The meeting, on the sidelines of a visit to Uganda, had been planned in such secret that even the main stakeholders in the Sudanese government had not been associated with it. By announcing the “normalization” of relations between their two countries, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the President of the Sudanese Sovereign Council, Abdel Fattah Bourhane, sought to brilliantly conclude a rapprochement started discreetly for several years. Before being a master stroke, or a historic step, it is an initiative with multiple potential repercussions, but at the risk of turning against the Sudanese executive.
The country, a member of the Arab League, has since its independence been hostile to Israel – which it disputed until existence – and has long been an ally of Iran, under the influence of Islamist officials who had seized power in 1989 with Omar Al-Bashir at their head. Sudan also supported Hamas, which was accused by the Israelis of letting Iranian weapons get there destined for the Gaza Strip, to the point of being repeatedly the object of clandestine operations to "neutralize" convoys there. 119 dead in 2009).
Sudden acceleration
A slow erosion of these alliances has been underway for several years. It experienced a sudden acceleration with the fall of Omar Al-Bashir in April 2019. The latter, although having broken with Iran in 2016, had remained hostile to any form of rapprochement with the Hebrew state. The new transitional authorities are in the area of influence, precisely, of countries with priorities other than hostility to Israel, or close to its government: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates ( UAE), but also the United States and Egypt. Together, they are pushing their interests in Africa. Sudan is therefore not a symbolic or isolated case, but an important part in a regional game.
For Khartoum, in absolute terms, it is a question of giving guarantees to this alliance, and of gaining a respite for the future. On the Israeli side, the idea is to satisfy a part of public opinion, as for the Trump administration, which pushes the Sudanese-Israeli rapprochement considered as an anchor of its plan for the Middle East, by returning a member of the Arab League who is hostile to it. In addition, American evangelical Christian circles have considered Sudan for decades as a focal point of their action, and Sudanese policy is therefore an issue of domestic policy in the United States.
