In fifty years, the geopolitical script between Uganda and Israel has been rewritten completely.
In 1976, Israeli commandos stormed Entebbe Airport under the cover of darkness, engaging Ugandan troops loyal to Idi Amin in a firefight to rescue over 100 Jewish and Israeli hostages held by Palestinian hijackers. The raid cost the life of the unit’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan “Yoni” Netanyahu the elder brother of Israel’s current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Uganda and Israel left that night on opposite sides of history.
Fifty years later, the son of Uganda’s president wants to build a statue to the man his country’s soldiers killed.
That is the measure of how dramatically things have shifted.
General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Uganda’s Chief of Defence Forces, called for a ceasefire in the Middle East this week but attached a condition that nobody was expecting.
“We want the war in the Middle East to end now. The world is tired of it,” he wrote on X. “But any talk of destroying or defeating Israel will bring us into the war. On the side of Israel!”
He did not stop there. “If Israel needs help, it only need ask. Their Ugandan brothers are ready to assist,” he added, in a string of posts that continued across several days.
He went further still, suggesting that a single brigade of the Uganda People’s Defence Forces would be sufficient to capture Tehran. “I hear our friends in Israel are looking for a division to capture Tehran. Personally, I think a division is too much. A UPDF Brigade would do the job quickly,” he wrote.
He also warned Iran directly: “If Tehran dares to hit us with missiles, we shall retaliate with our own missiles.”
For context, Uganda does not possess any long-range ballistic missiles, its air force consists of six Russian jet fighters, and Iran is not believed to have any missiles that could reach Uganda. But the boldness of the statements was not really about military capability. It was about alliance and about who Muhoozi Kainerugaba is, and what he represents.
Muhoozi Kainerugaba is the son of Uganda’s incumbent President Yoweri Museveni and serves as the chief of Uganda’s armed forces. He is known for his outspokenness on X, where he regularly gives his personal views on global events.
He is also widely regarded as his father’s likely political successor which gives his statements a weight that goes beyond the social media posts of an ordinary military officer.
In 2024, Kainerugaba was appointed commander of the UPDF. In 2025 and 2026, he again attracted attention for openly threatening members of the Ugandan opposition opposing Museveni’s government. His track record is one of a man who says things that no official policy has sanctioned, watches the reaction, and occasionally deletes the post but never fully walks back the sentiment.
His Israel comments are the latest and most internationally visible example of this pattern. Earlier this year, he demanded one billion US dollars annually from the United States for the UPDF a post he later deleted and apologised for, though the damage was already done.
Before the Iran war posts, Kainerugaba had already been making headlines with a different announcement. Last month, he announced that a statue of Yonatan Netanyahu would be erected at Entebbe Airport, at the exact spot where Netanyahu was killed. “In order to strengthen our close blood relations with Israel, we shall soon unveil a statue to Yoni Netanyahu at the exact spot he was killed at Entebbe Airport,” he wrote. “Yoni was the big brother of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. God bless Uganda and Israel.”
To date, no other Ugandan official has confirmed or commented on the statue. It is widely believed that Yoni Netanyahu was killed by a Ugandan sniper during the 1976 raid.
The symbolism is striking. The airport where Israeli and Ugandan forces once exchanged fire is now, in Kainerugaba’s vision, the site of a monument to the Israeli commander who died there. Whether that is a gesture of reconciliation, political performance, or genuine strategic realignment depends on who you ask.
Kainerugaba’s explanation for his pro-Israel position is rooted in gratitude. “Israel stood with us when we were nobodies in the 1980s and 1990s. Why wouldn’t we defend her now that our GDP is $100 billion? One of the largest in Africa,” he said.
He also offered a religious justification: “We stand with Israel because we are Christians,” he stated in one post, and cited Israeli General Moshe Dayan as his “greatest hero.”
The statements have not gone unnoticed in Washington. Republican Senator Jim Risch, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned that Muhoozi’s posts had “crossed a red line” and could cause a review of the US-Uganda security cooperation agreement.
Kainerugaba’s response to that warning was characteristically defiant. “My name is not ‘Commander @mkainerugaba’. My name is General Muhoozi Kainerugaba. What ‘Red line’ have I crossed according to you? You can re-evaluate whatever you want as far as our cooperation is concerned, but you will never DEMEAN and DEGRADE us. You will never make us your slaves,” he replied.
It is the kind of statement that plays well domestically nationalist, assertive, unbothered by foreign pressure. Whether it represents actual Ugandan foreign policy is a different question entirely.
Here is what makes this story genuinely complicated.
Uganda and Israel do not currently have resident ambassadors in each other’s capitals. Uganda’s long-running partnerships with Russia and China have contributed to tensions with Jerusalem, though in recent months the Museveni government has made more positive overtures toward Israel.
Despite South Africa accusing Israel of genocide in a landmark case at the International Court of Justice, many African countries have chosen to remain neutral, with some deepening military and economic ties with Israel. Uganda sits in that complex middle ground historically cautious, but with a military chief who is anything but.
No official Ugandan government statement has endorsed Kainerugaba’s posts. No Ugandan parliament has debated entering the Iran-Israel conflict. The Ugandan Foreign Ministry has said nothing. In that silence, it is worth asking: is this the position of Uganda, or is this the position of one very loud general who happens to be the president’s son?
The answer to that question matters far beyond Uganda’s borders. Africa’s position on the Middle East conflict is not monolithic. The continent’s 54 nations contain Christians, Muslims, secularists, and everything between each with their own history, alliances, and interests. When an African military chief declares his country ready to fight Iran on Israel’s behalf, it disrupts the narrative of African neutrality and raises a question that the continent has not yet fully answered: in this conflict, where does Africa stand?
Fifty years ago, the raid on Entebbe proved to the world that Israel possessed the operational reach to strike its enemies and defend its citizens anywhere on the globe. In 2026, the emerging dynamic between Kampala and Jerusalem is being read by some analysts as evidence of a broader geostrategic realignment occurring across the Global South.
Whether Muhoozi Kainerugaba’s posts represent that realignment, or simply the unfiltered opinions of an ambitious general with an unmonitored X account, is a question that Kampala has conspicuously declined to answer.
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What is clear is this: the man who may one day lead Uganda has looked at the most divisive conflict in the world, picked a side loudly and publicly, offered his country’s soldiers, threatened a sovereign nation with missile retaliation, and proposed a monument to a man his country’s forces killed fifty years ago.
Whether that is courage, recklessness, or theatre, the world is watching and Africa is paying attention.
