that is unfolding in Palestine today is having massive repercussions globally, and the North of Africa, the so-called Horn of Africa, especially, can be particularly affected by it. To better understand this, one needs to go back in time about three years, though.
Since the 2020 US-brokered Abraham Accords, and the subsequent normalization agreements with Israel signed by states such as the United Arab Emirates (UEA), tensions over the issue have arisen in the continent, and particularly in North Africa. The timing of the Abraham Accords is interesting: the Horn of Africa has been increasingly dominated by rising Gulf states, as Alex de Waal, a World Peace Foundation’s executive director, wrote in a 2019 paper. The 2020 Israel-UAE deal in particular, and notably their joint naval drill in November 2021, raised some eyebrows. Among other reasons for that, the UAE can be described as a rising military regional power, with a presence in Eritrea and Somalia, for instance, and also having, together with Tel Aviv, been occupying Yemen’s Socotra Island.
Far from being merely a matter of normalizing relations with the Jewish state, these agreements with Tel Aviv in fact have opened the door to security and military cooperation, thus increasing Israel’s presence in Africa – a presence which includes private companies with close ties with the state such as the NSO Group, but also the Shin Bet (Israel’s Security Agency), the Mossad and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) themselves. Such has been a key part of Netanyahu’s diplomacy – often described by critics as “buying friends by selling weapons” or sometimes as “spyware diplomacy” – for the last six years at least.
For one thing, one quarter of the Jewish states’s maritime trade goes through the port of Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba. Alex de Waal describes the Red Sea as “Israel’s back door”, the coastal countries there (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen Eritrea, and Djibouti) all being, in Tel Aviv’s perspective, “pieces in the jigsaw of its extended security frontier.” As Waal reminds us, about 10 percent of the global maritime trade is carried through the straits between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
Besides its concerns regarding the Red Sea’s security, Tel Aviv’s foreign policy has also focused on gaining African support pertaining to votes at international bodies, Palesting obviously being a hot topic. Thus far, such a strategy had been gaining Israel new allies, for sure, but, at the same time, fueling domestic tensions within these very states – and, more critically, inter-state frictions, as well. Morocco, for instance, is another point of contention: in a kind of “quid pro quo” over Morocco’s own normalization deal with its Israeli ally, former US President Donald Trump recognized Moroccan claims over the disputed territory of Western Sahara, controlled by Algerian-backed rebels, thus increasing the heat in what already was a boiling pan. Already in December 2020, Algeria’s then Prime Minister Abdelaziz Djerad denounced the Israel-Morocco deal in strong language, describing the agreement as a “dirty alliance” through which the “Zionist entity” (in his word) tried to get closer to Algerian borders.
When it comes to state officials in the region, anti-Israel speech is fueled by security concerns, from the perspective of some of these states such as Algeria, but such feelings have frequently found an echo in popular opinion whenever Tel Aviv bombs civilians in Palestine, something which happens, with varying intensity, quite often. The next year, in May 2021, Israeli bombing of residential buildings in Gaza, for example, sparked a humanitarian crisis and pro-Palestine protests, further polarizing the Middle East – again with an impact in the Horn of Africa.
The ongoing Israeli military campaign which started in October, after the Hamas attacks, is, one could say, unprecedented in its scale – and its diplomatic and geopolitical consequences will probably be so as well. Washington has long treated its Israeli ally as a kind of exception to international law and this seems to be backfiring. As I wrote, Turkish-Israeli ties in all likelihood are going back to the freezer – not to mention the rapprochement with Saudi Arabia.
All of this is very bad news for the Jewish state, considering all its strategic interests in the Red Sea and in the Horn of Africa, a region troubled by the complex situations unfolding in Sudan – not to mention a number of hydropolitical conflicts. As the aforementioned Alex de Waal reminds us, anti-Israeli feelings fueled by indignation over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza plus Hama’s boldness will encourage Islamists groups such as Somalia’s al-Shabaab – not to mention the Houthi movement.
In addition, Israel and Turkey already compete for influence in North Africa, as the former seeks to connect the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea as part of its geostrategic oil and gas interests, and with both countries’ relations severely damaged as of now (over Gaza), the area may increasingly become yet another point of contention.
Moreover, as I wrote in January, post-Nord Stream Europe has been in quest for energy alternatives to Russian gas, and both Algeria and Morocco have been competing for European markets, however it would be unrealistic to expect a robust energy supply from North Africa pipelines, considering the region’s ongoing tensions. This is particularly true now, as Middle Eastern stormy waves reach the Horn of Africa and beyond – thus the European continent’s industrial, economic and energy crises remain deadlocked – and so do emerging North African power aspirations towards becoming key energy providers, as the current Middle-Eastern conflict risks spilling across the Red Sea.
“…europe has been in quest for energy alternatives to russian gas, and both algeria and morocco have been competing for european markets…”
how can morocco compete since it is neither a petrol nor a gas producing country and it used to get its energy thru algeria but the pipeline and the border is closed since 2020?
“…however it would be unrealistic to expect a robust energy supply from north africa pipelines, considering the region’s ongoing tensions.”
the nigeria – niger – algeria pipeline is close to completion, it would have been interesting to have the author’s take on the consequences of it on the sahel region and its geopolitical ramifications in north africa.
no disrespect to uriel araujo “researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts” but the title is misleading since the content of the article contains very little information about what is going on in this complex african region.
nonetheless big thanks to southfront for relaying the article.