Having joined David Ben-Gurion’s flight to what then was called Burma, the journalists aboard the plane were surprised to see it land in Tehran, where they were led to the shah’s VIP room while the prime minister went to a secret meeting.
It was 1961, and cellphones were an eon away, but Ma’ariv’s Tommy Lapid sniffed a scoop and thus told the plane’s pilot that if his mother heard that he did not land in Burma, she would faint. Eager to help, the pilot offered to call her from the cockpit, but Lapid said she had no phone, and thus asked him to radio his editor. Tell him: “Lapid is stuck in Tehran and asks that you tell his mother all is well,” he said.
The editor understood the subtext, and the following day, the paper’s lead headline screamed that Ben-Gurion made a stopover in Tehran. Did he meet with the Shah of Iran? That’s unclear, but unimportant. What’s important is that whatever that stopover was about, it was part of the Old Man’s Periphery Doctrine, which, since its formulation in 1958, became a mainstay of Israel’s foreign policy.
That is why Israel’s recognition this week of Somaliland – a self-declared country in northeast Africa – is part of a time-honored legacy with its fair share of foresight and risk. Sadly, in this case, it is marred by political self-service and reckless conceit.
BEN-GURION’S doctrine emerged in response to the creation of the short-lived Egyptian-Syrian unification. Realizing that the pair’s anti-Western scheme threatened their non-Arab neighbors, the Israeli premier met secretly with Turkish prime minister Adnan Menderes and created an alliance that was soon joined by the shah’s Iran and by Ethiopia’s emperor Haile Selassie.
The rationale was simple. With the Arab world wholly hostile to its existence, Israel should seek allies among the region’s non-Arab and non-Muslim countries and minorities, first and foremost Turkey, Ethiopia, and Iran, but also the Kurds in Iraq, the Maronites in Lebanon, the Druze in Syria, the Berbers in Morocco, and the Christians in Sudan.
The alliance worked well, especially economically, but only as long as its members were pro-Western. When Selassie was unseated by pro-Soviet rebels in 1974, Ethiopia became anti-Israeli. The same thing happened with Iran in 1979, and with Turkey after the rise of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
At the same time, the emergence of Arab-Israeli peace deals changed the doctrine’s underlying assumption. Arab hostility to Israel was no longer automatic and sweeping. Even so, the Periphery Doctrine remained useful.
The Somaliland-Israel alliance: New front against Iran
After the First Gulf War, Israel’s longtime cooperation with the Kurds helped inspire the American creation of Iraq’s Kurdish autonomy. Islamist Iran’s enmity generated a solid alliance with Azerbaijan, and Turkey’s hostility created an Israeli alliance with Cyprus and Greece.
This is the general setting in which the alliance with Somaliland emerged, at the opposite end of the imperial map Iran tried to draw.
MORE THAN eight times the size of Israel, the breakaway republic of more than six million Sunni Muslims, has a 740-km. coastline along the Gulf of Aden, opposite Yemen. It takes no Ben-Gurion to understand this location’s strategic meaning for Israel.
Unlike other countries with which Israel forged strategic ties over the decades, Somaliland holds free elections, has an independent judiciary, and its economy is free and thriving. It’s an inversion of the country from which it seceded, Somalia, which is notorious for its lawlessness, destitution, and civil strife, all of which have made it a hotbed of Islamist terrorism and a focus of Iranian sway.
Moreover, the kind of strategic alliance that Israel is nurturing in Somaliland already emerged last year when Somaliland signed a deal with Ethiopia, leasing to its landlocked neighbor a 20-km. coastal strip for a naval base.
Israel’s cultivation of Somaliland is therefore natural, opportune, and visionary. That doesn’t mean that what we witnessed this week, including the fireworks in Somaliland’s capital, was prudent. It wasn’t.
THE FIRST suspicious thing in this affair is that Israel is the first, and for now the only UN member, to have established formal ties with Somaliland. That’s a position in which a country the size of Israel is not meant to be.
Worse, by making this high-profile move, Israel barged into the thick of Africa’s Big Game, the contest between the superpowers over influence and resources across the world’s most unstable continent. This complex chessboard’s four original players – Britain and France since the 19th century, and the US and Russia since the 20th century – have been challenged this century by China, which is believed to have supplied Africa with more than $500 billion in direct investments and loans since 2000.
Africa is thus one of the Chinese-American rivalry’s vast arenas. Israel’s place in this contest is obviously alongside Washington, but this does not mean Jerusalem can provoke Beijing in a way that even Washington avoids.
It would be one thing to quietly go to bed with Somaliland, granting it military goods and civilian aid, and gaining strategic presence. It’s an entirely different thing to waltz in broad daylight with an unrecognized state. Which raises the question: Why the noise? Ben-Gurion did these things so quietly that to this day it isn’t clear with whom he met on that forgotten stopover in Tehran.
Why the noise? Because the noisemakers think it serves them. Anything policy-related they do these days is not about policy, but about politics, which in their case means Likud’s imminent primaries. Impressing Likud’s voters with political fireworks is what their game is all about.
That’s why one noisemaker announces he is shutting Army Radio, another enters Supreme Court sessions and shrieks at the judges, a third tables a bill to swamp state-run company boards with party hacks, and a fourth pokes China in the eye. What will the fifth do?
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.