Africa-Israel summit cancelled after pressure from Arab nations and SA

AN AFRICA-ISRAEL summit, which was due to take place in Togo next month, has been cancelled due to a political crisis facing the west African country and political pressure from the Palestinians, South Africa and some Arab states.

Togo President Faure Gnassingbe informed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the summit’s cancellation, saying preparing for such a summit would take time. The gathering had been due to take place from October 23-27 in the capital of Lomé. Gnassingbe has been countering political problems in the form of mass protests against his regime. But it wasn’t just the political crisis the president is facing at home that propelled him to cancel the summit as Israel tries to build technological, political and economic alliances across Africa.

The Lomé event, which was to promote the summit’s slogan “Building bridges toward greater shared prosperity”, was to be the jewel in the crown of efforts to strengthen Israel’s diplomatic, trade and security relations with Africa. Only last week the Israeli premier celebrated “a big breakthrough and a return to Africa” at the foreign ministry in Jerusalem.

However, South Africa, and a number of Arab countries, have been applying pressure on Togo to cancel the event which they saw as green-lighting the normalisation of Israeli relations with Africa, despite the Jewish state’s expropriation of Palestinian land and its continued settlement building in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank – all illegal under international law.

Israel tried to put a positive spin on the cancellation although it is a setback to Netanyahu’s public position that Israel’s foreign relations were now substantially less negatively impacted by the Israel-Palestine conflict than in the past.