It was only a few decades ago when European powers striving to partition Africa like a piece of cake tried every possible effort to have the lion’s share from the continent’s natural and cultural legacy.
Thinking of the dark continent as a “fatherless” “remote” and “abandoned” zone of human history and geography Europe’s super powers tore the Dark Continent from limb to limb not only through recourse to the power of the sword but also through recourse to the “white man’s burden pretext.”
Though it was over ten decades ago that the Partition of Africa has entered the encyclopedia as a conceptualized fact of history the concept re-emerges on the surface as soon as one flips through the repertoire of Israel’s unending efforts to grab hold of whatever region of the globe it thinks is of interest to its imperialistic project creeping into secret holes and crossing filthy channels until its dreams see the day.
A few months ago the Africa-Israel Summit which was slated to take place by the end of October in Togo sparked furor among the Africans with many seeing it as a scar on the face of the continent’s long history of anti-Apartheid struggle and decolonization slog.
Speaking at the ECOWAS Africa-Israel Summit in Liberia in June Israel’s ill-famed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed an Africa-Israel Summit would herald a new page in bilateral ties and make “our peoples” live a heaven on earth.
It seems Netanyahu and the Israelis have all of a sudden caught an amnesia—a sudden loss of memory—and forgotten about the cloud of aggressions that has claimed the lives of hundreds of so many innocent Palestinians in the West Bank Occupied Jerusalem the Gaza Strip and even outside the occupied territories onboard the death boats to Europe.
It seems also that Netanyahu and the Israelis have gone amnesiac over the countless moments when they have made children in Gaza cry because a tough blockade has made them suffer without food and medicine; the countless moments when women in Palestine have had their hearts in their mouths because a missile was dropped into their neighborhood; the countless moments when they left civilians shivering in the cold because their home was turned into mounds of rubble; the countless moments when a bride-to-be young lady has gone widowed after her groom was sentenced to life over resistance charges; and the list of Israeli crimes goes on and on.
“Our goal here is not merely to join forces to fight the bad but to work together to advance the good and in this spirit I come here as an expression of a simple truth: Israel is coming back to Africa and Africa is coming back to Israel” claimed Netanyahu once he was given the floor at the ECOWAS Africa-Israel Summit in Liberia.
His words certainly as malevolent and insincere as his intentions and facial expressions appeared at the event are a forceful reminder of the logic put forward by the British who came to invade Nigeria and the French who stepped in the Maghreb (north Africa) claiming that the Africans are “the sons of darkness” and that the “white men” –the self-proclaimed “God’s chosen people”—are the world’s redeemers.
Africans are certainly more clued-in to let the bloody-handed Israeli leaders force upon them orientations that are not suited to them and which only mean for Africans a loss of self-respect. Africans do not need Netanyahu to believe in their history heritage and potential; nor do they need him to revive their pride in their past present and future. The Africans shall never forget Mandela’s words in which he warned the world that Israel “worked very closely with the apartheid regime” and cooperated with those “who slaughtered our people like animals.” Until Israel recovers its memory and kneels on its knee to the Palestinians and Africans alike for the atrocities it has wrought upon the MENA region the longest struggle in human history shall never come to an end.
– Safa Othmani PIC staff writer
