Félix Tshisekedi in Jerusalem and the dangerous marriage of faith, foreign policy and political survival

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).

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, French broadcaster RFI and researchers at New York University. The data placed opposition candidate, Martin Fayulu, far ahead of Tshisekedi. Congo was told to accept the outcome in the name of stability.

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When a presidency begins with an electoral truth managed through political arrangements and international acceptance, it learns an early lesson: legitimacy can be negotiated abroad even when it is contested at home. The people become an audience. Foreign capitals become the constituency that matters.

Israel offers security cooperation, intelligence relationships, technology and access to influential political networks in Washington. Jerusalem becomes another foreign capital where Tshisekedi can seek the legitimacy he has failed to build securely among his own people. The embassy decision must be understood within this politics of survival.

Freedom from Goma to Gaza

My solidarity with Palestine did not begin with the latest photograph, and it did not begin after 7th October. It comes from years of organising, political education and relationships built through the work of solidarity.

I have seen Palestinians and their allies make space for Congo when much of the world treated our suffering as invisible. Students at Birzeit University participated in Congo Week. Organisers from Existence Is Resistance stood alongside Congolese communities in New York. Palestinian and Congolese artists exchanged stories about war, memory and survival.

These experiences taught me that solidarity is strongest when oppressed people refuse to compete for attention and recognise the systems connecting their struggles.

In a new pan-African anthology, Rising for Palestine: Africans in Solidarity for Decolonisation and Liberation, I contributed a chapter titled “From the River to the Rift: The Global Struggle for Self-Determination in Palestine and the Congo.” I wrote it because Congolese people have a responsibility to understand that our struggle is connected to the struggles of other oppressed peoples.

Palestinians and Congolese are not competitors in a market for international sympathy. We confront systems that fragment land, displace communities, militarise daily life and turn human beings into obstacles to extraction and conquest.

In that chapter, I wrote that Palestine and Congo are “converging in resistance.” I meant it.

We cannot ask the world to recognise occupation in Bunagana and become diplomatically flexible about occupation in East Jerusalem. We cannot condemn the theft of Congolese land while treating Palestinian dispossession as a complicated matter best left to powerful governments. We cannot demand accountability for those who arm and protect Rwanda while embracing a government accused by authoritative international bodies of destroying Palestinian life in Gaza.

The language of solidarity must survive contact with power. Otherwise, it is branding.

The African Union continues to support Palestinian self-determination and occupied East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. Moving Congo’s embassy to Jerusalem would place the country against this long diplomatic position and reward Israel’s claim over a city whose status cannot lawfully be decided by an occupying power.

The contradiction becomes sharper from where I write this in Accra, Ghana.

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On the same day Tshisekedi met Netanyahu in Jerusalem, Ghanaian president, John Dramani Mahama, addressed the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Belgrade,  condemning the “selectivity and indifference” with which the international community responds to human suffering. He demanded the consistent application of international law and an end to civilian suffering in Gaza.

While Ghana was speaking in the language of international law and Palestinian humanity, Congo was moving its diplomacy towards Netanyahu. Tshisekedi was making a choice. 

When faith becomes a shield

At AIPAC, Tshisekedi connected his support for Israel to his Christian faith and praised American evangelicals for supporting the Israeli state. His language of divine favour should be taken seriously.

Christian Zionism reduces a living people, a contested land and a history of dispossession to a prophecy in which the State of Israel becomes sacred. Palestinian Christians disappear from the story. Palestinian Muslims become an obstacle within it. International law is subordinated to an interpretation of scripture, and political violence is protected by claims of divine purpose.

This theology also serves earthly interests. It binds political leaders to networks of money, access and influence. It turns diplomacy into spiritual theatre and allows a president to pursue foreign political support while presenting the relationship as obedience to God.

But Christianity itself is not the problem.

Faith cannot become a shield for standing beside a government killing children. That contradiction becomes unbearable when it comes from a president who asks the world to mourn the children of the Kivu provinces while embracing a leader responsible for the destruction of Palestinian children in Gaza.

The images of Tshisekedi’s meeting with Netanyahu in Jerusalem clarifies something that Congolese political discourse often tries to avoid. A government can speak the language of sovereignty while aligning itself with domination. It can invoke the dead while using their memory to sanctify power. It can call for solidarity with Congo while abandoning solidarity with Palestine.

Those of us who follow Congo must choose a side. I do not mean choosing between Congolese people and Palestinian people. That is a false choice manufactured by those who benefit when the oppressed are divided. I mean choosing between the people and the systems that dispossess them; between political truth and the convenient myth of a chosen leader; between solidarity and proximity to power.

From Gaza to Goma, our people will be free. That freedom will not come from presidents who ask us to see God in their authority while they shake hands with oppression. It will come from people who recognise one another across borders, refuse selective justice and understand that no nation can build its liberation on another people’s dispossession.

The images of empty DRC seats during Netanyahu’s speech at the UNGA must not fool anyone. It is the image of Tshisekedi smiling with Netanyahu in Jerusalem that clarifies Congo’s relationship with Netanyahu and Israel.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.