The Return of the Periphery? Israel, Somaliland and the Horn of Africa after October 7

Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has maintained a strategic interest in the Horn of Africa. Geography and security considerations have been – and remain – the principal drivers of its engagement with the region. Often overlooked, even within Israel, is the fact that Israel is a Red Sea state. The Horn of Africa and the southern Red Sea lie in close proximity to the country and encompass some of the world’s most strategically significant maritime routes and chokepoints. The port of Eilat, Israel’s gateway to Africa and Asia, depends on access through these waterways. As a result, developments in the Horn and the Red Sea have long occupied an important place in Israel’s strategic thinking.

With President Donald Trump declaring that he’s on the cusp of striking a nuclear deal with Iran, he ought to remember his promise earlier this year to “stand with the women of Iran who face daily abuse by the regime.”

Around 5,000 years ago, some ancient civilizations in the Near East were transformed and propelled into economic and political greatness by increasingly sophisticated systems of human control over nature.

In a shockingly swift turn of events, a coalition of armed opposition groups has overthrown the Assad dynasty that ruled Syria more for than a half-century. It took less than two weeks for the armed groups, led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), to oust the Russian-backed Assad regime and send President Bashar al-Assad fleeing into exile.

I have no complaints against the sixth Netanyahu government in regard to the agreement signed on a ceasefire in Lebanon. This is the best Israel could achieve in the timeline leading up to January 20, when Donald Trump will re-enter the White House.

On September 25, 2021, Gen. Gholamali Rashid, commander of the Khatam Al-Anbiya Central Headquarters in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), quoted remarks made by the Quds Corps commander Qasem Soleimani: “I have assembled for you six armies outside Iranian territory, and I have created a corridor 1,500 km. long and 1,000 km. wide all the way to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea... One army is in Lebanon. It is called Hezbollah. Another army is in Palestine and it is called Hamas and Islamic Jihad (IJ). One army is in Syria. Another army is in Iraq and is called the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), and another army is in Yemen and is called Ansar Allah (i.e., the Houthis).

Skeptics may question Israel’s ability to defeat Hamas yet absolute defeat is not only possible but a necessity. Even barbaric, tyrannical forces like Nazi Germany or the Islamic State, can be eliminated with the appropriate use of power. Total destruction of entities renders the idea behind it ineffective, but ideas, starting with Nasserism and ending with ISIS, can be destroyed, too.

That Hamas’s Oct. 7 rampage of barbaric atrocities has become a symbol of “Palestinian liberation” on campus is unsurprising. The pro-Palestinian movement and its ideology have long been a specter haunting the university.

The October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians, and the worldwide moral outrage that that day’s savagery generated were only paralleled by a gleeful schadenfreude that overtook many European capitals and other places around the globe, from the Arab world to the United States to American university campuses outright celebrating the greatest loss in Jewish life since the Holocaust. What is the root cause of such stark, vile dichotomies when it comes to Israel, pitting on the one hand a camp of empathy and on the other one of resentment? How is it that alongside Western sympathizers there are always those depicting Israel as the eternal offender, forbidden from defending itself, even at the risk of being depicted in the most hideous of antisemitic tropes? Conversely, why is it that among Arabs and Muslims, Palestinians are consistently, uncritically, portrayed as eternal victims, beatific casualties of Israeli Apartheid who can do no wrong, and whose own brutality is the justifiable result of grievances long unheeded and a righteous legitimate expression of self-defense?

“Never again!” It was never supposed to have happened. But it has, and is. We are witnessing in real time a pogrom. We thought that the most extensive pogrom — the Holocaust — would mark the end of the terrible record of violence against Jews, just because they are Jews. Not so.

Since 2020, six African countries have experienced a total of eight coups d’état. With the exception of Gabon, all occurred in the Sahel, the semi-arid band stretching across the continent between the Sahara Desert to the north and the tropical savannah to the south. The conventional narrative of “Africa Rising,” which had only recently replaced that of the “Hopeless Continent,” might be in need of revision or at least qualification. 

“Today, antisemitism is global, not just local,” says Sacha Roytman-Dratwa, CEO of the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM). “It comes from the right, from the left, from radical Islam, and other sources.” Roytman-Dratwa explains that over the past several years, a greater understanding has emerged in countries around the world that antisemitism needs to be aggressively confronted and countered. “Antisemitism must be taken seriously. There are conversations on the subject at the United Nations. The US government, and other countries are all building strategies to combat antisemitism, and are investing a great deal of money, time, and effort. We see legislation across the board.”

After months of waiting, the Biden administration finally released its "National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism." A close look at the document gives the impression that the strategy as a whole is designed to appear to be “doing something” to combat antisemitism while not alienating the party’s intersectional base.

Israel in 1948 was a manifestation of an ideal at the time it was created. Namely, this meant Jewish self-determination in their ancient homeland, a nation-state like all others, brought about by a liberation movement that worked with and ultimately against the world’s greatest imperial power, and which was the culmination of decades of patient organizing and building, all set against the horrific backdrop of the Holocaust.

Arabs citizens today comprise 21 percent of Israel’s population, a significant minority. While their financial situation has dramatically improved over the last 50-plus years, the parties they send to the Knesset are largely “anti-state” in that they reject Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

A Cold War-era federal program has wandered far from its national-security mission and into the woke follies that permeate much of American education. For decades, U.S. colleges and universities have received taxpayer dollars through the Education Department’s National Resource Centers, a program intended to bolster U.S. national security at the height of tension with the Soviet Union. But more recently National Resource Centers are promoting unserious academic research or causes irrelevant to national security.

My personal encounter with academic censorship began in the Fall of 1989 when Smith College’s newly appointed Diversity Officer summoned me to her office asking why I had included the following question on an exam in one of my courses during the second semester of the previous academic year —an action taken, she stated emphatically, at the behest of the College’s President and Provost. The question, one of several I posed on a take-home final on Middle East Politics, read: “Is Islam useful in the modern world? Describe the role of Islam in the political development of two states in the Middle East [one Arab and one non-Arab] since the end of World War II.” Opening a folder with my name, the Diversity Officer also added to her cascade of charges a complaint about mentioning slavery in the Muslim world without comparing it [favorably] to the system in America.

Reading Fouad Ajami’s posthumous memoir, When Magic Failed, was like reading my own life story. Both Ajami and I hail from Shia families who moved from a homogeneous countryside to cosmopolitan Beirut. My journey to Beirut took a bit longer—my father hailed from Iraq, and we fled the repression of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in the 1980s to my mother’s country, Lebanon.

Three days before Russia's President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, he assembled his top security staff for a televised charade. At it, he quizzed each in turn if they approved of his plan to recognize two areas of eastern Ukraine as independent states. Squirming and sometimes fumbling, they dutifully all bowed to their supremo's will.