PM may meet Chad president at UN to push renewed ties
Possible summit with leader of Muslim-majority central African nation part of Netanyahu's new outreach effort in Africa
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly hoping to meet with the president of Chad as he visits New York over the next few days to attend the United Nations General Assembly gathering.
A meeting between Netanyahu and Idriss Déby could take place on the sidelines of the GA, part of Israel’s bid to rekindle ties with Muslim African states, many of which don’t have formal diplomatic relations with Israel, Channel 2 reported on Tuesday.
The Muslim-majority Republic of Chad, in central Africa, cut diplomatic ties with Jerusalem in the 1970s.
Last month, Israel’s Foreign Ministry Director General Dore Gold paid a rare visit to Chad for talks with senior officials.
Some 55 percent of Chad’s 13.5 million residents are Muslim. About 40% are Christian.
“Chad is a central country on the African continent,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement at the time. “It is a Muslim, Arabic-speaking country that deals with radical Islamic terrorism and this year holds the rotating chairmanship of the African Union.”
Gold’s July 14 meeting came on the heels of Israel’s reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the Republic of Guinea, a small, overwhelmingly Muslim country in west Africa that cut ties with the Jewish state in 1967.
“The number of countries on the African continent that still haven’t [re-established ties with Israel] is steadily decreasing, and we’re hopeful that soon this number will not exist anymore,” Gold said after the July 20 meeting with Ibrahim Khalil Kaba, President Alpha Condé’s chief of staff, in Paris.
Netanyahu has declared the establishment of diplomatic ties with all African nations a strategic goal for his government, and visited sub-Saharan Africa last month.
Earlier this year, The Times of Israel reported that Netanyahu recently met with the president of Somalia, Hassan Shekh Mohamud, in the first high-level contact between the two countries. Somalia, a mostly Sunni Muslim country and a member of the Arab League, has never recognized the State of Israel.
During his August trip to Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia — the first prime ministerial visit to sub-Saharan Africa in three decades — Netanyahu announced that Tanzania intended to open its first-ever embassy in Israel. He also said the leaders of his host countries vowed publicly to push for Israel to regain observer status at the African Union.