Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu went on a charm offensive in Sub-Saharan Africa last year. He shook hands with Togo’s president Faure Gnassingbe, and smiled at Rwanda’s head of state Paul Kagame. The slogan for the tour expressed his ambition: ‘Israel is coming back to Africa, Africa is coming back to Israel.’ The crowning event was to be an Israel-Africa summit this October at Lomé in Togo, which would be open to the heads of all African states, except the Maghreb countries, and would showcase cooperation in engineering, agronomy, irrigation, security and other fields.

But tensions were growing. This June, Netanyahu’s presence at the 51st Ecowas (Economic Community of West African States) summit in Monrovia, Liberia, was criticised by Senegal, Niger and Nigeria. Morocco was to have returned to Ecowas at this meeting, but decided not to attend at the last moment for fear of being seen as normalising relations with Israel. (The two countries broke off diplomatic relations in 2000; see map.) All this did not bode well for the Israel-Africa summit, and it was no surprise that, over the summer, the West African countries all announced they would not attend. In September, after South Africa announced that it too would boycott the summit, it had to be cancelled, especially as demonstrations against Togo’s president were paralysing the host nation.

Israel’s relations with Africa had always wavered between reticence and a rational wish for rapprochement. When the UN voted for the partition of Palestine in November 1947, Africa was still mostly under colonial rule. The only independent countries, Liberia and Ethiopia, took different positions: Liberia voted for; Ethiopia abstained. After the 1948-9 wars and the failure to respect the armistice agreements signed in February 1949 by Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, incidents on the demarcation lines multiplied, especially along the Egyptian border.

Israel was excluded from the 1955 Bandung (...)