On Friday night, a second Houthi missile struck the Tel Aviv area. It landed in a playground, wounding sixteen, although none of them seriously. On Saturday, the U.S carried out more extensive strikes against Houthi bases in Yemen. But these Iran-backed jihadists, Ron Ben-Yishai writes, are committed to “proving to the world that unlike Hizballah, Hamas, and Iran, they remain unscathed and continue to fight in support of Hamas” and expect after the conflict ends “to be recognized as the force that held maritime traffic, including oil trade in the Persian Gulf, in a stranglehold at a cost to the European consumers.”

What can be done? While Israeli strikes have been tactically bold, they haven’t had a deterrent effect, and the U.S. is much better positioned to do serious damage:

[T]o deal with the Houthi threat to Israel’s home front and to world trade, there must be a resolute military operation that will not only hurt the local economy and humiliate the Houthi regime, but also eliminate its leaders and destroy its military capabilities. . . . A joint Israeli-American operation would be able to deter the Houthis if their weapons and production sites are attacked.

Ben-Dror Yemini offers a similar analysis of Houthi motives, but argues that even these steps won’t be sufficient:

Israeli retaliation does not deter them; harming Israel fuels their sense of honor. . . . While pointed attacks on a Yemeni port might grant us momentary relief, it does little to answer the actual source of our sleepless nights. Lest we forget, Israeli air-force jets aren’t the only threat the Houthis have faced. The Saudis, Americans, and British have all brandished their idea of aerial punishment, and the Jewish state itself has done so more than once. And yet, the Houthi war machine rumbles on.

These threats will only cease—or at least be reduced to hollow rhetoric—if Iran itself suffers a devastating blow.

 In a recent article, the New York Times Magazine asserts that Benjamin Netanyahu “prolonged the war in Gaza to stay in power.” Niranjan Shankar takes the argument apart piece by piece, showing that for all its careful research, it fails to back up its basic claims. For instance: the article implies that Netanyahu pulled out of a three-point cease-fire proposal supported by the Biden administration in the spring of last year:

First of all, it’s crucial to note that Biden’s supposed “three-point plan” announced in May 2024 was originally an Israeli proposal. Of course, there was some back-and-forth and disagreement over how the Biden administration presented this initially, as Biden failed to emphasize that according to the three-point framework, a permanent cease-fire was conditional on Hamas releasing all of the hostages and stepping down. Regardless, the piece fails to mention that it was Hamas in June 2024 that rejected this framework!

It wasn’t until July 2024 that Hamas made its major concession—dropping its demand that Israel commit up front to a full end to the war, as opposed to doing so at a later stage of cease-fire/negotiations. Even then, U.S. negotiators admitted that both sides were still far from agreeing on a deal.

Even when the Times raises more credible criticisms of Israel—like the IDF’s decision to employ raids rather than holding territory in the first stage of the war—they are offered in what seems like bad faith:

[W]ould the New York Times prefer that Israel instead started with a massive ground campaign with a “clear-hold-build” strategy from the get-go? Of course, if Israel had done this, there would have been endless criticism, especially under the Biden admin. But when Israel instead tried the “raid-and-clear” strategy, it gets blamed for deliberately dragging the war on.