Iran has a warship in the Red Sea. Why? Because the Houthi rebels of East Yemen have turned a bit of their fire away from their Saudi backed opponents and aimed it towards Israel. The missiles haven't hit Israel, but the Houthis have intercepted multiple ships going through the Red Sea's very narrow straits that are crucial for world trade. Of the four (I think) ships captured, one of them ships was owned by Israeli shipping magnate: Rami Ungar. The shipping world is international: every crew is international, every manufacture is international, so it's entirely possible that they captured all four with the intent of finding the Israel-owned one.
So why is something this vague this important?
First of all, this demands knowing something about Yemen, which I hardly do, and I'm not going to spend the weeks reading up on it unless Yemen's the reason a gigantic war breaks out (and it probably won't be...). Suffice to say, important things are going on in Yemen that you don't know about, with multiple regions, multiple ethnic groups, multiple factions, multiple wars. Even if it's true that 22,000 Gazans have died at Israeli hands, the blood of the Yemenite conflict seems to exceed the Gaza conflict by a multiple of SEVENTEEN.
You don't know anything about this conflict. Why is that?
...you obviously don't want to hear the answer.
...you obviously don't want to hear the answer.
But now Iran has a warship in the Red Sea. Why? Because the fact that Yemen's conflict is now becoming Israel's conflict is obviously at Iran's behest (possibly with an OK from Putin or Xi), and Iran wants an excuse to keep this conflict going as long as possible. Tactical maneuvers are easier when you want to keep wars going than when you want to stop them, but this is, sadly, a brilliant tactical maneuver.
It serves a triple purpose:
1. It demands some kind of response. You can't simply tolerate missiles going into Israel in the middle of a war they're already fighting or else ten other countries or terrorist groups might get the same idea.
Such a response would either come from Israel or the US.
- If it's Israel, it reminds every Israel-hater in the Middle East that, to their perception, Israel has always been an aggressor, and that if Israel is not defeated, the humiliations of still having an imperial occupier on their land will continue to effect countries whose distance from Israel seems extremely far.
- If it's the US, it reminds every America-hater in the Middle East that the US's reach is everywhere, it can come to your doorstep at any moment, and the US can decide at any moment to upend your country on a whim.
It serves a triple purpose:
1. It demands some kind of response. You can't simply tolerate missiles going into Israel in the middle of a war they're already fighting or else ten other countries or terrorist groups might get the same idea.
Such a response would either come from Israel or the US.
- If it's Israel, it reminds every Israel-hater in the Middle East that, to their perception, Israel has always been an aggressor, and that if Israel is not defeated, the humiliations of still having an imperial occupier on their land will continue to effect countries whose distance from Israel seems extremely far.
- If it's the US, it reminds every America-hater in the Middle East that the US's reach is everywhere, it can come to your doorstep at any moment, and the US can decide at any moment to upend your country on a whim.
So far, it's the US, and again, thank god for that. The fact that the US can decide to upend a country on a whim isn't news to anywhere in the world.
2. Israel is finally moving into the next phase of its conflict where thousands of ground troops are withdrawn. Thank god for that or every Jew around the world would eventually walk around with a target on our ass.
The idea that you can end Hamas is a delusion, everybody knew it was a delusion but the delusional; but an even bigger delusion is Hamas's that you can end Israel itself or even end the Jewish people, and the whole point of this war was to bring them closer to this goal of theirs by exposing us Jews to the world as the murderers and torturers we so obviously are. So long as Hamas stays in power and the people who support Hamas maintain their delusions (and don't forget, annihilation of the Jews is in Hamas's own charter), Hamas will find reasons to prolong this conflict. In other words - and stop reading if you're delicate... - you can't stop Hamas from killing people unless the price for Hamas's murders is so high that those who celebrated Hamas's killings would think twice about doing it again.
In case you haven't noticed yet, Israel/Palestine is a game of inches. Every foot of land has disputed claims and competing stories, every meter is subject to endless disputes, negotiations and battles, and each foot of the battle can last a hundred years.
There are only two actors in the world who want to see this war end less than Bibi Netanyahu, and one of them is Hamas. Without war, Hamas's entire purpose is run out. There is nothing left for their followers and captives but the obvious realization that so long as they draw a few percent support of the Palestinian electorate, Palestine could have all the apparatus in place to flourish, and it wouldn't take more than a generation for Hamas to remake Palestine into exactly what it already is. All it takes to make a country prosper is one group of practical hard workers and a rich, powerful backer. All it takes to ruin a country is one wing of ideological nuts with a rich, powerful backer. Israel: take note.
If Israel is unwilling to continue a war in Gaza at a pace that shocks the world, then Hamas, Iran, and all the people who want Israel eliminated need this war to spread.
Where can it spread? To a place already so bombed out and hellish that it makes Gaza look like Dubai.
3. The biggest quagmires are not wars in which there are two sides, clearly demarcated, where but where there are five or seven. The American Civil War was over in four years, but civil wars have been going on in Syria, Mali, and Camerooon for well over ten years. The 17th century German civil war was known as the Thirty Years War. The 14-15th century English civil war is known as the Hundred Years War. Civil wars too can go on forever with only two sides, but if the conflict takes forever, that's usually a sign that it has many sides, many actors, many belligerents in play - each of which have their own shifting motives, conflicting ambitions, personality tensions, corporate interests, and compete for the same resources; alliances break apart, fighters switch sides, actors within each side advance their own interests at the expense of the groups' goals, and generations of citizens live in a world of chaos.
2. Israel is finally moving into the next phase of its conflict where thousands of ground troops are withdrawn. Thank god for that or every Jew around the world would eventually walk around with a target on our ass.
The idea that you can end Hamas is a delusion, everybody knew it was a delusion but the delusional; but an even bigger delusion is Hamas's that you can end Israel itself or even end the Jewish people, and the whole point of this war was to bring them closer to this goal of theirs by exposing us Jews to the world as the murderers and torturers we so obviously are. So long as Hamas stays in power and the people who support Hamas maintain their delusions (and don't forget, annihilation of the Jews is in Hamas's own charter), Hamas will find reasons to prolong this conflict. In other words - and stop reading if you're delicate... - you can't stop Hamas from killing people unless the price for Hamas's murders is so high that those who celebrated Hamas's killings would think twice about doing it again.
In case you haven't noticed yet, Israel/Palestine is a game of inches. Every foot of land has disputed claims and competing stories, every meter is subject to endless disputes, negotiations and battles, and each foot of the battle can last a hundred years.
There are only two actors in the world who want to see this war end less than Bibi Netanyahu, and one of them is Hamas. Without war, Hamas's entire purpose is run out. There is nothing left for their followers and captives but the obvious realization that so long as they draw a few percent support of the Palestinian electorate, Palestine could have all the apparatus in place to flourish, and it wouldn't take more than a generation for Hamas to remake Palestine into exactly what it already is. All it takes to make a country prosper is one group of practical hard workers and a rich, powerful backer. All it takes to ruin a country is one wing of ideological nuts with a rich, powerful backer. Israel: take note.
If Israel is unwilling to continue a war in Gaza at a pace that shocks the world, then Hamas, Iran, and all the people who want Israel eliminated need this war to spread.
Where can it spread? To a place already so bombed out and hellish that it makes Gaza look like Dubai.
3. The biggest quagmires are not wars in which there are two sides, clearly demarcated, where but where there are five or seven. The American Civil War was over in four years, but civil wars have been going on in Syria, Mali, and Camerooon for well over ten years. The 17th century German civil war was known as the Thirty Years War. The 14-15th century English civil war is known as the Hundred Years War. Civil wars too can go on forever with only two sides, but if the conflict takes forever, that's usually a sign that it has many sides, many actors, many belligerents in play - each of which have their own shifting motives, conflicting ambitions, personality tensions, corporate interests, and compete for the same resources; alliances break apart, fighters switch sides, actors within each side advance their own interests at the expense of the groups' goals, and generations of citizens live in a world of chaos.
Two factorial is just two, and two sides can fight to a stalemate, but three factorial is six, so all it takes is three sides in any conflict and the complications get beyond the ability of anyone to foresee.
For a thousand years, Jerusalem's been a quagmire for the Arab world, but Israel/Palestine is not a quagmire, it's a stalemate. The main components of Israel/Palestine aren't unpredictable, they're all too predictable. The same situation continues with the same factors: year after year, decade after decade, until the smallest disruptions seem like epochal events. But in Yemen, the largest disruptions barely merit mention in the world's news, and even if world news covered it properly, what was true when written down would change by the time it's published.
So long as Israel/Palestine never spreads, it stays a stalemate, but in 1982 (really 1979), Israel launched itself into the Lebanese civil war to defend its borders and couldn't get out of it until 2000, ten years even past when the civil war ended.
Israel's involvement in Lebanon was the literal poison that set the world against it for all the future to foresee. What might an excursion further abroad do? What might happen were Israel to feel itself compelled to interfere this region 2200 kilometers away, with all its competing factions and competing factions within competing factions, each of which has a whole new beast of chaos to unleash?
It all seems unlikely or unbelievable, but consider this (with credit to the Stimson Center):
The Houthi movement's founder: Hussein al-Houthi, believed that the US and Israel had plans to occupy no less than Mecca and Medina. In 2021, the Houthis deported any Jews left in Yemen from the mass exiles after 1948. In 2021, al-Houti's brother Abdel-Malek declared his intention to capture the areas held by their Yemenite enemies who 'want to subjugate them [the areas] to the Americans, British, and Israelis. The rallying war chant for the Houthis is said to be 'God is great, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.'
Yemen is, in all likelihood, not going to be a new front in this particular war, but it just might be. This is a bid by a Shia group to be considered part of the Axis of Resistance: stretching from Hamas to Hezbollah to Iran and its militia groups in Iraq and Syria, that have taken put the commitment to wiping Israel off the map into Islamic form that used to be the pan-Arab cry of nearly every leader of every Arab country. What better way than embroiling Israel and its allies in a second front in the Israel-Gaza war that is of an unprecedented distance from Israel by a factor of 2,200 kilometers?
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