Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 74: Why the global outrage at Israel's Somaliland recognition?

Episode Date: December 31, 2025

Welcome to our new short-form episodes interspersed with the regular interviews that dive into an often-asked question about Israel, Jews and the Middle East.Our current question: Why the global outrage at Israel's Somaliland recognition? If you like what we do here, please join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything. There you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join in our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

I'm recording on December 30. Four days ago, Israel officially recognized Somaliland is a separate country. And it was a strategic move. It has to do with their location near the Babb and Mandab Straits. It gives Israel some options when it comes to future fighting against the Houthis of Yemen. It's not complicated. It's not dramatic. But the response has really surprised me and gotten me to think that there's a lot happening in this region that really isn't well understood in the international community. And it's time to get into it. It's time for the international community to get a lot more serious. the response of the United Kingdom, the response of some members of the African Union and other African states, the response of the Palestinian Authority, this mass across-the-board rejection of Somaliland's existence as a state or the ability to recognize as a state, it's fascinating and it matters. And it matters not because of Somaliland itself or because of, you know, Israeli maneuvers in a strategic area that Israel has military and national security interests in. None of that is the core. The core is the hypocrisy. The West is very bad at looking at the third world. It's very bad at looking at Africa. And the entire response to Somaliland really drives that point home, and I want to explain why. I'm going to try to do this without any romance, utopianism. I'm not going to pretend Somaliland is Switzerland. I'm also not going to pretend it's just another Somali warlord zone that declared independence for some tribal reason. Because it isn't. And the fact that it isn't tells us something really important.

Let's start with the basics. Somaliland is a de facto independent state in the Horn of Africa. It is basically northern Somalia up until 1991. It declared independence in 1991 and since 1991 it has functioned to an astonishing extent, more than you could possibly demand or ask for as a separate polity. It has its own government. It has its own parliament. It has its own courts. It has its own army. It has its own currency. the Somaliland shilling. It has elections, not perfect elections, sometimes delayed elections, but repeated, fair, open elections with real campaigns by opposition parties. And maybe most significant to being a state, it controls its territory. That already puts it in a different category from a whole lot of internationally recognized states, and I'm not just talking about the Palestinians. Here's what makes Somaliland really interesting, however. not how it's different from its neighbors, but how it's the same. Somaliland is ethnically Somali.

It is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. It is clan-based. Whether you belong to one clan or another, and there's half a dozen, matters more than a great many other categories in Somaliland, just like, by the way, Somalia. It's mostly pastoral. It has a post-colonial economy. It's poor. In other words, there's nothing, I don't know what to call it. it's civilizationally different about Somaliland from Somalia. So why is it stable? Why is it more or less free? Why is it not radicalizing?

There's no al-Shabaab in Somaliland. There are no jihadi mini emirates in Somaliland. There's no permanent civil war in Somaliland. Its currency is more stable, even though it isn't traded in the international currency markets because it's not a recognized state. Are you getting this? the scale of the competence and the seriousness of the ruling elite of Somaliland and the fact that they have real elections, that fact alone should make us suspicious of a lot of lazy explanations not about Somaliland but about Somalia. Why is Somalia a failed state if Somaliland can be successful without even international recognition or access to global financial exchanges? Let's not romanticize it. Okay, it's not a liberal democracy. It's not Scandinavia.

It is a hybrid democratic system with a lot of tribal elements and a lot of other elements, but it has competitive elections, it has peaceful transfers of power, it has real opposition parties, and it has a functioning parliament. This is a poor, unrecognized state with no international monetary fund safety net, and it managed to achieve monetary stability. Monetary stability is not a vibe. it's a signal of elite coordination of institutional restraint. States that can't manage money, they can't manage anything.

And states that can seriously manage their currency can manage everything else. Now let's get into why Somaliland declared independence in 1991. How did Somalia ever divide into the two countries? It wasn't random. It wasn't a secessionist whim. Somaliland was British-ruled Somaliland. was British-ruled Somaliland, and Somalia was Italian-ruled Somaliland. They were separate colonial entities.

They united voluntarily in 1960 to form the Somali Republic. It was a union of two distinct polities, but that union did very bad things for the northern part of that union, meaning Somaliland. It centralized power in Mogadishu in the south. It marginalized the northern clans. And in the 1980s, it be a very much. became brutal, violent, and authoritarian.

There were bombings of northern cities, including Hargasa. Clans were targeted that were associated with the north of the country, and tens of thousands of civilians were killed. So when the Somali state very quickly collapsed in 1991 because it was led by the leadership of the South into that state failure, there was no functioning union left to remain in. The union was domination by the South over the North in brutal authoritarian ways. And they were a distinct polity.

The border between Somaliland and Somalia is the pre-1960 border. And the most important point, it worked. Somaliland spent the next 30-odd years free, happy, and far more stable and prosperous than Somalia. And how does it function? Somaliland did not impose order in the north through a strongman through foreign troops, through intervention, or even through international aid. The clans got together in conferences

that produced power-sharing arrangements. Old customary law, which is very much in power there, like in many other places in East Africa and in the Middle East, were integrated into the formal institutions. It was a slow, messy process. It was not a Western process. It didn't produce a Western-style constitution. But it created,

something stable, something almost free at a almost Western democratic sense, certainly trending in that direction. It achieved what Somalia never did. There's a monopoly on legitimate violence. There are predictable, free,

and open politics. There's conflict resolution that isn't conducted through endless escalation into permanent states of civil war. And it did it all. And this is really the message to Westerners of Somaliland. without international recognition,

without ever becoming dependent on aid because it didn't have access largely to aid, without peacekeepers. This should make us uncomfortable because it breaks a lot of the dogmas of the development industry. Why does Israeli recognition, therefore, make sense? Now, obviously, the geopolitics.

The Babel Mandib Strait, one of the world's most strategic shipping lanes, where the lack of maritime security, the lack of stability in the Red Sea actually massively hurt the European markets and shipping between China and Europe because of the Houthis. Being able to counter that from a separate state that is stable and free and open to international assistance in that regard is not a small thing. Why would you turn that down?

Why isn't it being recognized by every European country that doesn't want shipping from China to be hindered at the drop of a hat whenever the Houthis decide? What's going on here with Bates? Britain rejecting out of hand the idea that Somaliland might be an independent state. The second point that is in Israel's interest, counter-radicalization. Somaliland is a Muslim society identical in the broader ethnic, linguistic, and religious sense to Somalia, that actively rejects jihadist governance, that cooperates on security, that has

internally suppressed extremist groups. And finally, that's a lot of the world should be run. Israel has always dealt with the de facto realities of the world, because the formal fictions are luxuries of elites, luxuries of safe and powerful countries, luxuries of people who don't have to live in the real world, where the gap between the reality and the formal diplomatic fiction could produce genocides, could produce brutality, could produce tyranny, but the diplomatic fiction is intact, so everybody has to pretend like nothing is happening in living. like nothing is happening in Syria, like everything's fine in Yemen.

Somaliland deserves to exist. Somalia lost its right to pretend that the union was sacred and sacrosanct, the union that existed barely 30 years, and was brutal and deadly to the residents of the North. Pretending that Somaliland doesn't exist or somehow doesn't deserve to exist doesn't make anything better for Somalia, and it doesn't help regional stability in any way. Somaliland's borders are clear.

They're grounded in history. They're non-expansionist. Recognition won't fragment Somalia further because Somalia was never united in this sense. It would formalize what has always been the real divide within Somalia. And finally, recognition of Somaliland challenges the excuse, the civilizational excuse.

that racist idea that Westerners often use to write off responsibility and accountability for the elites of the global South, for failing to build and failing to stabilize and create functional polities. Somaliland is the example that blows up the idea that Somalis are incapable of stable governance for some cultural, religious, spiritual, ethnic reason. They're the same people. They're the same religion. So why do they have such radically different political outcomes? The variable isn't culture in the broad sense. The variable is culture in the political sense, institutions, incentives, elite behavior, expectations of policies and populations. That's replicable. That's learnable. Somaliland proves that Somalia is a choice to be in the condition Somalia is in. The world needs to grasp that.

Somalia needs to be told that. Maybe that's why there's so much anger and so much resistance to the idea that Somaliland should be recognized for the success story and also the rescue story that it is. If you don't recognize Somaliland, you're standing against the desires and will and history and experience. of the vast majority of Somalilanders. You really want to do that?

That's really the argument of international legitimacy and the international community? If the world recognizes Somaliland, it'll be a statement that reality matters more than diplomatic ritual, that governance matters more than slogans. And that civilizational determinism

that lets the elites of the global south off the hook for their corruption and incompetence and deep failure, is lazy thinking. I'm glad Israel recognized Somaliland, Somalilanders, we are nothing alike. You are Somali and Muslim and African and all kinds of other words that I don't share

in my own civilizational history. But I feel like we're a little bit alike. You made it work. I'm proud that at least my country recognizes that. Thanks for listening.