Palestinian Authority is Teaming up With Sudan, Will it Matter for Israel?

So the best the Palestinian Authority can do on the African continent is to partner with Sudan? Somehow partering with a genocidal radical Islamic regime does not sound like a good PR move.  Then again, Abbas had very little to choose from.  Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and now Guinea have all pushed forward their relations with Israel.  This is besides Ghana who has been a stable partner of Israel since th 1990’s.  In the coming weeks Togo too will be publicly reaching out and moving forward with Israeli partnerships.

The irony of a known terrorist turned politician in the form of Abbas running to Sudan, a terrorist state that still practices slavery, almost guarantees that the PA has given itself no chance to make friends in the Sub-Sahara. The continent is increasingly being split between Arab or Arabized forces in the northern countries and those of Christian background to the south. At the end of the day, Israel’s growing allies in the Sub Sahara have grown to detest Islamists, especially ones they have had to deal in their immediate proximity.

So does the PA’s cozying to Sudan have any ramifications for Israel? The answer is not many.  Sudan and countries of similar dispositions are never going to be swayed to partner with Israel.  The fact that the PA decided to partner with Sudan should put to rest their claim of being a peaceful, liberty loving “state”.  By running to a known terrorist regime, Abbas has little room to find willing partners.  One place he can probably run to is Buhari’s Nigeria, which is increasingly becoming more and more radicalized at the expense of the Igbo and other tribes in Biafra.

When all is finished Sub Sahara Africa much rather build a partnership with a state that can offer them progress. The PA represents a rewind to the years when Africa floundered under autocratic despots too willing to trade their people’s future in order to enrich themselves.

The Coming War: Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Nile

When Egypt’s then-president Mohamed Morsi said in June 2013 that “all options” including military intervention, were on the table if Ethiopia continued to develop dams on the Nile River, many dismissed it as posturing. But experts claim Cairo is deadly serious about defending its

historic water allotment, and if Ethiopia proceeds with construction of what is set to become Africa’s largest hydroelectric dam, a military strike cannot be discounted.

Egypt fears the new dam, slated to begin operation in 2017, that it will reduce the downstream flow of the Nile, which 85 million Egyptians rely on for almost all of their water needs. Officials in the Ministry of Irrigation claim Egypt will lose 20 to 30 percent of its share of Nile water and nearly a third of the electricity generated by its Aswan High Dam.

“One reason for the high level of anxiety is that nobody really knows how this dam is going to affect Egypt’s water share,” Richard Tutwiler, a specialist in water resource management at the American University in Cairo (AUC), tells Institute of Policy Studies. He added “Egypt is totally dependent on the Nile. Without it, there is no Egypt.”

Ethiopia, on margins of international attention largely for many decades by the international community has suddenly become a focus of interest. The country, source of 80% of the Nile’s waters, and now intends to impose its own vision for the river and a different division of its waters. Egypt, having been the dominant power in the region for 200 years, is still reeling from recent political upheavals, economic weakness and the drastic diminution of its development — all of which reduce it to the status of one Nile state among many, without the capacity for action.

Egypt is entirely dependent on other states for its water, almost all of which comes from the Nile. Its four principal sources rise several hundred kilometers beyond Egypt’s southern border: the Blue Nile, Sobat and Atbara and its tributaries located in Ethiopia, which provide around 80%, and the White Nile in Uganda, which provides the rest.

Egypt’s share of Nile water has until now been regulated by a 1959 agreement with Sudan, under which Egypt gets 55.5bn cubic meters a year and Sudan 18.5bn. (The annual flow averages 84bn cubic meters, 10bn of which evaporate from Lake Nasser, created by the construction of the Aswan Dam, which came into operation in 1964.) This agreement allotted nothing to Ethiopia and other upstream states.

In 2010 Ethiopia secured a treaty reorganizing water-management and construction projects, the New Nile Cooperative Framework Agreement. Burundi, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania are signatories. Under this treaty, a commission representing all the signatories will approve (or reject) large-scale hydraulic projects, dams, canals and anything else that has an impact on the course, volume or quality of the Nile’s waters.

This alliance between six of the nine members of the Nile Basin Initiative — the forum in which Nile states try to find practical solutions and formulate joint projects (1) — has shaken things up in the region. Egypt refused to sign without an undertaking from the signatories not to alter the current division of the water and to recognize the “historical rights” of downstream nations (Sudan and Egypt). It now finds itself without any right of inspection in the Renaissance Dam project — a source of discord — and, for the first time in its history, without a right of veto, which it had thought innate.

Ethiopia’s renaissance as a regional power is under way, strengthened by assets it has hitherto lacked. We are witnessing the emergence of a strong Ethiopia capable of playing a key geopolitical role in its zones of influence: the Nile basin and East Africa.

Egypt has appealed to international bodies to force Ethiopia to halt construction of the dam until its downstream impact can be determined. And while officials here hope for a diplomatic solution to diffuse the crisis, security sources say Egypt’s military leadership is prepared to use force to protect its stake in the river.

Former president Hosni Mubarak floated plans for an air strike on any dam that Ethiopia built on the Nile, and in 2010 established an airbase in southeastern Sudan as a staging point for just such an operation, according to leaked emails from the global intelligence organization Stratfor posted on WikiLeaks.

A long-simmering water conflict between Ethiopia and Egypt has moved a step closer to resolution, after the countries’ foreign ministers announced that they had reached a preliminary agreement on sharing Nile waters.

The deal, which still needs to be approved by the heads of state of Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan, appears to be an important breakthrough, observers say – although details of the agreement have not yet been made public.

“This is significant in my view,” Mwangi Kimenyi, a Brookings Institute fellow who co-authored a book on the need for a new legal regime on sharing Nile water, he told Al Jazeera. “Any development in the sharing of Nile water that is based on negotiations between the stakeholders is a positive development.”

The prospective deal is important because it marks a move away from Egypt’s historical insistence on maintaining colonial-era agreements on water rights. However without some mechanism for significantly increasing the overall supply of water it is unlikely to resolve the core issue of total demand exceeding available supply—and head off the grave consequences that it will inevitably precipitate.