Somaliland: Israel’s new colonial chessboard

❞westasia.news│Somaliland: Israel’s new colonial chessboard

By Alberto García Watson

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland is not a neutral diplomatic gesture, but a calculated move to expand military reach and geopolitical control across the Horn of Africa, a twenty-first-century echo of nineteenth-century colonial logics.

Israel has become the first state in the world to formally recognise Somaliland, the breakaway region of Somalia. The United States is expected to follow. This is not about supporting self-determination or regional democracy. Recognition here operates as a key: an entry point for power projection.

Behind the diplomatic formalities lies a strategy that smells unmistakably of empire.

The first step is military. Permanent bases. Troops. Missiles. From there, direct pressure on Yemen and control over the Gulf of Aden, the narrow throat of global trade that opens into the Red Sea. Once militarised, that corridor becomes a space under constant surveillance. “Security” is the word. Control is the reality.

The second dimension is geopolitical competition. Djibouti already hosts China’s only military base in Africa. Rather than cooperation or demilitarisation, the response is escalation: another piece on the global chessboard. Somaliland becomes a pawn in a rivalry that was never its own.

And the third, and most disturbing, element is the outsourcing of the Palestinian tragedy. Deportations to the Horn of Africa while Gaza is repurposed for other interests. A population uprooted to an impoverished territory with little international protection. A humanitarian catastrophe reframed as logistics.

None of this is new. Somalia was already carved up by European powers in the late nineteenth century. That map, drawn far from the people who would live under it, is once again being rehearsed. Local lives remain expendable. Global elites decide; African communities pay.

Recognising Somaliland is not an act of historical repair. It is the construction of a military and economic platform on someone else’s land. A revival of colonial practice: buying loyalty through recognition, fragmenting weak states, turning territories into launchpads.

And the people who live there? Still excluded from the decisions that determine their future. Somaliland reduced to bargaining chip. Somalia further weakened. The Horn of Africa reframed as “strategic terrain” instead of a home.

The logic is transparent: militarise. Control sea routes. Expand power. Export the “Palestinian problem”. Diplomacy provides the varnish, the outcome is instability.

What emerges is not progress but regression, the return of imperial vocabulary: spheres of influence, strategic interests, regional balance. Words with long histories of destruction.

So the question becomes unavoidable:
will the international community allow colonialism to return in this raw form?

This is not a bilateral issue. It touches international law, African territorial integrity, Palestinian survival and the fragile balance of an entire region. It is about whether relations between states are built on justice, or on force.

If governments avert their gaze, the message will be clear: poor territories remain available for occupation by the powerful. And history has shown us, repeatedly, where that leads.

This recognition is not a formality. It is an alarm. And it needs to be heard, before it is too late.