Israel's surveillance tools are now part of its economic presence in Africa. Photo: File
Last month, Israel opened a new embassy in Lusaka, Zambia, after a 50-year absence. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called it part of the “alliance of believers”, adding, “Strengthening our engagement with Africa is a strategic priority.”
As the world increasingly unites in criticising the Zionist regime’s occupation and war on Gaza, amplified by the UN declaring it a “genocide of the Palestinian people”, Israel is looking to Africa as a soft power destination. It hopes the pivot to the continent will translate to UN votes and economic benefits.
This explains the radical intensification of its diplomatic efforts in Africa, which saw six new Israel Allies Caucuses launched in African parliaments in Ethiopia, Côte d’Ivoire, Lesotho, Seychelles, Gabon and Guinea-Conakry in July 2025. In April 2024, Malawi opened an embassy in Israel and the Africa-Israel Parliamentary Summit was held in Addis Ababa in September.
The caucuses affirm Israel’s right to exist with Jerusalem as its capital and signal the pursuit of expanded cooperation in agriculture, technology, climate resilience and counterterrorism.
But how useful is the Israeli partnership to African nations and is Israeli aid nothing more than a debt trap for the struggling nations it claims to assist?
‘Development cooperation’
Israel describes its engagement with Africa as “development cooperation”. Agricultural centres, irrigation projects and training schemes are promoted as gifts of expertise from a small state to a struggling continent. In reality, this is less about solidarity than about power. The financing is structured as buyer’s credits: Israeli banks pay Israeli contractors upfront, export credit agencies insure the risk and African governments guarantee repayment for years to come. If projects fail, the firms are already paid and the banks are protected; African treasuries — and citizens — absorb the loss.
This is a classic case of asymmetrical interdependence. Israel cultivates the appearance of soft power — attraction through technical know-how — but in practice exercises structural power, shaping the rules of finance to ensure the benefits flow one way. As former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir admitted after her 1958 Africa tour: “Did we go into Africa because we wanted votes at the United Nations? Yes, of course …”
What is a buyer’s credit and why is it always in dollars?
Buyer’s credit is when a foreign bank pays an exporter upfront and the importing government promises to repay the bank over time.
Step 1: Israeli bank pays Israeli contractor (e.g. Netafim, Green-2000).
Step 2: African government signs a sovereign guarantee to repay over 5 to 10 years.
Step 3: Loan is insured by Israel’s export credit agency Ashra.
Repayments are almost always in US dollars or euros — never local currency — because export credit agencies insure only in stable currencies.
If the local currency depreciates, the debt burden balloons. Governments must use foreign reserves to repay, cutting spending on health, education or subsidies. Citizens pay twice — once through taxes and again through lost public services.
The 1973 war pushed many African states to sever relations with Israel resulting in aid drying up overnight. But, in recent years, Israel has returned with the same formula — contracts that enrich Israeli firms while locking African citizens into debt service.
Ethiopia: Irrigation and debt
In 2016, under then prime minister Hailemariam Desalegn, Ethiopia signed a $200 million buyer’s credit with Israel’s Bank Hapoalim to finance drip irrigation for its sugarcane industry by Netafim. The loan looked like a development partnership, but its structure reveals the imbalance — Hapoalim paid Netafim directly, Ashra insured the risk and the Ethiopian state carried the liability over 9.5 years at commercial rates.
When corruption and mismanagement crippled the sugar sector, the project under-delivered. Netafim had already been paid; repayments still fell due. Ethiopia spends less than $10 per citizen annually on health and external interest payments absorb around 0.5 to 0.6% of GDP. A single instalment could have vaccinated 2 million children. Instead, scarce resources were diverted to creditors.
Zambia: Agro-centres and arrears
In 2019, President Edgar Lungu’s government signed a $47 million buyer’s credit with Israel Discount Bank to fund an “agriculture centre of excellence” contracted to Green-2000. Insured by Ashra and Dutch export credit agency Atradius, the structure ensured the Israeli contractor was paid upfront while Zambia carried the debt.
This came on top of a $176 million Tahal water project announced in 2017. By the end of 2022, Zambia’s external arrears reached 15% of GDP, forcing default and restructuring. Hospitals ran short of drugs, teachers went unpaid and rural roads deteriorated as repayments consumed scarce funds. Israeli firms exited whole; Zambian citizens bore the austerity.
Angola: Quiminha and beyond
In 2016–17, under president José Eduardo dos Santos, Angola awarded Israeli firm Tahal a $370 million contract for the Quiminha agricultural complex, followed by projects worth another $291 million. Financing was opaque but backed by the state.
When oil prices crashed, debt service took precedence over social spending, while food insecurity deepened. Israeli contractors profited while Angolans endured subsidy cuts and worsening poverty.
Uganda: A precedent
In the 1960s and 1970s, Israeli loans backed agricultural and mineral projects, including a potash scheme. Many underperformed, but debts endured. Today Uganda still spends about 3.5% of GDP on interest payments, a legacy of reliance on non-concessional loans.
Ashra: Israel’s export credit agency
Ashra (Israel Foreign Trade Risks Insurance Corporation) is the body that guarantees Israeli exports abroad.
What it does: Insures banks and contractors so they face no risk if an African government defaults.
How it works: Ashra pays out the bank or firm, then chases the debtor state for repayment.
Effect: Israeli firms are guaranteed profits; African governments and citizens bear all repayment risk.
Why it matters: Aid framed as “partnership” is risk-free commerce for Israel, debt for Africa.
Technology as dependency: Nigeria’s example
Israel’s model extends beyond agriculture into technology and security. Nigeria’s embrace of Israeli surveillance tools illustrates how “partnerships” often come with hidden costs and political strings. In 2013 the government contracted Elbit Systems for a $40 million internet monitoring platform and Nigerian law enforcement agencies have since adopted Cellebrite’s phone-extraction tools.
Far from constituting aid, these deals lock Nigerian institutions into costly procurement cycles denominated in foreign currency, with little transparency or accountability. Just as agricultural “assistance” has left states paying off irrigation debts, Nigeria’s search for security has tethered it to Israeli surveillance firms — transferring scarce funds into foreign coffers while exposing citizens to overreach and abuse. Israeli technology exports reproduce the same extractive logic as its aid projects: short-term fixes traded for long-term liabilities.
Weapons, surveillance and a compromised sovereignty
In recent years, Israel’s economic engagement in Africa has aggressively expanded into agritech, cybersecurity and critical infrastructure. By 2014, market sales of Israeli agricultural technologies (such as drip irrigation systems) to African countries had reached $100 million. These sales have continued into 2024 and 2025.
But it is the arms trade that reveals the partnerships’ most disturbing contours. Annual Israeli military exports to African nations embroiled in conflict are estimated between $200 million and $400 million, supplying unmanned aerial vehicles, artillery and surveillance technology to Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and South Sudan.
At the end of 2023 Israel Aerospace Industries signed an approximately $1 billion deal over five years to provide Morocco with satellites, particularly the Ofek 13 spy satellites. Additional defence deals with Morocco include $540 million for the Barak MX air defence system in 2022 and $48 million for Heron 1 unmanned aerial vehicles delivered since 2014. And Israeli company Check Point Software Technologies has established a presence in Casablanca as part of a broader cyber cooperation strategy.
Ghana has also engaged in cybersecurity collaboration with Israel, including government-to-government agreements on telecommunications security.
This trade is notoriously opaque, yet its consequences are starkly visible. Israeli weapons have been linked to documented war crimes by UN investigators in South Sudan and are wielded by repressive regimes in Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea known for torture and extrajudicial killings. Similarly, Israeli spyware and digital surveillance tools have been adopted by governments with weak democratic safeguards, facilitating political repression and mass surveillance.
African governments might believe they are purchasing tactical advantages, but they are acquiring entanglement in human rights abuses and political instability. This military and technological cooperation, far from being a neutral exchange, exports the very tools of repression and conflict that undermine African stability and betray the continent’s professed values.
The complicity question: arms, debt and African sovereignty
The flourishing military trade demands a sober assessment of its moral cost. By eagerly purchasing Israeli arms and spyware, African regimes with poor human rights records, from Cameroon to Chad, are investing not in security but in tools for internal repression, directly undermining the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and UN sustainable development goals.
Worse, this relationship creates a profound moral debt trap. This increased trade does not happen in a vacuum, it is intimately tied to Israel’s ongoing genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza. Understanding this sheds vital light on Israel’s true intentions — racist, colonial and brutal —- and must serve as a dire warning to African states and civil societies about what the expansion of Israeli power means for African sovereignty and democracy.
As Israel faces global condemnation for Gaza, African nations engaging in these deals become tacitly complicit, financing the very war machine destroying Palestinian lives. This is a Faustian bargain — trading sovereign principles for repression and paying in both drained treasuries and a compromised collective conscience.
While some African states deepen their military and economic ties with Israel, South Africa has leveraged the tools of international law and diplomacy to hold it accountable. Its case of genocide against Israel before the International Court of Justice underscores a fundamental foreign policy choice between pursuing short-term, often repressive, tactical gains and championing a long-term vision for a just international order based on human rights.
South Africa has weaponised the law in service of liberation, embodying the anti-colonial solidarity and commitment to human dignity that too many have abandoned. Yet South Africa is not free from Israeli pressure and influence. In August this year, Israel’s minister of digital diplomacy, David Saranga, bypassed diplomatic channels to meet the Amntshangase, amaPondo and abaThembu royal families in the rural Eastern Cape. He offered support from Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, Mashav for local feeding schemes run by traditional authorities, flood disaster relief and extended invitations for them to visit Israel.
And despite its International Court of Justice case, South African citizens are having to take to the streets to call on the government to match its legal intervention with economic and diplomatic ones and stop all trade, especially the sale of coal, with Israel, shut the Israeli embassy and arrest South African citizens who have served in theIsrael Defense Forces .
African Union and diplomatic fallout
Israel’s re-entry has not gone unchallenged. In 2021 the African Union granted Israel observer status. Within two years it was suspended after member states protested, citing solidarity with Palestine. Israeli diplomats were expelled from AU summits in 2023 and 2025, underscoring the depth of opposition.
South Africa has led resistance. In late 2023, its parliament voted to close the Israeli embassy in Pretoria unless a Gaza ceasefire was reached. Protests outside the embassy continue, framing Israeli aid and technology as part of the same extractive system.
Operation Solomon: Humanitarianism or control?
In 1991, Operation Solomon airlifted more than 14 000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 36 hours, projecting rescue and solidarity. Yet, two decades later, reports revealed Ethiopian women in Israel had been given long-acting contraceptives without informed consent. What was celebrated as salvation also carried elements of control — mirroring how “humanitarian” aid masks asymmetrical power.
Conclusion
From Meir’s frank admission that Africa was about UN votes to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refrain that, “Israel is coming back to Africa,” the strategy has been consistent. Israeli “aid” and technology exports are not free. They are structured to secure guaranteed profits and political leverage: banks and contractors are paid upfront, export credit agencies remove their risk and African citizens repay the loans or maintain costly imports.
Ethiopia’s sugar projects, Zambia’s agro-centres, Angola’s Quiminha complex, Nigeria’s surveillance contracts and Watergen machines from South Africa to Sierra Leone all point to the same conclusion — development promised, dependency delivered.
For Israel, Africa provides contracts, votes and legitimacy. For African citizens, it too often means austerity, debt service and surveillance. The mask of aid conceals an extractive logic. Israel’s “return to Africa” looks less like partnership — and more like a system of control.
Mariam Jooma Carikci is a political analyst and researcher with over 20 years of experience covering the Horn of Africa, identity politics in Turkiye and Zionism in Africa. Lorelle Bell is a South African writer and editor focused on social justice and feminism in majority world contexts, particularly South Africa and the African continent.