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Greater Israel and why Sub Saharan Africa should be worried

Those of us concerned about the return of great power competition cannot help but notice a pattern in the current shifts that precede the emergence of a multipolar world
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If you are a part of the “It doesn’t concern Africa and we should leave the Israelis and Arabs alone to their fight, after all, they both hate us” crowd, you might want to skip this article. It is probably not for you. Those of us concerned about the return of great power competition cannot help but notice a pattern in the current shifts that precede the emergence of a multipolar world. Russia has annexed large swathes of Ukrainian territory. President-elect Trump makes no secret of his ambition to annex Greenland by force if necessary, and perhaps even Canada through economic coercion. The US still occupies part of Syria, and former French spies are openly talking on television about recolonising Africa. So, after watching Syria, a sovereign state located a stone’s throw from Africa, get overrun in just a few days by foreign-backed terrorists, after which large swathes of its territory have been openly annexed by Israel, any conversation about whether such things are “possible” in the 21st century should be well and truly settled.

Far from viewing the ongoing crisis in the Middle East as a “Them vs. Them” problem, African countries located south of the Sahara should in fact see the ongoing escalation as a “Them vs. Them vs. Us” problem.

With relatively recent historical events in North and East Africa that have left the indelible mark of Arab conquest and colonialism on the region, it is perhaps understandable that any talk of Israeli conquest and colonialism in Africa may seem almost abstract and esoteric in comparison. Unfortunately, as an example from 13 years ago shows us, destabilisation of North Africa – no matter who does it – will have an extremely costly Sub-Saharan African death toll.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

What does the map above mean to you? To most people, it is a political map of the Persian Gulf, Levant and North Africa with some weird red squiggly lines straddling Egypt and Iraq painted on it. To those in the know, this is the proposed map of the so-called “Greater Israel,” a long-held hardline Zionist idea which posits that the borders of the entire region should be redrawn, with Israel gifted all of Palestine along with large sections of Lebanon, Western Syria, Iraq, Southern Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. While this was once dismissed as an idea so far-right that it could be described as a conspiracy theory, the events of the past year have made it clear that everything is on the table – including Greater Israel.

A famous proponent of the Greater Israel plan is Bezalel Smotrich, who nowadays sits on the Israeli cabinet as the country’s finance minister. Earlier this year, the image below began circulating on the internet, depicting an Israeli military uniform embroidered with a “Greater Israel” patch.

Source: Israel365

With the recent events in Syria, culminating in Benjamin Netanyahu’s gleeful declaration that Syria’s Golan Heights “are now part of Israel for eternity,” it is clear that what was once dismissed as kooky, hard-right, conspiracy stuff is now to all intents and purposes, a military objective for Israel in the MENA region. This is bad news for Africa. Here’s why.

Under the Greater Israel plan, about 11 percent of the territory of Egypt would be annexed by the expanded state of Israel. This would already be a serious problem even if the territory in question were uninhabited desert land in Egypt’s south. It is the case however, that the 11 percent in question happens to be the part of Egypt that contains…Egypt. It is where the Suez Canal is located – the single most important shipping lane in the world and the single maritime trade choke point for 3 of the world’s 5 inhabited continents.

More importantly, this strip of Egypt between the Nile River and the Red Sea is also where about 95% of Egypt’s population lives, and it is where basically everything useful or notable about Egypt is located – the cities, the arable land, the water, everything. Israel occupying this land, renaming it, and potentially driving out its 100 million+ inhabitants would be like Israel stealing an entire country, running its people off their land, and renaming it.

Are you seeing the obvious problem here?

Egypt is clearly never going to give up such territory without a fight to the death – it is after all, by some distance Africa’s most defensively capable and militarised state. A war in North Africa between the mega military machines of Egypt and Israel would have similar consequences for the entire northern half of Africa to those of the war in Libya – but dialled up by a factor of 10.

When the conflict in Libya began in 2011, the consensus among African countries south of the Sahara appeared to be that it was none of their business. It was a conflict involving Ghadaffi the colourful Strongman, a local rebellion, and NATO. So detached were these countries from the potential second and third order effects of Libyan destabilisation that the three African members of the UN Security Council at the time – Nigeria, Gabon and South Africa – actually voted in favour of the “No-fly” resolution that became a pretext for NATO to carry out the 7,000 airstrikes across 8 months that completely ended Libya as a functioning state.

At the time, it didn’t matter. After all, they were Arabs and they hated Black people, so why should we care what happened to them? Very rapidly, however, we found out that – Arab or no Arab – when there is war and instability in a country two borders away from us, it absolutely was our business. We still do not know the exact number of innocent people in West Africa and the Sahel who subsequently died and are still dying because of the influx of arms from the erstwhile heavily-stocked armouries of Libya. Boko Haram went from being a group of ragtag militants who lived in hiding and bombed the occasional building to being a fighting force capable of holding territory and raising flags.

And you know what’s really interesting this time around with the looming threat of “Greater Israel” and Egypt getting into a North Saharan infinity war?

The number of borders between Nigeria and Ghana is the same as the number between Nigeria and Egypt.

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