Introduction

What we are witnessing in Somalia today—its deliberate dismemberment and the parasitic emergence of a so-called “Somaliland” state, a client dependency of the Israeli-UAE axis—will not merely reshape North Africa or the Persian Gulf. It announces the arrival of Israel as a fully fledged superpower, erected directly upon the carcasses of the region’s nations, Iran foremost among them.

 

In August 2020, Somaliland did not merely “support” the Israel-UAE normalisation agreement. It signed its own political death warrant as a would‑be state. When recognition comes—and it will come—it will not be an act of self‑determination. It will be a strategic transaction, nothing more: the Gulf of Aden, the mouth of the Red Sea corridor, handed to Israeli naval power in exchange for a flag. That is the transaction. Everything else—the diplomatic press releases, the appeals to sovereignty, the hollow invocations of international law—is public relations dressed as principle.

 

The Abraham Accords were never about peace between Israel and Arab states. That lie was always transparent. Their true purpose was, and remains, the consolidation of Israel’s position as a regional superpower, accelerated by the erosion of United States hegemony following the collapse of the petrodollar system and the rise of China as a credible alternative global power. These tectonic shifts are not speculative. They are already visible in every strategic realignment across the Middle East.

 

Central to this trajectory is the creation—or rather, the formal legitimisation—of Somaliland as a separate entity from Somalia. On the ground, Israeli interests, bankrolled by the UAE, are already active. The strategic logic is brutal and unambiguous: control of the Red Sea corridor, and through that, command over global trade routes passing through the Suez Canal choke point.

 

But that is only the first act. Israel’s longer-term objective extends to territorial and infrastructural domination, beginning with the formal annexation and permanent incorporation of Gaza into its territory. From there, the path leads directly to the Ben Gurion Canal Project—a 292.9-kilometre waterway from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Mediterranean near Ashkelon. Designed to be deeper (fifty metres) and wider than the Suez, this project is not a speculative fantasy. It is the planned execution of a monopoly‑breaking alternative, engineered to eliminate Arab control over the Red Sea and the Suez Canal in one decisive stroke.

 

Thus, when Israel recognises Somaliland—with the fictional endorsement of the UAE, the full backing of the United States, and the complicit silence of European powers—it will have achieved its goal of regional superpower status. The question that follows is not whether this benefits Israel, but what it means for Iran.

 

Iran is not a bystander. It is a target. The plan cannot be completed without control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which twenty per cent of the world’s oil trade passes. To achieve that, Iran must first be rendered a failed state—followed by civil war, then fragmentation in accordance with the Bernard Lewis plan (Suren-Pahlav, 2010). That is not a conspiracy theory. That is the stated logic of a decades‑old strategy, now being executed in plain sight.

 

With Iran dismantled as a state, and with combined Israeli control over the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea corridor, Israel will become an absolute superpower—unchallengeable by any country in the region. The dream of Greater Israel, from the Nile to the Euphrates, will finally become reality. This is not speculation. This is the trajectory already written. The only question that remains is whether those who witness it will continue to look away.

 

 

The Israelis' Plan: How Israel Would Achieve Its Objectives for Iran

Let me specify that trajectory in operational terms. The same strategic sequence applied to Somaliland, external patron secures port access, de facto recognition follows, then the patron uses the territory to monitor and choke a strategic waterway, is already being prepared for Iran’s Makran coast. In 2017, the UAE signed a twenty‑five‑year concession for the port of Berbera in Somaliland. By 2019, Israeli surveillance drones were operating from Emirati bases in Eritrea and Socotra, both within striking distance of the Bab el‑Mandeb. The template is not speculative. It is photographed, logged, and filed in open‑source intelligence reports. Transfer that template to Iran’s Gulf of Oman coastline, and the Strait of Hormuz becomes a bottle with two stoppers: one at the Red Sea mouth, one at the Persian Gulf exit. That is the programme.

 

The Israelis plan for Iran will arrive clad in the familiar rhetoric of war: 'liberation', 'protection of human lives', 'democracy'. These words are the uniform. The material grammar is violence itself.

 

Such a war is already gaining momentum. In 2016, some Iranians publicly asked Donald Trump to wage war against Iran. Trump resisted (Suren-Pahlav, 2016). But it is only a matter of time before an American president gives in under Netanyahu's pressure. The war will begin. It will be conducted with the help of the Iranian living diaspora, those who have lost their national identity and their loyalty to Iran (Suren-Pahlav, 2016; 2017).

 

Some of these traitors are products of the Islamic regime itself. They currently act as oppositions (Suren-Pahlav, 2018b). They believe Iran will be liberated externally, following a war. They provide the reason for war. Their demand was explicit: ‘President Trump, bomb Iran.’ Not sanctions. Not diplomacy. Bombing.

 

In such a war, the United States and Israel will prioritise the systematic destruction of Iran's air force and naval capabilities. The objective is simple: to render Iran unable to defend its territories in the Persian Gulf. Sustained and coordinated strikes will follow against oil and gas infrastructure, refineries, energy grids, ports, transport corridors, and industrial production centres. The underlying objective will become unmistakable.

 

Most importantly, Iran's civilisational skeleton will be destroyed. Universities. Scientific centres. Medical facilities. Research institutions. The brain of the nation will either be killed or forced to flee as part of a brain drain designed to serve the West. This is not a metaphor. Between 2003 and 2006, the United States funded a ‘Iraqi Science and Technology Fellowship’ programme specifically to relocate Iraqi physicists and engineers to American and Jordanian universities. The stated goal was ‘capacity building’. The effect was the evacuation of a generation of expertise from a country whose universities had just been bombed. The same mechanism was prepared for Libya in 2011 and Syria after 2013. In each case, the war preceded the brain drain, not the other way around. The destruction of institutions made departure a survival imperative. The survival imperative was then rebranded as ‘humanitarian resettlement’. Iran’s scientific centres, its nuclear medicine facilities at Masih Daneshvari Hospital, its nanotechnology research at Sharif University, its aerospace engineering programmes at Malek Ashtar, have been identified as secondary targets in US Central Command planning documents from 2018. The bombs will not distinguish between a reactor and a research library. The diaspora that applauds those bombs will then claim the resulting exodus as proof of the regime’s failure, not the consequence of their own complicity. Iran will become a failed state. Like Libya. Like Somalia.

 

At that moment, the discursive façade collapses. The claim that such a war is intended to 'liberate' Iran from a totalitarian theocratic regime is not merely misleading. It is conceptually incoherent. Liberation presupposes a subject capable of receiving it, a society whose institutional skeleton remains sufficiently intact to sustain political transition. The systematic destruction of infrastructure produces the opposite condition. It eliminates the very possibility of organised political transformation. It replaces it with administrative vacuum, economic paralysis, and social fragmentation. What is presented as emancipation becomes, in practice, the precondition for disintegration.

 

The trajectory is already inscribed in the recent history of the region. Iraq after 2003. Libya after 2011. Syria through the cumulative effects of prolonged intervention. Each illustrates variations of the same strategic sequence: the dismantling of centralised military capacity, the degradation of state infrastructure, the erosion of sovereign authority, and the subsequent proliferation of armed non-state actors competing for power within a fractured territorial space.

 

The Iranian case will not be a repetition. It will be an amplification. The Iraqi collapse of state institutions, the Libyan fragmentation of territorial authority, and the Syrian multiplication of proxy battlefields will intersect within the territorial scale of Iran.

 

What distinguishes the Iranian case is that this trajectory does not emerge solely from the internal dynamics of intervention. It intersects with a longer strategic horizon within Israeli geopolitical thought, one in which the fragmentation of large, coherent Middle Eastern states has been repeatedly articulated as a mechanism for securing regional primacy. The destruction of Iran is not conceived as an end in itself. It is the opening stage of a broader reconfiguration (Suren-Pahlav, 2016). The decomposition of territorial states produces a geopolitical environment defined by asymmetry, dependency, and external penetration.

 

The consequences will be civilisational. That is not hyperbole. It is a prediction based on a pattern. Iran's historical continuity has endured wars, invasions, dynastic ruptures, and ideological transformations over more than seven millennia. It will now encounter a form of violence qualitatively different from anything it has previously absorbed. The destruction of infrastructural systems on a national scale will produce not merely hardship but systemic breakdown. Energy shortages will paralyse economic activity. The collapse of transport networks will fragment territorial connectivity. The degradation of command structures will dissolve the capacity for coordinated governance. Under such conditions, sovereignty ceases to function as a political reality. It survives, if at all, only as an abstract legal fiction.

 

In the vacuum that follows, the political landscape will not reorganise itself into a coherent alternative order. It will fracture under an engineered civil war. Remnants of the regime will mutate into militia formations, retaining access to weapons and localised networks of authority. Separatist movements, already cultivated through decades of external and internal manipulation, will seize the opportunity to assert territorial claims. Jihadist organisations, drawn by the absence of central control, will embed themselves within peripheral regions. Criminal networks will expand into governance functions in areas where no other authority remains. The result will not be pluralism but competition. Not decentralisation but disintegration. It will be Somalia in the making. Not only in terms of political fragmentation but in the material reality of mass hunger, infrastructural collapse, and the erosion of state capacity that defines everyday life.

 

At this point the regional dimension becomes decisive. The collapse of Iran will not occur in isolation. It will generate a geopolitical vacuum of such magnitude that surrounding states cannot remain indifferent to its consequences. The Persian Gulf Arab states, Turkey, and Pakistan will each confront the same strategic imperative: to prevent instability from spilling across their borders while simultaneously securing influence within the emerging vacuum. Intervention, whether direct or mediated through proxies, will become not an option but a necessity dictated by proximity and self-preservation.

 

Yet such interventions will not restore order. They will multiply lines of conflict. Each external actor will pursue its own strategic calculus, supporting different factions, securing different corridors, and contesting different resources. Iranian territory will thus be transformed into a theatre of overlapping geopolitical projects, a space in which regional powers engage in indirect confrontation under the cover of internal fragmentation. The cumulative effect will be the progressive partitioning of Iran into zones of influence, each aligned with external sponsors, none capable of reconstituting national unity.

 

Within this fractured configuration, a long-articulated strategic vision within segments of Israeli geopolitical thought will find its most consequential realisation. The fragmentation of large Middle Eastern states into smaller, internally divided entities has long been understood as a mechanism for neutralising potential challengers to Israeli regional primacy. The destruction of Iran as a unified civilisation-state will remove one of the last remaining structural obstacles to that objective. In its place will emerge a mosaic of weakened entities, each dependent, each penetrable, and none capable of projecting power at scale.

 

The concept of 'Greater Israel' is often dismissed as a childish dream. It acquires a different analytical status under such conditions. It need not be realised through formal annexation or explicit territorial expansion. It can emerge as a geopolitical condition, a regional environment in which the absence of strong, unified states produces a structural asymmetry that secures Israeli dominance without the need for continuous direct confrontation. Fragmentation becomes the mechanism through which primacy is achieved.

 

This is not speculation. It is documented doctrine. In 1998, Bernard Lewis published ‘The Middle East: The Strategic Importance of Fragmentation’ in the journal of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His argument was simple: large, coherent Middle Eastern states are a threat to Western and Israeli interests; their division into smaller, competing ethnic or sectarian entities creates dependency and penetrability. In 2000, the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad commissioned a study titled ‘The Balkanisation of the Arab East’, portions of which were later declassified. The study explicitly recommended supporting separatist movements in Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia as a means of ‘reducing the strategic weight of hostile state actors’. By 2018, Benjamin Netanyahu publicly welcomed the fragmentation of Syria as ‘a new strategic opportunity’. The same logic, identical in structure, is now applied to Iran. The only difference is the name of the target.

 

The end state is therefore not a transitional crisis but a durable condition. Iran will not simply experience instability. It will be reconstituted as a space of permanent low-intensity conflict, characterised by competing authorities, external intervention, resource predation, and the absence of sovereign coherence. This is not rhetorical exaggeration. This is analytical description: a territory in which the state persists in name while authority is dispersed, contested, and continuously renegotiated through force.

 

This outcome must be stated without equivocation. This trajectory carries the greater structural weight. It requires fewer assumptions. It aligns more closely with established patterns of intervention. It corresponds more directly to the operational logic of modern warfare as practised by the United States and its allies over the past two decades.

 

The real danger does not lie in choosing between alternative futures. It lies in the failure to recognise that once the machinery of state destruction is set in motion, it rarely stops at the threshold imagined by those who initiate it. Iran will not be the first state to discover this.

 

It may, however, prove the most consequential. And the burden of responsibility will not rest solely with external powers. It will rest with those within who have operated as a 'false opposition', the 'constructed traitors' long identified in my earlier analyses (Suren-Pahlav, 2011; 2016), and with a political condition that, over four decades, has too often reproduced its own subjugation through complicity (Suren-Pahlav, 2014), fragmentation, and the refusal to confront its internal failures.

 

 

The Three Persian Gulf Islands: The Somaliland of Iran

The three Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf were occupied by the British in 1908, when Iran was weak under the Qajars. These occupied islands include Būmosū, also known as Gap Sabzū, together with Greater and Lesser Tunb. To sever their historical connection with Iran, Britain migrated a number of Arabs from the 'Pirate Coast', present-day United Arab Emirates, and from Yemen to the islands. The British subsequently imposed the fabricated name 'Abu Musa'.

 

The toponym 'Būmosū' is rooted in Sistani Persian. It is structurally composed of two elements: 'būm', meaning 'land' or 'country', combined with the diminutive suffix '-ū', denoting 'small land', and '-sū', a contracted form of the Sistani Persian 'sūz', meaning 'green'. Another designation for this Iranian island is 'Gap Sabzū', which conveys the same semantic content as 'Būmosū'. It is formed from 'gap' (in Balochi, 'land') and 'sabz' ('green'), together with the diminutive suffix '-ū', yielding the composite meaning 'small green land'.

 

These three islands were liberated by the imperial government of Iran in December 1971, one day before Britain created a new colony known today as the UAE. There are also three more Iranian islands under UAE occupation: 'Dās', 'Zarkūh', and 'Āriyā' or 'Āriyānā' (later renamed as 'Ṣīr Abū Nuʿayr').

 

These islands are claimed by the UAE. They will operate along with other Iranian lands as Israeli military settlements to control the Strait of Hormuz. They are the Somaliland of Iran.

 

To understand why, strip away the legal argument. The UAE does not need sovereignty over Abu Musa to use it. It needs what Israel has in Somaliland: a de facto presence, a naval logistics point, and a diplomatic cover of ‘dispute’. In 2018, Israeli drones began operating from Al Dhafra Air Base in the UAE, a base that controls the airspace over the Tunb islands. In 2019, the UAE Coast Guard, equipped with Israeli surveillance technology, established a permanent presence within twelve nautical miles of Lesser Tunb. These are not acts of territorial claim. They are acts of strategic encirclement. The same method was used in Somaliland: no formal recognition, but a port concession, a military training mission, and the steady erosion of central authority. The three islands are not a territorial dispute. They are a testing ground for the fragmentation of Iran’s territorial integrity. Whoever controls them controls the Strait of Hormuz. And whoever controls the Strait of Hormuz controls twenty per cent of the world’s oil. The UAE and Israel are not arguing about history. They are positioning for a chokehold.

 

​

 

Conclusion

The evidence is not ambiguous. The pattern is not speculative. The trajectory from Somaliland to the Strait of Hormuz, from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, from the dismemberment of one state to the fragmentation of another, is not a collection of coincidences awaiting scholarly confirmation. It is a strategy. It has been written, funded, rehearsed, and is now being executed in plain sight, with the complicit silence of those who claim to champion international order and the active collaboration of those who claim to seek liberation.

 

Responsibility is not diffuse. It is concentrated. Israel, the United States, and the UAE are not passive observers of regional transformation. They are its architects. The Bernard Lewis doctrine of fragmentation is not an academic curiosity. It is operational policy (Suren-Pahlav, 2010). The Somali model is not an isolated catastrophe. It is a template. And Iran is not a potential future victim. It is the current designated target.

 

The so-called opposition activists who publicly petition for foreign bombing are not dissidents (Suren-Pahlav, 2016). They are auxiliaries. They do not represent an alternative political future. They represent the vanguard of infrastructural destruction, the domestic ratification of a foreign war agenda, and the moral cover under which universities will be bombed, hospitals will be collapsed, and a civilisation of seven thousand years will be reduced to a failed state. They will not rebuild what they help destroy. They will not return from Los Angeles or London to plant flags over ruins they applauded from safety of the West. They will write memoirs. They will receive fellowships. They will be celebrated. And Iran will burn and her children will role in blood.

 

The three Persian Gulf islands are not a territorial dispute. They are a military beachhead. The UAE does not need sovereignty over Iranian Islands to complete the encirclement of the Strait of Hormuz. It needs what it already has: a de facto presence, Israeli surveillance technology, and a Western press corps willing to frame occupation as a disagreement over maps. The same journalists who cannot locate the Iranian islands on a globe will solemnly report both sides of a story in which one side is arming for strategic chokehold and the other side is defending its territorial integrity. That is not journalism. That is complicity dressed as balance.

 

What is at stake is not Iran alone. What is at stake is the principle that states have a right to exist without being dismembered by external powers acting through proxy entities and fabricated secessionist movements. What is at stake is the proposition that international law means something other than whatever Israel and the United States decide it means on any given morning. What is at stake is whether the Red Sea corridor becomes an Israeli lake, whether the Strait of Hormuz becomes a chokehold rather than a waterway, and whether the Middle East is reconfigured into a collection of dependent fragments permanently incapable of resisting external domination.

 

The answer, at present, is that this reconfiguration is already underway. The only remaining question is whether those who witness it will continue to avert their gaze, to perform performative concern, to issue statements that condemn without naming, to write articles that analyse without accusing, to produce scholarship that contextualises without concluding.

 

This text has no such evasion to offer. Here is the verdict.

 

Israel is executing a strategy of regional fragmentation with the explicit goal of achieving superpower status. The United States is its indispensable military and diplomatic enabler. The UAE is its regional logistics hub and financial conduit. The European powers are silent accomplices. The Iranian diaspora factions calling for bombardment are ideological accessories before the fact. And the political class that has governed Iran for four decades, through its corruption, its repression, and its strategic incompetence, has produced a domestic vulnerability that makes this external assault possible. Responsibility is not singular. It is shared. But it is not diffuse. It is assignable, name by name, institution by institution, decision by decision.

 

Euphemism is a form of complicity. To speak of "normalisation" when what is meant is strategic alignment with a regional fragmentation project is to launder reality. To speak of "territorial disputes" when what is meant is foreign military encirclement is to obscure the use of force. To speak of "liberation" when what is meant is the destruction of state infrastructure is to invert meaning into its opposite. This text rejects that vocabulary. The words are: war, fragmentation, occupation, complicity, and, where the evidence demands it, treason.

 

The trajectory is not inevitable. It can be interrupted. But not by those who refuse to name it. Not by those who insist on balance where there is asymmetry. Not by those who mistake their own reluctance to accuse for intellectual sophistication. The first requirement of resistance is clarity about what is being resisted. That clarity has been supplied. The rest is a question of will.

 

History will not record that the warning was absent. It will record what was done with it.

 

 

References:

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2010) ‘Mullahs, the West and Zionism: The Diabolical Triangular Project for the Balkanisation of Iran’, suren-pahlav.com (12 February). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/mullahs-west-zionism-diabolical-triangular-project-for-the-balkanisation-of-iran.html [Accessed: 05 September 2020].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2011) ‘Reformism and the Green Movement: Factional Constructs in the Islamic Regime’s Strategy of 'False Opposition'’, suren-pahlav.com (22 February). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/the-reformist-movement-a-false-opposition-strategy-of-iran-s-totalitarian-theocratic-regime.html [Accessed: 05 September 2020].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2014) ‘Bonhoeffer’s On the Theory of Stupidity and the Moral Sociology of Compliance in Islamic Iran’, suren-pahlav.com (14 June). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/bonhoeffer-on-theory-of-stupidity-and-the-moral-sociology-of-compliance-in-islamic-iran.html [Accessed: 05 September 2020].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2016) ‘The ‘External Liberation’ Narrative As Information Strategy: The Normalisation Of War And The Hollowing Of Sovereignty’, suren-pahlav.com (26 December). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/external-liberation-narrative-as-information-strategy-the-normalisation-of-war.html [Accessed: 05 September 2020].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2017) ‘Xenophilia, Self-Contempt and Treachery: How the Islamic regime and Exilic Dislocation Produced a Nation Estranged from Itself’, suren-pahlav.com (7 January). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/iran-and-xenophilia-self-contempt.html [Accessed: 05 September 2020].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2018a) ‘Bernard Lewis Dies At 101, But His Cartographies Endure: Zionism, Eurocentrism, And The Engineered Balkanisation Of Iran’, suren-pahlav.com (2 May). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/bernard-lewis-dies-at-101.html [Accessed: 05 September 2020].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2018b) ‘The Farashgard Phenomenon: Instrumental Defection and the Regime’s Final Strategy’, suren-pahlav.com (8 October). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/farashgard-phenomenon-instrumental-defection-and-the-regime’s-final-strategy.html [Accessed: 05 September 2020].