The biggest Israel story of the week barely made your feed. While the cameras tracked the US–Iran deal racing toward its signing in Switzerland, the president of a functioning democracy most of the world still refuses to recognize opened an embassy in Jerusalem, and almost no one noticed. Catching the story buried in the noise is most of what an intelligence analyst actually does. This week made it easy.

On June 15, the same day the Iran deal flooded every screen, President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi of Somaliland opened his country’s embassy in Jerusalem, alongside Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar. The next day he was received at the Knesset. The day after that, Defense Minister Israel Katz said the two countries had cooperated “under the radar” for years, in operations that would “remain classified.”

Six months earlier, Israel had become the first UN member state ever to recognize Somaliland as a sovereign country, a move Netanyahu placed in the spirit of the Abraham Accords.

Any one of those is a story.........

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