The Long Brief: The Berbera Model
Israel traded the photographed peace for quiet, transactional presence — the quiet is why it lasts, and why it isn't peace.
Shabbat shalom, friends.
A note before we go below the waterline. I have a piece (While Iran Filled the Feed, an Embassy Opened) in the Times of Israel this week, built on this same story — the short, public version of the argument that follows: how to catch the story a loud news cycle buries. The brief below is the full map: the coast, the model, the ceiling.
— Uri
There is a Somaliland flag flying over a Jerusalem tech park this week, and the country it belongs to does not, for most of the world, legally exist.
The embassy sits in Har Hotzvim, the hi-tech quarter on the north edge of the city, between the server farms and the startups. It is the first embassy Somaliland has ever opened anywhere on earth, and it is the eighth top-level diplomatic mission in Jerusalem, and it represents a republic that no other foreign ministry’s map will print as a border.
On Tuesday the president of that republic, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi — Irro to nearly everyone — stood in the Knesset, was received by the speaker, and signed the Guest Book of Honor on behalf of what he called all 6.5 million citizens of a state. He is the first head of state of a “non-existent country” to do any of this, because until last December no head of state of Somaliland had a recognition to travel on. Israel gave him the first.
The photograph cost Israel almost nothing to take — a declaration, a guest-book signature, an office in a tech park — and it bought a headline and a chorus of condemnation and not much else that will still matter in a decade. The part that will matter is the part you cannot see from the curb.
Two days after the embassy opened, Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, stood next to Irro and let one corner of it show, telling the room the two countries had cooperated “under the radar” for years in operations that will remain classified. The relationship that counts stays below the surface.
Above the waterline: a flag, a signature, a recognition that two dozen governments and every regional bloc lined up to denounce.
Below it: a coastline on the Gulf of Aden, the first cohorts of Somaliland water engineers trained on Israeli soil, a business delegation Israel had to turn people away from, and a security cooperation a sitting Israeli minister will confirm only to the edge of the classified line and no further.
The recognition is loud, contested, and reversible. The substance is quiet and useful and, for now, beyond anyone’s reach to undo. That is the design.
Normalization Went Below the Waterline
The consensus after October 7 was that normalization was dead. But the deals did not stop. They more or less just stopped being photographed.
Israeli-Saudi normalization was called a collateral victim of October 7. The Gaza war was said to have made any talk of normalization toxic in Arab societies. Chatham House held that the Abraham Accords would not expand for at least a decade.
Measured against the photographed deal — the Saudi handshake on a White House lawn, the willing Arab public, the parade — every word of that was broadly true.
The Saudi grand bargain is genuinely frozen and the recent MOU with Iran certainly doesn’t help. Mohammed bin Salman has tied normalization to a credible path to a Palestinian state with its capital in eastern Jerusalem, a condition nobody at the table expects to be met, and Riyadh has restated time and time again that there is no normalization without it.
But the obituary measured missed key parts of the whole project while pronouncing it dead. Kazakhstan joined the Abraham Accords in November 2025 — the first state to accede since the original 2020 cohort, and the textbook case of a thin deal, since Astana and Jerusalem have held full diplomatic relations since 1992.
A House bill, the Abraham Accords Expansion Act, was filed this month by Rep. Craig Goldman of Texas, directing the framework’s expansion into Central Asia and the South Caucasus, carried by two dozen cosponsors out of a bipartisan caucus that now runs to roughly a quarter of the House.
And a breakaway statelet on the Gulf of Aden opened an embassy in Jerusalem on the back of a security relationship its partners now admit ran under the radar for years.
None required a Palestinian concession, a willing public, or a ceremony anyone needed to applaud. The accession that happened (Kazakhstan) accedes to a frame, not to a new relationship — full ties since 1992, a symbolic top-up. The recognition that happened (Somaliland) is a sovereign bilateral act that one government performed alone and the rest of the world condemned.
Each was available without the consent of any public, and each routed around the multilateral permission gate a grand move has to pass through.
We have written before about that gate — the layer of vetoes, in Washington and Europe and the courts, that can cancel Jerusalem’s once-a-decade sovereign acts from a phone or a website. A discreet bilateral recognition needs no Senate vote and no capital’s blessing. Which is quite the point of doing it discreetly.
So the prediction that the Accords would not expand for a decade was nullified — just not in the form the prediction was watching for. The watchers were looking for another Rose Garden, another four-leader photograph, another warm peace sold on public buy-in.
Recognition Was the Cheap Part
Israel became the first UN member state to recognize Somaliland with Netanyahu announcing it as a mutual declaration “in the spirit of the Abraham Accords,” for a territory that had declared independence from Somalia in 1991 and held exactly zero recognitions from any UN member before that morning.
Somaliland had sent its recognition appeal to all 193 UN states. One answered. That cuts two ways at once: it measures how badly Hargeisa wanted this, and how thin the thing Israel actually handed over is.
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar visited Hargeisa in January and signed a memorandum that included defense.
Ambassadors were exchanged through the spring. Israel began training Somaliland’s first water engineers — twenty-five in the first cohort, a second cohort of roughly the same size just begun — run through MASHAV, Israel’s development-cooperation agency, on desalination and purification for a territory that has very little water and a great deal of coast.
And when Israel convened a business forum around Irro’s visit, the demand to attend ran past the room. Israel had to cap participation at 200 companies, with more turned away, across minerals, gas, oil, and fisheries.
The symbolic ledger holds a flag, a declaration, a guest-book signature, a recognition the African Union and the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council and a UN Security Council emergency session all rose to condemn.
The material ledger. The one that truly matters. Holds a coast, water engineers, a capped forum, and a security relationship Katz confirmed had been running for years and would remain classified.
The first ledger is loud and lonely and cost Israel real diplomatic isolation — Israel spent goodwill it had little of to begin with, and not one other state, not even the UAE, followed it onto the page. The second one is quiet and growing and cost Israel a declaration. Most of the coverage is reading the first book. The whole argument of this piece is in the second.
And here is the thing the “recognition is cheap” framing gets right and the thing it misses. It is right that on the bilateral books Israel paid almost nothing — the flow ran the other way, Hargeisa sought this from 193 capitals and Jerusalem was the one taker. It misses that recognition was expensive in a different currency: not money, but exposure. The condemnation, the Security Council session, the isolation, all of it was the price of doing this one part in the open at all. Which is exactly why the part that matters was structured to stay out of the open. The recognition takes the hit so the substance does not have to.
