If Israelis are learning things, American leaders seem to be forgetting them. One is that the United States is prosperous because it can trade freely over the world’s waterways, and that its navy exists primarily to secure this freedom. This is the U.S. Navy’s own definition of its purpose, and has been since the 18th century. But it has done very little of consequence to stop Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels from destroying commerce through the Red Sea. Just last week, the Houthis disabled a Greek oil tanker, which since then has been on fire and likely leaking its cargo into the water. They hit two more ships yesterday. Elliott Abrams comments:

A recent article in the Telegraph newspaper in London by the former Royal Navy commander Tom Sharpe was titled “The Houthis Have Defeated the U.S. Navy.” If that is not correct, it is only because the U.S. Navy has been ordered not to fight.

The navy isn’t seeking to abandon that role and there are many reports that it wishes to do more to defeat the Houthi attacks that . . . have decimated Suez Canal traffic. But it has not been given a green light by the White House, which seeks to avoid what it calls “escalation,” especially (one might guess) in the pre-election period.

A thought experiment: instead of defending ships that are attacked by the Houthis, or trying to take out launch sites one by one, what if the United States told Iran that we would respond to further missile strikes by hitting targets in Iran, the supplier of the missiles? . . . What if Iran were told that for every ship sunk by the Houthis, the United States (and, one hopes, its allies) would sink an Iranian ship?

I can hear the screeches now: this is escalation, this means war, this would create instability. But the instability comes from Iran’s aggression—its delivery of weaponry to Yemen with the intent that the weapons be fired to prevent innocent maritime activity and to attack U.S. and other naval vessels. That’s an act of war.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.