September has been a long month when it comes to Israel-DRC relations. On the first day of the month, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Félix Tshisekedi, smiled broadly beside Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Twenty-four days later, Tshisekedi’s delegation to the UN General Assembly in New York, led by Prime Minister Judith Suminwa and Foreign Minister Thérèse Wagner, was listed along with 76 other countries that walked out or was absent when Netanyahu addressed the assembly – seemingly in protest over Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Suminwa and Wagner will, no doubt, be grilled by Tshisekedi about the reason for their absence during Netanyahu’s speech.

Tshisekedi has been cosying up to Israel and Netanyahu for over six years now.

At the 2020 conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Tshisekedi announced that he would appoint an ambassador to Israel and establish a commercial section in Jerusalem. He called Israel a source of inspiration and spoke of its “divine grace and favour.” In September 2023, Tshisekedi pledged to Netanyahu that Congo would move its embassy to Jerusalem.

Then came 7th October 2023. Then came the destruction of Gaza. Yet the embassy promise survived the rubble, starvation, displacement and death. It survived the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures in the case brought by South Africa. It survived the arrest warrants issued by the ICC for Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant. Three years later, Tshisekedi returned to Jerusalem and revived it.

Many Congolese asked how the president of a country that speaks constantly about aggression, occupation and stolen land could stand so comfortably beside a man wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Many Congolese asked how the president of a country that speaks constantly about aggression, occupation and stolen land could stand so comfortably beside a man wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

They wondered how a government that invokes Congolese suffering could deepen its relationship with a state whose destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza has been described as genocide by a United Nations commission of inquiry, Amnesty International, B’Tselem and other human rights organisations.

The Ideology of Survival

Tshisekedi’s embrace of Netanyahu is an act of political survival by a president who repeatedly searches abroad for the legitimacy he lacks at home, using faith to sanctify the transaction. This is one reason I warned after the disputed 2018 election that the arrangement that brought Tshisekedi to power would damage the country. The official election result was contradicted by the Catholic Church’s extensive observation mission and by two independent sets of leaked voting data analysed by the Financial Times,........

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