Israel’s recognition of Somaliland as an independent state, ushered in by Foreign Minister Gideon Saar’s visit on January 6, is a geopolitical watershed that sheds further light on Israel’s evolving regional strategy after October 7.
Much of the early commentary has been distorted by claims that the move is part of a transactional scheme to relocate Palestinians en masse from Gaza to Somaliland, a breakaway territory that declared independence in 1991 but has never received international recognition. Yet despite reports from March 2025 that Israel and the United States were beginning to pursue this plan, the idea that Israel or its partners could forcibly relocate tens or hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to Somaliland is implausible.
Such a move would destabilize Somaliland, inflame Somali politics, provoke regional backlash, and generate permanent insecurity for all parties involved — including Israel and the UAE, which is far more established in the country. No state benefits from importing a large, disgruntled population against its will, least of all into a fragile and diplomatically contested polity without the resources to absorb it. And neither Israel nor the UAE would want the liability of a large Palestinian presence in an area they are cultivating for their own strategic ends.
This resettlement narrative distracts from the far more consequential reality: Israel is executing another geopolitical maneuver designed to consolidate its military reach, maritime access, and strategic leverage during a moment of significant regional fluidity.
Seen clearly, Israel’s move fits into a broader post–October 7 strategy aimed at reshaping its strategic environment through military power and opportunistic positioning. In Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, Israel has transformed territorial, political, and security realities with devastating violence and no concern for international law or long-term stability. Rather than managing threats, Israel is attempting to eliminate them outright — or at least push them farther from its borders. This approach is not new, but its scope and intensity are unprecedented.
Beyond its immediate neighborhood, Israel has expanded its reach with remarkable speed. Its deepening security relationship with Azerbaijan has allowed it to project power along Iran’s northern flank, mitigating its own geographic constraints and opening new avenues for intelligence-gathering and strike capabilities. In the Eastern Mediterranean, Israel’s growing coordination with Greece and Cyprus is explicitly designed to counter Türkiye’s influence by reshaping the regional maritime, energy security, and military balances of power.
A foothold in Somaliland extends this logic southward, offering Israel something it has long sought but never possessed directly: access to the Bab al-Mandab Strait and the southern entrance to the Red Sea. This is no longer a distant arena for Israel but a frontline, and from Somaliland, Israel can more directly challenge the Yemen-based Houthis’ growing stranglehold over one of the world’s most critical maritime corridors and disrupt their capacity to launch missiles and drones toward Israeli territory.
This move also deepens Israel’s footprint in the Horn of Africa, where it has cultivated relationships with Ethiopia, Kenya, and others, while probing opportunities in more volatile contexts such as Sudan and Eritrea. Egypt, too, has massive interests and vulnerabilities in this region, and Israel is gaining a new pressure point with which to squeeze its North African neighbor when need be. This also applies to Türkiye, arguably the most important backer of the Somali government in Mogadishu with huge economic and security investments in place.
So while diplomatic recognition of Somaliland inserts Israel into one of the most combustible regions of the globe, the payoff could be huge: exceptional geostrategic access in a geopolitical gray zone well suited to its clandestine operations, and leverage to use against other countries when it wishes.
Power without legitimacy
Although the first to recognize Somaliland, Israel is not the only state that has sought out the territory for its strategic value. The UAE has spent years establishing its presence and influence in Somaliland through commercial and naval ports, part of a broader littoral strategy spanning Yemen, Sudan, and the Horn. Abu Dhabi has also maintained its strategic partnership with Israel despite the reputational costs of the Gaza genocide, hoping that weathering the storm would pay off in the end — and Israel’s entry into Somaliland could be viewed as a convergence.
Israeli military capabilities, particularly in air defense, surveillance, and maritime security, complement the UAE’s logistic, commercial and security presence. In Yemen and the surrounding waters, Israeli power may prove especially useful. It is likely not an accident that Israel’s recognition of Somaliland coincided with a major operation by the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council to seize the entirety of southern Yemen.
Yet the central weakness in this alignment is not military capacity or strategic value. It is political legitimacy — and Israel, alongside and in parallel with the UAE, is reshaping these regions in ways that could backfire.
Israel is advancing its strategy with American power firmly at its back, particularly under a U.S. administration willing to absorb extraordinary diplomatic, legal, and reputational costs on Israel’s behalf. Washington is actively holding off international courts, sanctions regimes, and multilateral accountability mechanisms. In doing so, the United States is degrading the international order it once underwrote and accelerating the erosion of its global standing.
This support enables Israel’s ambition, but it does not resolve its core constraint: the absence of regional consent. Israel has almost no soft power in the Middle East. Its influence flows through coercion, arms and surveillance technology transfers, intelligence cooperation, and its unique access to Washington — not through legitimacy or shared norms. Its relationships with regional regimes exist in constant tension with popular will and must be sustained through repression, censorship, and security coordination. These are not the foundations of durable hegemony.
Even in the West, Israel’s position is becoming more precarious. While governments remain aligned, public support is eroding at a scale not seen before. The response has not been political adaptation, but increased repression — curbs on protest, speech, and dissent — contributing to democratic backsliding and fueling populist anger on both the left and the right. This dynamic is corrosive not only to Israel’s standing but to the political systems that sustain it.
Hegemony is not merely dominance; it is the ability to establish and maintain an order that others accept as legitimate. Israel shows little interest in building such an order. Its actions instead suggest a belief that overwhelming force can substitute indefinitely for political engagement.
Even before October 7, Israel already possessed military supremacy in the Middle East through the American-guaranteed “qualitative military edge.” What Israel is pursuing now is something more extreme: a condition of total military non-opposition. Any threat, anywhere, at any distance, is deemed intolerable.
While the desire for security is understandable, the pursuit of absolute invulnerability only guarantees perpetual war — an outcome Netanyahu and his political coalition have long promoted as preferable to compromise.
Disrupting the regional balance
Every serious regional actor recognizes that the key to lasting stability lies in a political settlement with the Palestinians. Israeli leaders understand this as well, but reject it. Pursuing such a resolution stands in opposition to the right-wing vision that now dominates Israeli politics and society, which has become wedded to its total control over the land from the river to the sea. There is no longer a meaningful domestic constituency capable of initiating or sustaining the compromises peace would require.
For decades, Israel sought to manage the Palestinian question by containing it, deferring it, and outsourcing its costs. Today, ideology, ambition, and fear have converged to produce a different approach: resolving conflict through sweeping violence.
This shift has been most catastrophic for Palestinians, but also for citizens of Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, and new alignments are beginning to form to guard against Israel’s boundless militarism. Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and even Pakistan, for instance, are seriously exploring a mutual defensive architecture. Nuclear proliferation is very much on the table.
The UAE, for its part, is already demonstrating the consequences of overreach. In Yemen, its sponsorship of the STC military advancement in the south provoked a forceful response from Saudi Arabia that undid its entire decade-long project in the country and brought UAE-Saudi relations to an unprecedented rupture point.
Likewise, Israeli recognition of Somaliland is upsetting a delicate balance in the Horn of Africa and risks sparking conflict along any number of the Horn’s myriad faultlines. The African Union has already convened an emergency meeting to discuss the matter, while calling for its “immediate revocation.” China, which sent its foreign minister to Somalia immediately after Saar’s visit, condemned the Israeli move as “illegal and a blatant violation of Somalia’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
For Israel, this is not an isolated diplomatic maneuver. It is one piece of a broader project to entrench Israeli power across multiple theaters while deferring, indefinitely, the political reckoning at its core. The strategy may succeed tactically — but strategically, it deepens Israel’s isolation, binds it ever more tightly to an increasingly unreliable United States, and locks the region into an unstable equilibrium where force substitutes for consent.
That is not a path to security. It is a wager on perpetual dominance in a region that has never tolerated it.
This article was originally published in +972 Magazine.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.
