Technopolitics, development and the colonial-postcolonial nexus: revisiting settlements development aid from Israel to Africa

Abstract

This article focuses on the interrelationship between colonial development in Israel and the export of knowledge and practices to Africa. We argue that at the core of the Israeli aid project to Africa is the Cold War and the global technopolitics of this era, that is, the use of technological methods and practices to achieve political ends. The main question to be discussed throughout this article is whether the Zionist settlement enterprise and its ‘export’ to Africa is not only a unique historical event but rather is part of the global imperial debate. We point to the way in which the technopolitics of development in Israel is directly related to the concepts prevalent in the country during the period under discussion in several interrelated ways. First, it was embedded in an Orientalist discourse in which the ‘backward native’ becomes a consumer of modern technologies migrating from a territory where knowledge is produced to the territories that consume its products. Second, the view of Africa was part of a wider epistemological system in which orientalism was also ‘inward’ both toward the Jewish Mizrahi population and to the Palestinian population.