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abraham accords
Israel Becomes First Nation to Recognize Somaliland—But Still Rejects Palestine
One foreign policy analyst said that Israel views Somaliland as a "strategic location as a launch pad for strikes on Yemen and potentially a place to forcibly 'relocate' Palestinians to."
Dec 26, 2025
Israel became the first nation to recognize Somaliland as a sovereign state on Friday, a move that was met with criticism from international observers who questioned its continued unwillingness to recognize a Palestinian state.
Somaliland, a breakaway region in the north of Somalia that is home to more than 6 million people, declared independence in 1991, but until now, no United Nations member states have recognized its claim.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described his government's recognition of the territory as being “in the spirit of the Abraham Accords,” a deal brokered by US President Donald Trump for Israel to normalize relations with some of its Arab neighbors, which has itself been accused of disregarding the issue of Palestinian sovereignty.
Speaking over a video call with Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, the president of Somaliland, Netanyahu said he was signing "Israel's official recognition of Somaliland and its right of self-determination," calling the friendship between the two nations "seminal and historic."
In a statement, Abdullahi said Israel's recognition "represents a milestone in Somaliland's long-standing pursuit of international legitimacy, reaffirming its historical, legal, and moral entitlement to statehood."
However, a report from the Guardian suggested that Israel's recognition of Somaliland has less to do with the self-determination of its people than with Israel's military interests. It cited a November report from a prominent Israeli think tank, which argued that Somaliland could be used as a base of military operations against Yemen's Houthis.
Somaliland, located in the horn of Africa just south of the Arabian Peninsula, already hosts an air base that the United Arab Emirates has used to conduct operations against the Yemeni militant group, which—until a "ceasefire" agreement was reached in October—launched regular attacks on Israel and its vessels in the Red Sea in what it said was an effort to pressure it to stop its genocidal military campaign in Gaza.
Egypt and Turkey condemned Israel's agreement with Somaliland, saying, "This initiative by Israel, which aligns with its expansionist policy and its efforts to do everything to prevent the recognition of a Palestinian state, constitutes overt interference in Somalia’s domestic affairs.”
Foreign ministers for the two nations joined those of Somalia and neighboring Djibouti on a call following the development, where they called for the continued unity of Somalia as an institution and condemned Israel's efforts "to displace the Palestinian people from their land."
Adil Haque, a professor at Rutgers Law School, pointed out on social media that, in August, Netanyahu met with Somaliland's leadership "offering recognition in exchange for helping Israel to illegally deport Palestinians from Gaza."
Somaliland was one of many nations reportedly approached by Israel to warehouse Palestinians exiled from the strip permanently—others included Indonesia, Uganda, South Sudan, and Libya.
Following reports at the time that Somalia was also in consideration, its president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, responded that "the idea of removing Palestine from their own land and putting them into another, other people’s land—I don’t see that that’s a solution at all."
A senior Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity with Israel's Channel 12 reportedly agreed that Netanyahu's recognition of Somaliland undermines his repeated assertions that there will never be a Palestinian state. As the Times of Israel summarized: "The official... points out that while Israel is the first country to grant recognition to Somaliland, the rest of the world considers the breakaway region an integral part of Somalia."
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a fellow at the Palestinian Policy Network and a producer at AJ+, said: "To state the obvious, Israel wouldn’t recognize anyone unless there was something in it for them. Israel doesn’t give a shit about Somaliland apart from its strategic location as a launch pad for strikes on Yemen and potentially a place to forcibly 'relocate' Palestinians to."
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In the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the US Has Not Been a Force for Peace
The polar opposite of the needed diplomatic effort is what has been the dominant strategy of Israel and to a large degree also of the United States: the application of ever more military force.
Dec 12, 2024
The retiring United Nations envoy for the Middle East peace process has insightfully identified a major reason the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues to boil and to entail widespread death and destruction.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Norwegian diplomat Tor Wennesland criticized the international community for relying on short-term fixes such as improving quality of life in occupied territory or diversions such as seeking peace deals between Israel and other Arab states. The crescendo of bloodshed during the past year underscores the ineffectiveness of such approaches.
Needed but not employed was a concerted and sustained diplomatic effort to end the occupation and create a Palestinian state. “What we have seen,” said Wennesland, “is the failure of dealing with the real conflict, the failure of politics and diplomacy.”
It is important to understand what diplomacy in this context does and does not mean. It does not mean routinely giving lip service to a “two-state solution” while doing little or nothing to bring about such a solution.
Much of Wennesland’s criticism was directed at the international community as a whole, but his points would apply especially to the United States, the patron of the party to the conflict that controls the land in question and resists Palestinian sovereignty.
The polar opposite of the needed diplomatic effort is what has been the dominant strategy of Israel and to a large degree also of the United States: the application of ever more military force. This was true with the 1973 war between Egypt and Israel, the first full-scale Arab-Israeli war after Israel conquered in 1967 what is now the occupied territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights.
The central feature of former U.S. President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s policy was a huge airlift of military supplies to Israel. Nixon and Kissinger, viewing the conflict in Cold War terms, considered their policy a success by enabling Israel to turn the tide of battle while shutting the Soviet Union out of a meaningful regional role.
Fast forward to today, and the emphasis is still on military escalation. Israel, in its vain effort to “destroy Hamas” and strike down adversaries on its northern border, is more committed than ever to increasing death and destruction as its default approach toward any security problem. The United States has abetted this approach by gifting $18 billion in munitions to Israel since October 2023.
The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria does nothing to discourage these tendencies and may instead encourage them. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the events in Syria with celebration and self-congratulations, claiming that Assad’s fall was due to earlier Israeli airstrikes on Hezbollah and Iran. The change of regime was an occasion for Israel increasing rather than decreasing its offensive military activity in Syria, including seizure of a previously demilitarized buffer zone along the Golan frontier and airstrikes in and around Damascus on the very weekend that rebels were entering the capital.
During the intervening years since the 1973 war, a couple of U.S. presidents did make genuine efforts to advance an Israeli-Palestinian peace. But the necessary follow-up—largely the responsibility of subsequent administrations—did not occur.
After former President Jimmy Carter brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin pocketed the resulting peace treaty with Egypt while ignoring the part of the accords dealing with the Palestinians. After former President Bill Clinton in 2000 laid on the table his "parameters" for a deal, the two sides came closer than ever to a peace agreement, but an Israeli election ended the negotiations and the new Israeli government did not return to the table.
The current impending change in U.S. administrations offers little or no hope for positive change on this subject. After social media posts by President-elect Donald Trump that said nothing about diplomacy and instead talked about “all hell to pay” if Israeli hostages were not released by his inauguration on January 20, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Trump for his “strong statement.”
Ignoring that Israel has both the power and the land and is inflicting many times more suffering on innocent civilians than anything Hamas has done, Netanyahu said that Trump’s statement “clarifies that there is one party responsible for this situation and that is Hamas.”
Echoes of a 1973-style Cold War mentality can be heard today in much discussion of U.S. policy toward the Middle East and overwhelmingly in Israeli rhetoric. The main bête noire this time is Iran, reducing the influence of which is a constantly invoked rationale for hawkish and military-heavy policies.
The Middle East is not the only region that has demonstrated the fallacy of the notion of deescalating a conflict through military escalation. As Wennesland puts it, “Politics is what ends war, and diplomacy is what ends war.”
It is important to understand what diplomacy in this context does and does not mean. It does not mean routinely giving lip service to a “two-state solution” while doing little or nothing to bring about such a solution.
Nor does it mean seeking agreements for the sake of agreements, motivated in large part by a desire to wave supposed accomplishments before a domestic constituency. This was true of the so-called "Abraham Accords," which were not peace agreements at all but instead were largely about Israel not having to make peace to enjoy formal relations with other regional states, with which Israel was not at war anyway.
It was true as well of the enormous priority that the Biden administration put on seeking a similar agreement with Saudi Arabia, which, even if it had materialized in the form the administration envisioned, would not have served either U.S. interests or the cause of Middle East peace. The administration’s effort along this line was counterproductive not only in further reducing any Israeli incentive to make peace with the Palestinians but also, as President Joe Biden himself admitted, in probably being an additional motivation for Hamas to attack Israel last October.
As for what diplomacy does mean, it includes the concerted and sustained use of diplomatic energy, policymaking bandwidth, and political capital to address directly the core issues underlying a conflict and bring about a result that makes a difference. In the Middle East context, that result needs to include Palestinian self-determination and an end to occupation.
Correct understanding of diplomacy also speaks to what a foreign policy of restraint means. It does not mean isolationism. In areas such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can mean an increase in diplomatic involvement and in the priority that policymakers give to the goal being sought. As the restraint-minded Quincy Institute puts it in its statement of principles, the United States “should engage with the world” and pursue peace “through the vigorous practice of diplomacy.”
Much damage from the policies that Wennesland laments has been done and cannot easily be reversed. The Israeli settlement enterprise in the occupied territories, which tsk-tsks from the United States have done nothing to stop, have led many observers—though not Wennesland—to believe that a two-state solution is no longer possible.
But even if the requirement of Palestinian self-determination could be achieved only through a one-state solution that provides equal rights for all, the same principle—that peace can be achieved only through vigorous diplomacy and not military escalation—applies.
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Biden’s Apocalyptic Middle East Failure: an Autopsy
By his insistence on impunity for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has left the Middle East in flames and the U.S. and the world distinctly in peril.
Nov 11, 2024
U.S. President Joe Biden has now joined the ranks of Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush as a president whose Middle East policy crashed and burned spectacularly. Unlike Carter, who was stymied by the Iranian hostage crisis, or Bush, who faced a popular Iraqi resistance movement, Biden’s woes weren’t inflicted by an enemy. Quite the opposite, it was this country’s putative partner, the Israeli government, that implicated the president in its still ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as its disproportionate attacks on Lebanon and Iran, for which Biden steadfastly declined to impose the slightest penalties. Instead, he’s continued to arm the Israelis to the teeth.
Israel’s total war on Palestinian civilians, in turn, significantly reduced enthusiasm for Biden among youth and minorities at home, helping usher him out of office. It also created electoral obstacles for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid. By his insistence on impunity for the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has left the Middle East in flames and the U.S. and the world distinctly in peril.
During his first three years in office, his administration wielded the tools of diplomacy in the Middle East. Donald Trump’s sanctions against the Houthis in Yemen had imperiled the civilian population there by denying them humanitarian aid and gasoline to drive to the market for food. Biden lifted those sanctions and sponsored continued negotiations between those in power in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa and in the neighboring Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh. Only relatively small contingents of American troops remained in Syria and Iraq to help with the mopping-up operations against the so-called Islamic State terrorist organization.
Pushing Iran Into the Arms of China and Russia
Danger signals nonetheless soon began flashing bright red among friend and foe alike in the region, as Biden’s team quickly squandered an opportunity to restore the 2015 “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” or JCPOA, between the United Nations Security Council and the Iranian regime in Tehran, which Trump had so tellingly trashed. Between 2015 and 2019, that deal had successfully kept Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program purely civilian, closing off the four most plausible pathways to a nuclear weapon.
In those years, the Iranians had, in fact, mothballed 80% of their nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. While the U.N. Security Council lifted economic sanctions on that country, Republicans in Congress refused to halt unilateral American sanctions, which applied to third parties as well. European investors had to jump through hoops to invest in Iran while avoiding Treasury Department fines. As a result, a disappointed Iranian leadership went unrewarded for its careful compliance with the JCPOA.
Then, in May 2018, Trump stabbed the Iranians in the back, withdrawing the U.S. from the JCPOA and slapping the most severe economic sanctions ever applied by one country to another in peacetime on Iran. It essentially added up to an invisible blockade of the Iranian economy, even interfering with ordinary commerce like that country’s oil sales. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted of having convinced the gullible Trump to take such a step, which led Iran’s petroleum exports to plummet over the next three years. Trump even designated the Iranian National Bank a terrorist organization, again with potentially crippling consequences for the entire economy.
Biden’s hardline policy toward Tehran ultimately harmed his major foreign policy initiative, of defeating Moscow.
In revenge, Iran went back to enriching uranium to high levels and building more centrifuges, though without actually producing weapons-grade material. To this day, its civilian nuclear program remains a form of “the Japan option,” an attempt at deterrence by making it clear that it does not want a bomb but that, if it feels sufficiently threatened, it can build a nuclear weapon relatively quickly.
As soon as Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020, the centrist Iranian President Hassan Rouhani declared that the JCPOA could be restored by the two leaders virtually by fiat. And Biden’s foreign policy team initially appeared to consider negotiations to reinstate the treaty, only to ultimately retain Trump’s outrageous sanctions as “leverage,” demanding that Iran return to compliance with the JCPOA before the two sides could talk.
Perhaps the Iranian public got the message that Biden was determined to be as hostile as Trump. Certainly, in the next round of voting in the summer of 2021, they swung behind hardliner Ebrahim Raisi. And despite occasional modest diplomatic forays since then, relations have been in a dumpster for the remainder of Biden’s term, with most of Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions still in place. And once again, as in the Trump years, the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has lobbied Biden hard to cease all negotiations with Tehran.
Iran, which might have been drawn into the Western camp, has instead become a hostage to Beijing. Starting in 2019, China accepted smuggled Iranian petroleum at a substantial price discount. Then, when the Ukraine War broke out and Biden imposed maximum sanctions on the Russian Federation, Moscow and Tehran found themselves pushed ever closer.
Now, the two countries plan to sign a “strategic partnership agreement,” while, in July 2023, Iran joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, cementing the alliances with both China and Russia into which it had been so vigorously pushed by Washington. Iran also became a definite asset for Russia in its Ukraine War, providing Russian President Vladimir Putin with crucial weaponry. In short, Biden’s hardline policy toward Tehran ultimately harmed his major foreign policy initiative, of defeating Moscow.
Passionate Intensity
Biden’s team also pursued the strategy worked out by Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner of trying to wheedle or strong-arm Arab states into making a separate peace with Israel, while throwing the stateless Palestinians under the bus. They managed to defame the Bible by naming their agreements—initially among Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Israel—the “Abraham Accords,” though they were actually thinly veiled arms deals. Underlying such a strategy lurked the possibility of creating a military bloc, involving Israel and significant parts of the Arab world, to isolate and ultimately overthrow the government of Iran. The Arab signatories all sought the economic benefits of trade and investment with Israel as well as U.S. security promises, benefiting American arms manufacturers with their orders. Had Biden instead made a full-court press for Palestinian rights, he might have created optimism rather than despair.
Sudan was also soon blackmailed into joining the accords. A popular revolution there overthrew the decades-long dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir on April 11, 2019. Its civilian and military wings then entered into a tenuous cohabitation, with the civilians pressing the generals to return to their barracks. Civilian Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and the chairman of the Transitional Military Council, General Abdel Fattah Burhan, signed onto the Abraham Accords in January 2021 both to get Sudan removed from the U.S. list of terrorist nations and to begin repairing its economy.
The Israeli and U.S. response to the gruesome Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, can fairly be said to have entirely undone all of Biden’s diplomatic work in the region.
In the end, that represented pure economic blackmail, a policy continued by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. A 2022 poll showed that more than 74% of Sudanese rejected any normalization with Israel. Instead of attempting to bolster budding Sudanese democracy, the Biden administration continued to resort to backdoor deals with that junta in the interests of America’s main geopolitical client in the Middle East (while Sudan itself fell into a catastrophic civil war).
Blinken also made it a personal mission to rope Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords. Unlike the two other Gulf states committed to the treaty, however, Saudi Arabia has a largely pro-Palestinian Muslim population in the millions and a peace treaty with Israel might have fomented unrest among them. While Mohammed Bin Salman, the fickle crown prince who ran much of the show in that country, continued to vacillate on the issue, his father, King Salman, repeatedly made it clear that “Palestine is our number one issue,” and that there will be no recognition of Israel without an ironclad path to a Palestinian state (a longstanding Saudi position).
Nonetheless, the Biden foreign policy team continued pressuring Riyadh to normalize relations with Israel, even as the Gaza War grew ever more devastating and the Saudi public daily saw images of women and children being shredded by American-supplied bombs and drones. In an opinion poll released last January, 78% of Saudis said that they felt psychologically stressed by the Gaza War, while nearly every one of them lambasted the U.S. response as “bad” or “very bad,” and 57% believed there was now no possibility of making peace with Israel.
Things Fall Apart, the Center Cannot Hold
The security guarantees the U.S. gave the United Arab Emirates under the Abraham Accords emboldened its leader, Mohamed Bin Zayed (MBZ), in his quest to create an informal empire stretching from Yemen to Sudan and even all the way to Libya. In April 2023, however, Sudan’s conventional army and the country’s special operations Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fell to fighting one another, as the generals that led them competed for power. The country then devolved into a horror show of a civil war, with half of its 50 million people now facing starvation and at least 62,000 already slaughtered. The brutal RSF fighters are nonetheless backed by the Emirates (lovingly dubbed “little Sparta” by the Pentagon). And in these years, President Biden has proven impotent when it came to reining in America’s “Abraham Accords” darling. In fact, he only recently hosted MBZ at the White House and a Rose Garden that’s seen more genocidaires than most administrations.
The Israeli and U.S. response to the gruesome Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, can fairly be said to have entirely undone all of Biden’s diplomatic work in the region. While the United States and some other Western governments viewed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s never-ending devastation of Gaza and his country’s deployment of American 2,000-pound bombs against residential complexes as forced on him by Hamas’ alleged tactic of using civilians as “human shields,” virtually no one in the Global South agreed. Even some European Union states and Israeli journalists dissented.
President Biden could undoubtedly have halted Netanyahu’s total war on Palestinian civilians at any point in 2024, given Israel’s dependence on U.S. ammunition and arms.
South Africa brought a case against Israel at the International Criminal Court charging it with genocide, which the Court said was "plausibly brought" in January, issuing the equivalent of a preliminary injunction against the Netanyahu government. Israel, of course, ignored it and has simply continued the devastation there (and now in Lebanon as well). Somehow, Biden seemed unaware that the government of extremists formed by Netanyahu in late 2022 was anything but the Israel of the 1960 film Exodus, with a blue-eyed Paul Newman as the protagonist. It was instead a witch’s brew of virulent ethnonationalism and religious apocalypticism.
Worse yet, Netanyahu used the cover of his Gaza atrocities to expand the war further. He deliberately bombed an Iranian diplomatic facility (considered Iranian soil under international law) in the Syrian capital of Damascus last spring. Iran later responded with a rocket barrage. Netanyahu went on attempting to get Tehran’s goat, aware that if he could turn his conflict into an actual war with Iran, American jingoists would give him even more knee-jerk support.
In the process, he had Ismail Haniyeh, his chief, if indirect, civilian Hamas negotiating partner, assassinated in Iran’s capital of Tehran on the occasion of the inauguration of a new president there. He then launched a terrorist onslaught of booby-trapped pager bombs against an Iran-allied group, Hezbollah, in Lebanon before invading that country and subjecting significant parts of it to a Gaza-style bombardment, as a response to Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel in support of Gaza. Such provocations led to yet another Iranian missile barrage against Israel on October 1 to which Israel replied with attacks on Iranian military facilities. Biden was reduced to pleading with Iran to be reasonable in response, while declining to demand any similar restraint from Israel.
The Blood-Dimmed Tide
And here’s the truth of the matter: President Biden could undoubtedly have halted Netanyahu’s total war on Palestinian civilians at any point in 2024, given Israel’s dependence on U.S. ammunition and arms. Instead, his gung-ho support of the insupportable in Gaza has helped turn the Middle East into a genuine powder keg, which he is bequeathing to his successor. Crucial Red Sea and Suez Canal maritime trade has already been partially paralyzed, thanks to rocket attacks launched by Yemen’s Houthi rebels in support of the people of Gaza, adding inflation and supply-chain difficulties to the global economy.
Biden then restored sanctions on the Houthis, harming Yemeni civilians, while allowing Netanyahu to go on butchering Gazan civilians. Lebanon, already a basket case, with a ruined port, a bankrupt national bank, no president, and a third of its population below the poverty line, now faces a wholesale reduction to fourth-world misery. More than a million Lebanese have had to flee their homes in that small country, and the conflict will undoubtedly contribute to Europe’s immigration crisis.
Consider it a distinct irony, then, that, rather than allying with Israel against Iran, most Arab publics have significantly raised their estimation of Tehran. Even long-time American ally Turkey and U.S. partner Egypt have felt threatened by the extremist Netanyahu government and its Napoleonic ambitions, and have begun warming to one another and exploring better relations with Tehran.
Nativist Shiite militias in Iraq rained down rockets on bases in that country hosting U.S. troops, but ranged even further afield, targeting American soldiers in Jordan and killing Israeli troops in Israel itself. They pledged to come to the aid of Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The Iraqi parliament recognized such militias in 2016 as the equivalent of a national guard. Iraq’s outraged Shiites even finally convinced Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ Al Sudani to kick the last U.S. troops out of that country by 2026.
In the end, Biden’s unfaltering bear hug of Benjamin Netanyahu ensured that even the last vestiges of the George W. Bush administration’s neoconservative project of reshaping the Middle East to America’s and Israel’s advantage have now gone down the drain. Washington continues to send ever more bombs and sophisticated weaponry to a Middle East in flames and, with Donald Trump set to take office in January, such dangerous arms deals will likely only multiply.
Consider it a genuine first-class nightmare.
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