Tshisekedi in Jerusalem and the dangerous marriage of faith, foreign policy and political survival
I was supposed to spend this weekend writing Part II of my reflections on Nyansa Futures and Beyond AI. That essay will come. But there are moments when planned work must make way for urgent work.
There was Félix Tshisekedi, President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, smiling beside Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.
For many Congolese, the image was shocking. They asked how the president of a country that speaks constantly about aggression, occupation and stolen land could stand so comfortably beside a man wanted by the International Criminal Court. They wondered how a government that invokes Congolese suffering could deepen its relationship with a state whose destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza has been described as genocide by a United Nations commission of inquiry, Amnesty International, B’Tselem and other human-rights organisations.
The image disturbed me, although its appearance followed years of warning.
The smile was the result of a path Tshisekedi has been showing us for years.
On 1 September 2026, Netanyahu received Tshisekedi in Jerusalem. The two leaders agreed to strengthen economic and security cooperation and revived plans to move Congo’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
This was no improvised diplomatic gesture. At the 2020 conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, Tshisekedi announced that he would appoint an ambassador to Israel and establish a commercial section in Jerusalem. He called Israel a source of inspiration and spoke of its “divine grace and favour.” In September 2023, he went further, telling Netanyahu that Congo would move its embassy to Jerusalem.
Then came 7 October 2023. Then came the destruction of Gaza.
Yet the promise survived the rubble, starvation, displacement and death. It survived the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures in the case brought by South Africa. It survived the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for Netanyahu and former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant.
In September 2026, Tshisekedi returned to Jerusalem and revived it.
The question is why so many people refused to believe what he had already told us.
The Ideology of Survival
Tshisekedi’s embrace of Netanyahu is an act of political survival by a president who repeatedly searches abroad for legitimacy that remains deeply contested at home. Faith helps him sanctify the transaction.
This is one reason I warned after the disputed 2018 election that the arrangement that brought Tshisekedi to power would damage the country.
The official result was contradicted by the Catholic Church’s extensive observation mission and by two independent sets of leaked voting data analysed by the Financial Times, RFI and researchers at New York University. Those data placed Martin Fayulu far ahead. Congo was told to accept the outcome in the name of stability.
When a presidency begins with an electoral lie sustained through political arrangements and international acceptance, it learns an early lesson: legitimacy can be negotiated abroad even when it is rejected at home. The people become an audience. Foreign capitals become the constituency that matters.
Since then, Tshisekedi has moved from accommodation with Joseph Kabila to presenting himself as the man who defeated Kabila’s system. His foreign alliances have shifted with the threats to his power.
In March 2019, while consolidating his disputed presidency, Tshisekedi stood at the Kigali Genocide Memorial and described the millions of Congolese lives lost after 1994 as the “collateral effects” of the horrors in Rwanda. It was language suited to his rapprochement with Paul Kagame.
When the Rwanda-backed M23 returned and began seizing Congolese territory, Kagame became the aggressor. Tshisekedi first turned to an East African military force, then ordered it to leave when it failed to defeat M23 and replaced it with a SADC mission. After M23 captured Goma and Bukavu, his government approached Donald Trump with another proposition: American access to Congo’s strategic minerals in exchange for security support. Africa Intelligence reported that the proposed minerals-for-security arrangement was being presented as involving mineral resources valued at approximately $3 trillion.
Now he is in Jerusalem.
The partners change when his position becomes vulnerable. The objective remains the same.
Power!
Israel offers security cooperation, intelligence relationships, technology and access to influential political networks in Washington. Jerusalem becomes another foreign capital where Tshisekedi can seek the legitimacy he has failed to build securely among his own people.
The embassy decision must be understood within this politics of survival.
This politics also forces us to decide what solidarity means when the language of Congolese suffering is used by those seeking alliances with other systems of oppression.
I Have Written This Before
My solidarity with Palestine reaches back years through organising, political education and relationships built in the work of solidarity.
I have seen Palestinians and their allies make space for Congo when much of the world treated our suffering as invisible. Students at Birzeit University participated in Congo Week. Organisers from Existence Is Resistance stood alongside Congolese communities in New York. Palestinian and Congolese artists exchanged stories about war, memory and survival.
These experiences taught me that solidarity is strongest when oppressed people refuse to compete for attention and recognise the systems connecting their struggles.
In Rising for Palestine, I contributed a chapter titled “From the River to the Rift: The Global Struggle for Self-Determination in Palestine and the Congo.” I wrote it because Congolese people have a responsibility to understand that our struggle is connected to the struggles of other oppressed peoples.
Palestinian and Congolese struggles converge against systems that fragment land, displace communities, militarise daily life and turn human beings into obstacles to extraction and conquest. In that chapter, I wrote that Palestine and Congo are “converging in resistance.” I meant it.
We cannot ask the world to recognise occupation in Bunagana and become diplomatically flexible about occupation in East Jerusalem. We cannot condemn the theft of Congolese land while treating Palestinian dispossession as a complicated matter best left to powerful governments. We cannot demand accountability for those who arm and protect Rwanda while embracing a government accused by authoritative international bodies of destroying Palestinian life in Gaza.
The language of solidarity must survive contact with power. Otherwise, it is branding.
Congo, Africa and Palestine
Congo’s earlier position on Israel belongs to a wider African history.
On 4 October 1973, as African governments were reassessing their relations with Israel, Mobutu announced before the United Nations General Assembly that Zaire would break diplomatic relations with the Israeli state. Zaire, he said, had to choose between “a friendly country, Israel, and a brother country, Egypt.” Between a friend and a brother, the choice was clear.
We should not romanticise Mobutu. In 1982, Zaire restored diplomatic relations with Israel and developed a close political and security relationship with the Israeli state. Contemporary scholarship connected the reversal to Mobutu’s pursuit of greater support in Washington. It exposed the distance between his Pan-African language and the bargains that sustained his regime.
Still, the 1973 rupture matters. It reflected a wider African recognition that Palestine belonged to the continent’s unfinished struggle against colonial domination and apartheid.
The African Union continues to affirm Palestinian self-determination and an independent Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Moving Congo’s embassy to Jerusalem would break with this longstanding African position. It would also lend recognition to Israel’s claim over a city whose status cannot lawfully be determined through occupation and unilateral annexation. The United Nations regards East Jerusalem as occupied Palestinian territory.
The contradiction becomes sharper from where I write in Ghana.
On the same day Tshisekedi met Netanyahu, President John Dramani Mahama addressed the Non-Aligned Movement summit in Belgrade. According to Ghana’s official account, he condemned the “selectivity and indifference” with which the international community responds to human suffering. He demanded the consistent application of international law and an end to civilian suffering in Gaza.
Ghana was speaking in the language of international law and Palestinian humanity while Congo moved its diplomacy towards Netanyahu.
This was Tshisekedi’s choice, made against Africa’s longstanding solidarity with Palestine.
When Faith Becomes a Shield
At AIPAC, Tshisekedi connected his support for Israel to his Christian faith and praised American evangelicals for supporting the Israeli state. His language of “divine grace and favour” places him within the political world of Christian Zionism, where support for Israel is presented as a religious obligation and Palestinian dispossession is obscured by prophecy.
The wider influence of Christian Zionism on African politics deserves a separate examination. Here, its importance lies in the religious legitimacy it gives Tshisekedi’s search for security, influence and access to Washington.
Paula White-Cain, Donald Trump’s spiritual adviser and head of the White House Faith Office, embodies this fusion. She prayed during the June 2025 ceremony connected to the US-brokered agreement between Congo and Rwanda, travelled through the Great Lakes region and organised a special prayer gathering attended by Tshisekedi in Kinshasa. Three days later, Israeli President Isaac Herzog arrived in Kinshasa to deepen diplomatic, security and economic cooperation.
The sequence brings the relationship into view: pulpits, presidents, peace agreements, strategic minerals and Israel belong to the same diplomatic network. Religious language elevates these alliances into expressions of divine purpose.
The problem lies in Tshisekedi’s conversion of Christianity into a political instrument: scripture emptied of justice, faith reduced to loyalty and divine favour invoked to protect power from moral scrutiny. That contradiction becomes unbearable when a president who asks the world to mourn the children of the Kivu provinces embraces a leader responsible for the destruction of Palestinian children in Gaza.
Comfort or Liberation?
Joel Osteen’s recorded message connected to the 2026 Genocost commemoration belongs to this expanding religious stage. The DRC Embassy in Washington publicised the message. Its ambassador participated in a prayer service at his Lakewood Church in June 2026.
The more revealing question concerns what the Congolese state chose to amplify.
The message spoke of compassion, prayer, hope, peace, justice, dignity and reconciliation. It assured Congolese people that every life matters, every tear is seen and God has not abandoned them.
Those words may provide comfort. Solidarity requires us to identify the structures responsible for suffering and confront them.
The message invoked justice without telling us what justice requires. It did not name Rwanda or Uganda. It did not name mineral extraction, multinational corporations or the foreign governments that have sustained Congo’s suffering. The world was asked to remember the victims without being told who made them victims.
The United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) offer a different record. Their relationship with Congo reaches back to 1899. In 2011, their governing assemblies called for education and advocacy on Congo, and their Congo Initiative has connected Christian teaching with resource extraction, sexual violence and the rights of Congolese communities.
The same tradition can be seen in the Reverend Dr Otis Moss III, senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, Barack Obama’s former congregation. Under the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Trinity displayed a “Free South Africa” banner in 1977. Its solidarity with African liberation did not begin with Congo.
In his 2011 sermon “Choose Life”, Moss named coltan. He connected the minerals inside electronic devices to the exploitation of Congolese people and asked his congregation to recognise its place within an economic system producing death in Congo. That is the difference between faith that comforts power and faith that confronts it.
This matters because Genocost was created in 2013 by the Congolese Action Youth Platform. The government did not create it. It inherited a movement built by young Congolese organisers and has increasingly placed the presidency at the centre of its commemoration.
Official recognition can give a people’s memory wider public reach. It can also empty that memory of its political meaning and convert it into legitimacy for those in power.
Hope without truth becomes an escape from responsibility. Prayer without justice becomes a blessing over the order that keeps people oppressed.
We Have Seen the Chosen Man Before
Inside Congo, religious figures close to Tshisekedi have helped cultivate the idea of a providential leader. Roland Dalo, pastor of the Centre Missionnaire Philadelphie, has publicly described Tshisekedi as “the choice of the Eternal” for the nation. Such language creates an environment in which criticism of the president can be recast as resistance to divine will.
Congolese people should recognise the danger. We have lived through the manufacture of a man larger than the country.
Under Mobutu, state propaganda elevated the president into a religious figure. His image was everywhere. Official media called him the “Father of the Nation,” the “Guide of the Revolution” and even the “Messiah,” while Mobutism was taught in schools in place of religious instruction. The state weakened as the myth of the man grew.
Today the vocabulary is more Pentecostal, more transnational and better connected to Washington. The political function is familiar. Tshisekedi is presented as chosen, protected and indispensable while Congo’s institutions are asked to orbit his person.
Public worship of a leader disciplines citizens, converts disagreement into betrayal and teaches a nation to confuse the fate of one man with the fate of the country.
The Side of the People
The photograph from Jerusalem clarifies something that Congolese political discourse often tries to avoid. A government can speak the language of sovereignty while aligning itself with domination. It can invoke the dead while using their memory to sanctify power. It can call for solidarity with Congo while abandoning solidarity with Palestine.
The surprise is that people ignored AIPAC, the promise on Jerusalem, the theology of divine favour and the expanding religious diplomacy, then treated the photograph as an inexplicable betrayal. It was a warning. It was also a mirror.
Those of us who follow Congo must choose a side: the people or the systems that dispossess them; political truth or the myth of a chosen leader; solidarity or proximity to power.
My choice is the choice I expressed in Rising for Palestine: from Gaza to Goma, our people will be free. That freedom will come through people who recognise one another across borders, refuse selective justice and understand that no nation can build its liberation on another people’s dispossession.
The image from Jerusalem should end our surprise.
Now it must begin our clarity!