Recognition in the shadow of Gaza

In the late hours of the evening of 26 December, shortly after Israel’s announcement recognising Somaliland, images of jubilation rapidly flooded social media platforms. Footage from Burco and Hargeisa captured dense crowds occupying public streets, Somaliland flags raised high, while Israeli flags -- digitally imposed onto walls and public spaces -- served as potent symbols of an imagined political arrival. These scenes projected an atmosphere of triumph, signaling what many perceived as the long-awaited breach of Somaliland’s three-decade exclusion from the international order.

For a significant number of Somalilanders, the recognition was met with palpable relief. After thirty years of diplomatic marginalisation, acknowledgement by any internationally recognised state, regardless of its geopolitical weight, was interpreted as overdue endorsement of Somaliland’s claim to sovereignty. Yet beneath these public performances of celebration lies a conspicuous and troubling silence. Among observers both within Somaliland and across the diaspora, a critical line of inquiry remains largely absent: why has recognition arrived now, and under whose strategic conditions? What is notably missing from the celebratory narrative is a sustained, rigorous interrogation of the timing, motivations, and geopolitical interests of hostile actors underpinning this sudden shift. Without such scrutiny, the spectacle of recognition risks obscuring the deeper power dynamics at play, reducing a profoundly consequential political moment to little more than symbolic affirmation devoid of critical self-examination

While Israel’s historic periphery doctrine prioritized strategic alliances with non-Arab, Western-aligned, and politically marginal states, the underlying logic of this approach has remained strikingly consistent. What has shifted over the past decade is not Israel’s strategic orientation, but rather the theatre in which it operates. Israel’s foreign policy has increasingly pivoted toward alliance-building within the Arab world itself, a recalibration most visibly crystallised in the 2020 Abraham Accords. Through normalisation agreements with Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan, Israel sought to rehabilitate its previously isolated regional position by embedding itself within an emergent Arab–Israeli security architecture. This architecture is structured around converging strategic priorities: the containment of Iran’s axis of influence, the securitisation of critical maritime corridors, and the expansion of intelligence-sharing and militarised coalitions.

The Abraham Accords marked a decisive rupture from Israel’s historical reliance on non-Arab peripheral partners, signalling a willingness to sidestep, rather than resolve, the Palestinian question in exchange for regional legitimacy and strategic cooperation. Through these agreements, Israel was actively rebranded: no longer framed as a settler-colonial occupying force, but recast as a regional security guarantor, economic partner, technological provider, and counter-insurgency ally against Iranian-aligned actors. In this framing, peace-building was not the objective; consolidation of a militarised, Western-aligned regional order was. Israel’s foreign policy thus evolved less as a pursuit of stability, and more as a project of hegemonic entrenchment.

This trajectory extended beyond the formal signatories of the Abraham Accords. Prior to the escalation of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza -- now surpassing a reported death toll of over 70,000 -- Saudi Arabia had signaled its willingness to pursue normalisation with Israel. As a symbolic leader of both the Arab and Islamic worlds, Saudi participation would have marked the apex of Israel’s “diplomatic rehabilitation.” Through back-channel negotiations, and US-brokered security guarantees, the groundwork for Saudi–Israeli rapprochement was actively underway. However, Israel’s intensifying genocidal campaign in Gaza rendered overt normalisation politically untenable. The scale of Palestinian civilian suffering made public rapprochement diplomatically impossible amid global outrage.

Since the escalation of Israel’s genocidal violence, the state has been subjected to an unprecedented level of diplomatic, humanitarian, and legal scrutiny. The sheer magnitude of civilian casualties, disproportionately affecting women and children, has prompted widespread allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued formal arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, citing credible evidence of forcible expulsion, deliberate targeting of civilian populations, and incitement to mass civilian harm. Concurrently, South Africa submitted a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), seeking to halt Israel’s military offensive in Rafah as part of a broader genocide case, arguing that Israel’s actions constituted a violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

International accountability mechanisms subsequently accelerated, gaining traction across global civil society and among a growing number of state actors, including Spain, Belgium, Colombia, Egypt, and Ireland. Despite continued political, financial, and military backing from key allies -- most notably the United States -- Israel’s diplomatic standing has markedly deteriorated. Independent investigations by organisations such as Amnesty International have documented the systematic destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, the collapse of essential civil services, and the sustained bombardment of civilian spaces. These findings have intensified global demands for accountability, and justice for the Palestinians.

Israel’s foreign policy, therefore, must not be understood merely as a reactive response to diplomatic isolation, but as an active effort to manage and redirect the political fallout of its own destabilising conduct. Israel’s actions in Gaza have not only eroded its legitimacy; they have also exposed the contradictions embedded within the Western-led international order. Governments that routinely position themselves as arbiters of international law and humanitarian norms now find themselves complicit in defending mass civilian harm. The dissonance between professed commitments to proportionality, civilian protection, and rules-based governance -- particularly among the United States, the United Kingdom, and aligned European powers -- has become increasingly untenable.

It is within this context that Israel’s recognition of Somaliland must be situated. Far from a benign diplomatic gesture, the move should be understood as a strategic diversion, an attempt to recalibrate diplomatic momentum away from arenas of intense scrutiny and toward regions where geopolitical returns are high and accountability is minimal. By extending recognition to Somaliland, Israel signals its continued capacity to forge alliances and shape security architectures, even as allegations of genocide and war crimes haunt its international image. Somaliland’s political marginalisation and lack of formal recognition render it a low-cost diplomatic asset: a means for Israel to expand influence in the Horn of Africa and Red Sea corridor, project security interests, and reconstitute itself not as an isolated pariah and rogue state, but as an assertive actor within an increasingly militarised regional order.

The strategic significance of Somaliland to Israel does not emerge from shared political histories, ideological affinities, or moral alignment. It is rooted instead in geography and military utility. Overlooking the Gulf of Aden and situated adjacent to the Bab El-Mandeb Strait, Somaliland occupies a critical node within one of the world’s most consequential maritime corridors. This passage, linking the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, functions as a lifeline for global trade, and military logistics, rendering control and surveillance of the region a strategic priority for any state seeking to project power beyond its immediate borders.

For Israel, this geography has acquired renewed urgency amid escalating confrontations with Iran-aligned actors in Yemen, particularly the Houthis, whose sustained attacks have disrupted maritime traffic and challenged regional security architectures. Expanding influence along the Red Sea therefore offers Israel a decisive strategic advantage: enhanced surveillance capacity, intelligence coordination with aligned actors, and the potential for operational reach beyond its territorial boundaries. Somaliland’s proximity to these chokepoints transforms it from a peripheral entity into a tactical asset within Israel’s broader security calculus.

Crucially, Somaliland’s political non-recognition positions it within a diplomatic grey zone that is not a liability for Israel, but an asset. As an unrecognised entity, Somaliland lacks the institutional leverage, and international scrutiny that constrain formal state-to-state military and intelligence partnerships. This absence of accountability creates conditions of access without constraint. In this sense, Somaliland becomes uniquely valuable: a space where security cooperation can be pursued with minimal political cost, limited transparency, and reduced exposure to global accountability mechanisms. What is framed publicly as diplomatic recognition thus functions materially as an expansion of covert security infrastructure.

This shift cannot be separated from Somaliland’s own strategic repositioning over the past decade. Once articulated primarily as an economic partner pursuing development through trade and investment, Somaliland has increasingly aligned itself with a Western-backed security order. Engagements with Taiwan, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and now Israel reveal a clear departure from earlier postures of non-alignment. Economic cooperation has gradually been subsumed by strategic alignment, blurring the boundary between development discourse and militarised integration.

Berbera Port stands as the clearest embodiment of this transformation. Marketed initially as an economic development initiative, it has evolved into a site of strategic military significance. The language of investment, infrastructure, and trade has served to obscure deeper processes of regional securitisation, in which Somaliland’s value is measured by its utility to external powers seeking logistical footholds and security leverage. In this framework, sovereignty becomes secondary to serviceability.

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland has already exacerbated regional tension. It has provoked direct condemnation from Somalia, formal rejection by the African Union, and opposition from regional and international actors who view the move as a destabilising precedent. The Horn of Africa is already vulnerable to becoming a militarised frontier, evident in the use of Bosaso Airport in Puntland as a base for UAE-linked paramilitary operations and the ongoing genocide in Sudan. Rather than contributing to cooperative regional engagement, the Somaliland project risks deepening fragmentation and intensifying militarisation across an already unstable region.

If Somaliland is to meaningfully distinguish itself from the centralised and autocratic governance structures it once rejected in southern Somalia, it must resist reproducing the same logics of power consolidation, elite decision-making, and secrecy from the public domain. Historical trauma cannot be continually mobilised to justify the erosion of democratic accountability, nor can strategic diplomatic alliances substitute for popular consent. Recognition that entrenches political exclusion, particularly among populations who oppose the Zionist entity in light of its widely documented war crimes, does not constitute genuine statehood. It is not sovereignty realized, but vulnerability leveraged.

For Somaliland’s political leadership, including President Cirro, the diplomatic gains of recognition by Israel may appear to outweigh its symbolic and ethical costs. Yet such calculations risk tethering Somaliland’s political future to an external security agenda shaped by militarisation, impunity, and regional domination. In doing so, recognition becomes less a pathway to legitimacy and more an instrument through which Somaliland’s marginality is exploited, traded for short-term recognition at the expense of long-term political integrity.