Buck-Dancing for Zion: Why Ghana Remains One of the Last Countries on Earth Where Israel Is Popular
How Israeli aid and arms turned Ghana into the Jewish state’s West African Outpost
The Pew Research Center released its annual survey of global attitudes toward Israel in June 2026, and the findings painted a picture of near universal disapproval. A median of 67 percent across all 36 countries surveyed held unfavorable views of Israel. Not a single country had a majority viewing Israel favorably. Confidence in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had cratered worldwide.
Yet buried in the data was a remarkable exception. 49 percent of Ghanaians reported holding a favorable view of Israel, making Ghana one of only a tiny handful of nations globally where nearly half the population still supports the Jewish state. Sub-Saharan Africa was the only region in the entire survey where pluralities still held favorable views. Kenya came in at 50 percent favorable. Nigeria registered 47 percent despite a sharp nine point jump in unfavorable views from the previous year.
These numbers demand explanation. Why does Ghana stand so far apart from global opinion? The answer lies in a unique convergence of historical ties, evangelical theology, Israeli diplomatic strategy, and the explosive growth of Pentecostal Christianity across West Africa.
Ghana’s relationship with Israel predates Ghanaian independence itself. In 1956, Israel established a consulate in the Gold Coast while it was still a British colony. After Ghana achieved independence in March 1957, Kwame Nkrumah invited Israel to deepen ties, and Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
The warmth of the early relationship was striking. Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir was the only foreign Cabinet official invited to participate in Ghana’s first independence anniversary celebrations in March 1958. Israel also helped establish the Ghana Air Force in July 1959, founding a flying training school in Accra staffed by Israeli instructors and technicians, with Indian advisers setting up the new service’s headquarters later that year.
Meir’s 1958 trip—her first to the African continent, taking in Liberia, Ghana, and other West African states—left her deeply moved by the challenges facing newly independent African nations. She personally championed the establishment of MASHAV, Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, making international cooperation a signature element of her foreign policy. Meir stated that “human and economic development in Africa is a drive toward universal self-determination and justice,” articulating the humanitarian philosophy that would guide MASHAV’s work for decades.
The “golden years” proved fragile. At the January 1961 Casablanca Conference, Ghana joined other countries in sharply criticizing Israel, and the relationship cooled steadily through the 1960s. The Yom Kippur War of October 1973 proved to be the breaking point. In late October 1973, Ghana severed diplomatic relations with Israel, in compliance with an Organisation of African Unity resolution calling on members to cut ties over the occupied Arab territories.
For the next two decades, formal diplomatic relations were suspended. The signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993 opened a window for Ghana to review its position. On August 9, 1994, Ghana and Israel signed a joint communiqué and simultaneously announced in Tel Aviv and Accra the re-establishment of diplomatic ties. Ghana reopened its mission in Tel Aviv in 1996, but Israel did not reopen its embassy in Accra until September 2011.
The post-2011 period has witnessed a dramatic deepening of ties. Two rounds of formal political consultations were held in 2018 and 2021, and Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen visited Accra in 2023. A Ghana–Israel Parliamentary Friendship Association was inaugurated in June 2025, and a Third Session of the Ghana–Israel Political Dialogue was held in Jerusalem in January 2026.
Military cooperation has also featured. In September 2018, 25 commanders from the Ghana Armed Forces received training from Israeli Defense Forces officers in shooting and Krav Maga. In 2019, Israel appointed Colonel Aviezer Segal as its first military attaché to Africa in several decades; according to the Times of Israel, the IDF was by then training local forces in more than a dozen African nations, including Ghana, as part of Netanyahu’s broader Africa strategy.
Cybersecurity has emerged as one of the most dynamic areas of cooperation. In 2020, Ghana’s Minister of Communications led a delegation to the CyberTech Global conference in Tel Aviv, where Ghana and Israel signed a Memorandum of Understanding to strengthen cybersecurity cooperation. In 2024, Ghana’s Cyber Security Authority achieved Tier 1 status in the International Telecommunication Union’s Global Cybersecurity Index, with a score of 99.27 percent.
Yet cybersecurity cooperation also produced the single biggest controversy of the modern relationship. Around 2015–16, NSO Group contracted to supply its Pegasus spyware for roughly $6 million; with a $2 million fee added by the local intermediary, Infralocks Development Limited—run by George Derrick Oppong—Ghana’s National Communications Authority paid $8 million for the system, which was acquired for the National Security Council Secretariat. In 2020, three former senior officials were convicted in Accra High Court for causing financial loss to the state. Former Deputy National Security Coordinator Salifu Osman and NCA Director-General William Tetteh Tevie each received five-year sentences. The Times of Israel called it “the first time in the world that a government official has been jailed for doing business with NSO.”
Economic ties have grown steadily. The Israeli Trade Mission reported in May 2023 that over five years of engagement, Israeli businesses had concluded $140 million worth of deals with over 450 Israeli and 2,000 Ghanaian companies and agencies. MASHAV has run training programs in Ghana since 1958 in agriculture, health, education, and innovation; in 2019, a second batch of 70 Ghanaian agricultural graduates was sent to Israel for an 11-month attachment on Kibbutz farms.
The relationship has drawn serious criticism beyond Pegasus. Former MP Ras Mubarak has argued that Israeli investment and aid carry a political price tag. Netanyahu himself told Israeli ambassadors to Africa in 2017 that the “first interest” of the Africa push was to “dramatically change the situation regarding African votes at the UN and other international bodies from opposition to support.”
In November 2018, Ghana’s Foreign Minister Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey visited Israel and assured Knesset member Avraham Neguise—a Likud figure who chaired the World Likud movement—that Ghana would help Israel gain observer status at the African Union, drawing backlash from pro-Palestinian voices who said it cut against Ghana’s non-aligned tradition.
In December 2025, seven Ghanaian travelers—including four members of a parliamentary delegation bound for Tel Aviv University’s Cyber Week conference—were detained at Ben Gurion Airport for over five hours without justification; three were deported. Ghana’s Foreign Ministry condemned their “humiliating” treatment and said they had been deliberately targeted, and in a rare reciprocal move Ghana deported three Israelis who had just arrived.
Curiously, Ghana’s UN voting record has been quite hostile to Israel. According to the pro-Israel monitoring group UN Watch, Ghana has voted against Israel in the large majority of recent General Assembly votes, with no pro-Israel votes. Ghana voted against the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December 2017, and in September 2025 President Mahama, addressing the General Assembly, backed Palestinian statehood and a two-state solution and condemned Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
This apparent contradiction, warm bilateral ties alongside consistent pro-Palestine UN voting, reveals the true driver of Ghana’s pro-Israel sentiment. It is not government policy but popular religious culture.
According to Ghana’s 2021 census figures, 71 percent of Ghanaians are Christian. Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians represent about 44 percent of all Christians. Scholars consistently identify this demographic reality as a primary engine of pro-Israel sentiment. In the edited volume Christian Zionism in Africa (ed. Cynthia Holder Rich), Suraya Dadoo’s chapter “Brand Jesus: Pro-Israel Messaging Through Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches in Ghana” documents how support for Israel has been embedded in church culture.
Israel has deliberately leveraged evangelical Christianity as a diplomatic tool across sub-Saharan Africa. Gideon Behar, former head of the Africa Bureau at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has described growing Evangelical communities in Africa as having a natural affinity for Israel and as an increasing factor pushing African governments to strengthen ties with it. He explained: “But the fact that there are Evangelical communities that are becoming larger and stronger everywhere in Africa . . . these communities naturally have a stronger connection with Israel, and a stronger urge to have links with us, and they are certainly a factor that is increasingly encouraging African countries to strengthen their ties with Israel.”
Archbishop Nicholas Duncan-Williams, founder of Christian Action Faith Ministries and one of West Africa’s most influential evangelical figures, serves as Patron of the Ghana Israel Business Chamber. In a 2017 sermon, he declared that a key sign of the end times would be “when the capital of Israel is moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,” urging his congregation to pray for it as prophecy to be fulfilled.
Ultimately, Ghana serves as the latest exhibit in a broader, calculated strategy by organized Jewry to cultivate golem states across the Global South. By weaponizing the theological fervor of low-IQ, easily manipulated populations, Israel secures a diplomatic and intelligence foothold that masks its deepening isolation in the West. As European nations increasingly awaken to the reality that organized Jewry has acted as the historical nemesis of their civilization, Israel has predictably pivoted toward melanin-enhanced, opportunistic constituencies who are eager to buck-dance for shekels in exchange for immediate financial gain.
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