Born to an Anglican mother and a Jewish father, the acclaimed British novelist Muriel Spark converted to Catholicism at the age of thirty-six. Seven years later, in 1961, Spark found herself in Jerusalem covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann for the London Observer. That experience would in turn become the basis for her novel The Mandelbaum Gate, which has as its protagonist a Catholic Briton of mixed Jewish and Christian ancestry, named Barbara, visiting the capital of the Jewish state. Calling the book both Spark’s “most ambitious” and her “most disappointing,” Christopher Scalia nonetheless finds in it moments of profundity:

Some of the novel’s most compelling passages occur when Barbara, reflects on, or is challenged to reconcile, her disparate ethnic and religious backgrounds.

Although Spark devotes only a few pages of this long novel to it, the [Eichmann trial] has a profound effect on Barbara’s journey. She is struck by the language and imagery of Eichmann’s testimony, finding them consistently inappropriate and ill-suited for their subject. On some occasions, his empty mechanical language belies the horror of the Holocaust: “Minute by minute throughout the hours the prisoner discoursed on the massacre without mentioning the word, covering all aspects of every question addressed to him with the meticulous undiscriminating reflex of a computing machine.” This “dead mechanical tick” is poorly suited for the massacre it described.

Later, Barbara contracts scarlet fever and spends a stretch of time confined to a house with several other people:

During her quarantine . . . Barbara becomes fed up with another character’s anti-Semitic commentary—“Really, let’s face it, Hitler had the right idea. . . . It’s a network on a world scale. The Jews. They’ve got us in a net.”—and attacks her. The overt anti-Semitism and Barbara’s visceral, direct reaction to it create a sharp contrast to the oblique and suppressed nature of the Eichmann trial, and the scene permits Barbara to demonstrate her attachment to her Jewish identity.

Last Tuesday, the Houthis—the faction now ruling much of Yemen—said that they intend to renew attacks on international shipping through the Red and Arabian Seas. They had for the most part paused their attacks following the January 19 Israel-Hamas cease-fire, but their presence has continued to scare away maritime traffic near the Yemeni coast, with terrible consequences for the global economy.

The U.S. responded on Saturday by initiating strikes on Houthi missile depots, command-and-control centers, and propaganda outlets, and has promised that the attacks will continue for days, if not weeks. The Houthis responded by launching drones, and possibly missiles, at American naval ships, apparently without result. Another missile fired from Yemen struck the Sinai, but was likely aimed at Israel. As Ari Heistein has written in Mosaic, it may take a sustained and concerted effort to stop the Houthis, who have high tolerance for casualties—but this is a start. Ron Ben-Yishai provides some context:

The goal is to punish the Houthis for directly targeting Western naval vessels in the Red Sea while also exerting indirect pressure on Tehran over its nuclear program. . . . While the Biden administration did conduct airstrikes against the Houthis, it refrained from a proactive military campaign, fearing a wider regional war. However, following the collapse of Iran’s axis—including Hizballah’s heavy losses in Lebanon and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria—the Trump administration appears unafraid of such an escalation.

Iran, the thinking goes, will also get the message that the U.S. isn’t afraid to use force, or risk the consequences of retaliation—and will keep this in mind as it considers negotiations over its nuclear program. Tamir Hayman adds:

The Houthis are the last proxy of the Shiite axis that have neither reassessed their actions nor restrained their weapons. Throughout the campaign against the Yemenite terrorist organization, the U.S.-led coalition has made operational mistakes: Houthi regime infrastructure was not targeted; the organization’s leaders were not eliminated; no sustained operational continuity was maintained—only actions to remove immediate threats; no ground operations took place, not even special-forces missions; and Iran has not paid a price for its proxy’s actions.

But if this does not stop the Houthis, it will project weakness—not just toward Hamas but primarily toward Iran—and Trump’s power diplomacy will be seen as hollow. The true test is one of output, not input. The only question that matters is not how many strikes the U.S. carries out, but whether the Red Sea reopens to all vessels. We will wait and see—for now, things look brighter than they did before.