Most people in Israel may never have heard of Somaliland. It is a name rarely spoken in the region, a country that appears in almost no atlas, no evening broadcast, and no diplomatic communique. Yet it is a place that changed me. It is a place I once walked, sat, listened, and learned, long before its name ever entered the corridors of recognition. Today, something happened that I once believed impossible. Israel spoke a sentence the world had refused to say for more than thirty years: “We recognise you.”

Before this moment, I knew Somaliland through footsteps rather than headlines. In 2018, I arrived in Hargeisa, a notebook pressed against my chest as if it could protect me from uncertainty. The heat was raw and honest. The dryness of the air made every breath feel like work. I thought I came to collect data about breast cancer: to interview patients, gather opinions, and present findings. Instead, I found stories that did not belong to academic formats.

In small rooms with faded paint and plastic chairs, I sat across from women who carried truths in their silence. Some looked straight at me, prepared to speak. Others held their arms close to their bodies, as if words might expose something they needed to protect. One said quietly, “If I have cancer, my husband will leave me.” That sentence did not tremble. It fell with certainty. Another woman, older, with lines etched deeply into her face, said, “If it is God’s will, there is no point in testing.” Neither woman lacked knowledge. Each calculated what illness might cost her place in her home, her marriage, her community. I learned that silence is not simply the absence of speech. It is a form of armor.

The country I stood in had been learning to survive through that same kind of silence. Somaliland held democratic elections, guarded borders, built ministries, maintained peace, yet remained officially “not a country.” I had stepped into a state that was already behaving as a state, long before the world cared to acknowledge it.

That summer, I walked through the gates of the Hargeysa International Book Fair. The courtyard felt like a heartbeat. Chairs lined beneath modest shade, patterns of bright fabric reflecting the same tones found in the desert, and a hum of voices that created a kind of music. The bookshelves were crowded with titles by Hadrawi, Nuruddin Farah, and emerging Somali writers whose ink felt like soil: full of roots, history, and possibility.

It was there, beneath a tree, that........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)