Israel's self-defeating bet on Somaliland | Elfadil Ibrahim | AW

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

69% : Gideon Sa'ar, Israel's Foreign Minister, touched down in Hargeisa last week, days after Israel made history as the first United Nations member state to recognise the breakaway republic.
63% : Flanked by Somaliland's President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullah at a press conference, he hailed the dawn of a new "warm friendship," adding that Israel's formal recognition of Somaliland was "the moral thing to do.
60% : The court was unequivocal: the settlements are illegal and the regime of checkpoints and permits constitutes a form of racial segregation.
57% : " Indeed, while Israel praises Hargeisa for its stability, its own policy in the Palestinian territories has engineered the opposite.
55% : Israel's Palestinian-free vision of the Holy Land meshes neatly with the Trump administration's "Project Sunrise."
52% : Israel's security cabinet took the unprecedented step last March of approving a formal administration within the defence ministry to oversee the "voluntary departure" of Palestinians to "third countries."
48% : Israel's finance minister, himself a settler, stated without hesitation that the strategic design of settlement expansion is to "bury the idea of a Palestinian state.
48% : By recognising Hargeisa, Israel is betting that it can still bypass the question of Palestinian statehood by cultivating ties with Muslim allies who are willing to trade solidarity for survival.
46% : Israel's search for Palestinian partners has meant avoiding responsible leaders, instead preferring opportunistic strongmen.
45% : By framing the conflict as a squabble between Arab interlopers and the Jewish people returning to their indigenous lands, the Israeli right wing (now at the helm of power) frames annexation of the West Bank as a form of sacred reclamation rather than the "ethnic cleansing" that United Nations experts warn it actually represents.
44% : " Sa'ar's back-handed comment stings because it overlooks the obvious: if the Palestinian state remains "virtual," it is because Israel has spent the better part of six decades serving as its architect, and, finally, its demolition crew.
43% : Israel is using its recognition of Somaliland to mount a diplomatic offensive resting on the 1933 Montevideo Convention, which sets four criteria for statehood: a permanent population, a defined territory, a functionin, effective government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.
40% : It lacks a coherent administration because its fiscal revenues are frequently withheld by Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's Finance Minister, who has used his office to bring the PA to the brink of insolvency.
37% : Israel prevents the emergence of a "real" state through settlements and checkpoints, and then points to the resulting dysfunction as proof that the state is "virtual.
36% : As the evidence-gathering phase continues into 2026, Israel finds itself increasingly isolated.
36% : The recognition of Somaliland then, is a desperate attempt to take the moral high ground, to claim that Israel is not inherently Islamophobic, nor is it an "apartheid" state.
35% : Accused of drug-trafficking, systematic aid theft and eventually disowned by his own family, Abu Shabab was killed in a skirmish in southern Gaza late last year, a messy, though unsurprising end for a man whose chequered past embodied the chaos Israel claims it wants to solve.
35% : The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in 2024 that Israel's 57-year occupation of Palestinian territories is "unlawful" and must end "as rapidly as possible."
32% : As a result of this world-view, the state of Israel enters a trap of its own making.
30% : If Israel annexes the land but does not offer citizenship, it strengthens international accusations of "apartheid," and invites the wrath of the international community.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.