ИСТИНА

The last two decades have seen a remarkable proliferation of actors seeking to exert political and economic influence across the African continent. The academic community tends to focus predominantly on the policies of the BRICS countries, especially China and India, pouring billions of dollars in Africa in aid and investments and frequently overshadowing the efforts of the former metropoles and the United States. However, there are numerous actors beyond these giants, which have become visible as providers of development and security assistance to Africa, including Israel, Turkey, Iran. Their policies largely have escaped the scholars’ attention yet. This paper seeks to fill this gaping niche in the literature with an examination of the African policies of Israel, which, similar to the BRICS countries, plays a dual role in global aid flows. On the one hand, Israel remains a major recipient of the U.S. foreign aid, on the other hand, it provides significant amounts of military and non-military assistance to developing countries. This paper posits a hypothesis that Israel is most active in those countries in Africa where she may receive clear security benefits, especially, in the counter-terrorism realm, and tests it with example of Kenya. The conclusion is drawn, that Israel acts in the region within a ‘security-development nexus’ paradigm. She regards Sub-Saharan Africa both as a battleground in the war on terror and as a region suffering from underdevelopment and fragility and plans its strategy accordingly, using all possible policy instruments and channels to win the hearts and minds of African people and to reinvigorate the successes of the Golden Age of Israeli-African cooperation of the 1960s in a turbulent and dense geopolitical environment of the XXI century.