Enemies Become Brothers: The African Christian General Ready To Fight For Israel

Last month, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba posted that he was "ready to deploy 100,000 Ugandan soldiers in Israel. Under my command. To protect the Holy Land. The land of Jesus Christ our God." Kainerugaba is Uganda's Commander of Defense Forces and the son of its president, Yoweri Mucseveni, who has ruled the country since 1986. He is also widely expected to succeed his father.

He was just getting started. Over the following weeks, he offered to send 500,000 soldiers to fight Iran "for free," warned that any talk of defeating Israel would bring Uganda into the war "on Israel's side," and threatened to sever relations with Turkey after Ankara called Netanyahu "the Hitler of our time." He also announced that Uganda will erect a statue of Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu -- the older brother of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, killed while leading the 1976 hostage rescue at Entebbe -- at the exact spot where he fell.

This is not a fringe figure in Ugandan politics. Kainerugaba is the most powerful military officer in the country, and when he speaks, he speaks with the weight of the Ugandan state behind him, even when his government hasn't quite caught up to what he's saying.

To understand how we got here, you need to know the full story of Uganda and Israel -- one of the stranger relationships in modern history.

From Brothers to Enemies: A Friendship That Idi Amin Destroyed

When Uganda gained independence in 1962, Israel was among the first countries to extend a hand. Israeli advisors helped train the Ugandan military, modernize its agriculture, and develop national infrastructure -- part of a broader Israeli effort to build genuine partnerships across newly independent sub-Saharan Africa. It was a warm relationship by any measure, built on real cooperation and mutual respect.

Idi Amin ended all of it. After seizing power, Amin expelled the Israelis in 1972, aligned Uganda with the Arab world and the Soviet Union, and proceeded to kill hundreds of thousands of his own citizens in one of the most brutal dictatorships of the twentieth century. 

The low point came in the summer of 1976. Palestinian terrorists hijacked Air France Flight 139 shortly after takeoff from Athens and forced it to land at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Amin welcomed them personally. The terrorists separated the Jewish passengers from the non-Jews -- a selection that horrified the world with its deliberate echo of the Holocaust -- and issued their ultimatum: release Palestinian terrorists held in Israeli prisons, or the 102 Jewish hostages would be executed.

Israel's answer came eight days later, at midnight on July 4th. A hundred commandos flew 2,500 miles through the night in a mission most military planners considered suicidal. They landed at Entebbe, killed the terrorists, and freed all 102 hostages within 53 minutes. The operation was named Operation Yonatan, after Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who commanded the ground assault and was the only Israeli soldier killed in the rescue. Israel celebrated. Uganda was humiliated. And the two countries would not speak to each other for another decade.

The Time Herzl Almost Chose Uganda

Before Amin, before independence, before any of this, Uganda was the unlikely focus of a major Zionist controversy. In 1903, the British government offered Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, a tract of East African land in what is today Uganda as a site for a Jewish autonomous settlement. Herzl, watching Jews being killed in pogroms across Russia and desperate to find some refuge for them, was willing to consider it. He called the proposal a "night shelter" -- not a final destination, but a temporary haven while the movement continued its push for the Land of Israel.

But when Herzl presented the British proposal to the Sixth Zionist Congress, it set off a furious battle. Many delegates wept openly, others walked out in protest, and the Russian Jewish delegates -- who knew that the Jewish people had only one home and that it was not in Africa -- refused to entertain the proposal for a single moment. The Uganda Plan was voted down and, after Herzl's death in 1904, was never raised again. The Jewish people were going back to the Land of Israel, and nowhere else.

Repentance on the Tarmac

Museveni came to power in 1986 and began the slow work of rebuilding Uganda's international relationships. The renewed partnership with Israel grew around shared strategic interests: counterterrorism, military training, intelligence cooperation, and a common concern about the spread of radical Islam in East Africa. The alliance deepened quietly until Netanyahu's visit to Kampala in 2020 made it visible to the world, and became even stronger after October 7. Kainerugaba is now one of the loudest voices in any country defending Israel's right to fight its enemies. 

What motivates Kainerugaba to stand so publicly and furiously for Israel?

He is not doing this because of a security agreement or a weapons contract. He is doing it because Uganda is approximately 85% Christian, because African Christian leaders speak openly about the biblical bond between their continent and the Jewish people, and because Kainerugaba himself believes -- and says plainly -- that defending Israel is a matter of faith, not merely of policy.

When he says he wants to protect "the land of Jesus Christ our God," he is expressing something that millions of African Christians feel with great sincerity: that the Jewish people are God's firstborn, that the Land of Israel is holy, and that standing with Israel in a moment of danger is the right thing to do.

Fifty years after Israeli commandos stormed Entebbe Airport in the middle of the night to rescue Jews held hostage on Ugandan soil, Uganda wants to honor the man who led that rescue with a permanent monument at the very spot where he gave his life -- and call him a hero.

That is not foreign policy. That is repentance.

Originally published at Israel365 News