On 26 June 2026, Ibrahim Traoré , hailed as Africa's anti-imperialist hero, issued France an ultimatum to close its embassy in Ouagadougou, accusing Paris of "blatant neocolonial ambitions."
Concurrently, he received the credentials of Israel's ambassador pledging to deepen bilateral cooperation with the settler-colonial state .
The continent applauded the first act, while largely ignoring the second.
That is precisely the problem Rising for Palestine: Africans in Solidarity for Decolonisation and Liberation is written to address.
Edited by Algerian researcher Raouf Farrah and South African writer Suraya Dadoo, this 22-chapter anthology, drawing on contributors from across Africa and Palestine, sets an uncomfortable challenge to the reader.
At its core, it is an incitement to dialogue that demands we rethink not only what solidarity means, but what decolonisation requires of us in a contemporary political climate.
Significantly, the book has garnered serious attention.
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese calls it a wake-up call for a continent at risk of falling into the ultraliberal ideologies that have enabled Palestine's annihilation.
John Dugard, Emeritus Professor of Law and a member of South Africa's legal team at The Hague, praises it as a welcome contribution to the literature on genocide, decolonisation, and the intertwined histories of Africa and Palestine.
Emmy-nominated journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin reads it as a reckoning that reconnects Africa's unfinished liberation to Palestine's ongoing struggle for survival.
Rarely does an anthology arrive already carrying such a weight of expectation. Rarer still does it meet it.
What makes the book distinctly radical in its opening section is a refusal of the consolation we usually offer ourselves that, in our outpouring of sympathy for the Palestinians, we can appease ourselves.
The book forces a reckoning that the genocide in Gaza persists because the world cannot see it. It is proceeding precisely because the world is a voyeur to the livestreams and satellite images; that visibility fails to produce consequences.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's Seeing Genocide, Ending Genocide tells us that we must refuse to see the ruins as museum artefacts and instead elevate the honourable persistence of Palestinian life from beneath the rubble.
Jephta Uaravaera Nguherimo braids the Herero and Nama genocide of 1904–1908 into his own apartheid childhood, personalising the story of his family's experience of the settler-colonial architecture that exterminated Herero and Nama peoples, drawing parallels to Israeli apartheid .
Kambale Musavuli's companion essay on the DRC argues that Palestine and Congo are not analogous struggles but are structurally fused, bound by extractive capital and sacrificed on the same altar of great-power expedience.
This forces us as readers to confront our performative solidarity. It asks whether the memory of our colonial trauma has become a nostalgic trophy to conveniently display and self-aggrandise, or does it become a lens through which to reflect and make meaningful change.
The anthology's most incendiary chapters appear in productive conversation with each other.
Dadoo's interview with Basim Naim , Palestine, Hamas , and the Logic of Armed Resistance , may unsettle readers across the political spectrum, as it is designed to do .
Dadoo refuses both apology and condemnation, constructing instead a rigorous dialogue about what resistance becomes when a colonised people has exhausted every sanctioned avenue and found the international community indifferent to its extinction.
Naim speaks of the necessity of armed struggle as the only register an occupier trained to recognise nothing but force will comprehend, when peace processes function as instruments of managed subjugation rather than liberation.
The parallel Dadoo draws to armed factions of liberation movements in Africa, such as uMkhonto we Sizwe, SWAPO’s PLA, the MPLA, FRELIMO, is not abstract — each was branded a terrorist by Western powers sustaining the colonial regimes they fought.
Many who now hero Traoré's pan-Africanism once lionised Mandela's. But do we apply the same moral framework consistently? Do we ask of Hamas what we never asked of MK? The chapter does not answer for us, which is its sharpest quality.
It is Amzat Boukari-Yabara's Africa and Palestine that gives this question its fullest theoretical scaffolding, and it may be the most provocative chapter in the volume. He argues that negrophobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism must be fought as forces of terror just as fiercely as the West claims to fight terrorism — a provocation that refuses the hierarchy which places some forms of hatred at the centre of civilisational concern while consigning others to the margins.
Boukari-Yabara's excavation of the post-9/11 paradigm of the "good Muslim, bad Muslim" is devastating: the racialised sorting mechanism through which Western powers licensed or criminalised resistance, reframing liberation as terrorism and occupation as counterterrorism. He insists that dismantling colonial terror requires a radical redefinition of global power structures — one that directly confronts racial capitalism and institutional racism at their core.
Read alongside Naim's account of necessity, we are asked not only how we perceive resistance elsewhere, but whether we have truly reckoned with the architectures of dehumanisation — racial, religious, political — that make resistance inevitable.
The book's third section is where it earns its full seriousness.
Yotam Gidron's essay on Israel's solutions to African problems , paired with an analysis of surveillance infrastructure, documents how Pegasus and Circles spyware, marketed as security cooperation, have been deployed against journalists and dissidents from Ghana to Rwanda: African governments becoming, in effect, subcontractors of their own citizens' repression.
Dadoo's Weaponising Faith: Christian Zionism in Africa traces how complicity is cultivated not only in diplomatic agreements but in pulpits, through the careful nurturing of Pentecostal networks, even as those same governments vote for Palestinian self-determination at the UN.
Raouf Farrah's interview with Ambassador Malainin Lakhal deepens the discomfort, recasting Western Sahara's occupation, now entering its sixth decade behind a fortified sand wall, as Palestine's African twin: the same international law violated, the same resources auctioned to foreign corporations, the same silence rewarded.
And Roshan Dadoo's chapter delivers perhaps the most searching indictment of all. South Africa filed its historic, morally driven ICJ case in December 2023 , while deploying a coal-laden ship from its shores to power an Israeli power grid within the same week. The book asks us to hold both facts simultaneously. The question it raises for us is whether our anti-imperialism is principled or merely personal: targeting the colonisers against whom we hold specific grievances while accommodating those who offer something in return.
Fathi Nimer's chapter charts how a different world was once not only possible but operational. When Arafat was received as head of state from Lusaka to Havana, the Global South solidarity was not rhetorical.
The Cold War's end dismantled not merely geopolitical allegiances but the institutional imagination that had made solidarity structural.
Nimer's prescription admits no ambiguity: solidarity that is not material is not solidarity. Severe military ties. Enforce the boycott. Refuse diplomacy-as-usual until occupation ends. Anything short of this, he argues, is complicity clad in progressive language, forcing us once again to confront our hypocrisies within our romanticised solidarities.
South Africa's ICJ case indicts 75 years of apartheid, 56 years of occupation, and 16 years of blockade as a single continuous legal crime.
The Court has issued three binding orders. Israel has honoured none.
Shahd Hammouri's essay tackles international law's breaking point with unflinching clarity: the system does not merely fail to end atrocity — it manages it, contains outrage within procedure, and produces the appearance of accountability while the killing continues.
Maha Abdallah's chapter on the structural limits of international legal institutions locates this failure not as malfunction but as design; a framework built by the powerful and calibrated to their tolerance, in which the language of universal rights has always coexisted with the practice of selective enforcement.
Together, they compel a discomfiting question: if international law cannot protect a people whose dispossession has been documented, litigated, and ruled upon for decades, what exactly are we waiting for it to do?
Rising for Palestine arrives as ICJ orders are bureaucratically beleaguered, Western arms shipments continue unabated, Israel expands its genocidal agenda to Lebanon and beyond, and trade between Israel and Africa persists.
The book insists on an insurgent memory of Pan-Africanism and political imagination that once understood liberation as indivisible.
It is not as much an informative compendium as it is a provocative incitement to disturb and disrupt us, to discard our common concert of camaraderie, to reexamine what our memories of genocide and liberation signify, and to force a rethinking of decolonisation.
Zeenat Adam is a writer, a former diplomat for the South African government, and an international relations analyst. Over a two-decade career, her work has centred on political analysis, human rights, and the intersections of Africa and West Asia.
Follow her on X: @ZeenatAdamZA