Netanyahu May Be Making the Same Mistake With the Houthis as He Did With Iran
The Israeli attack Thursday on the airport in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, may have temporarily resolved a peculiar debate on policy options that emerged in Israel over the past two weeks: Whom should Israel attack first?
The instinctive answer would be the Yemeni Houthis, who are harassing Israel by firing ballistic missiles into the center of the country every other night. Conversely, there was the option of attacking Iran, which Israel now sees as a geopolitically weakened and military degraded enemy.
The first option is framed as self-defense, the second as an opportunity. There's also a third option: Retaliate against the Houthis but coordinate an international reaction because this group isn't only an Israeli problem – and refrain at this point from any unsolicited and unprovoked attack on Iran.
Smoke rises after Israeli airstrikes near the Sanaa airport on Thursday.Credit: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters
Predictably, this option isn't being weighed. Call it the zeitgeist or geopolitical fervor, but that third choice doesn't seem to be on the table.
The debate was peculiar because it was out in the open and contains an interesting paradox. The Israel Defense Forces says Israel should launch a major operation against the Houthi commanders. This would mainly be a Mossad operation. The Mossad, through its chief, David Barnea, has been quoted as advocating a substantial strike on Iran, which supposedly handles and operates the Houthis in Yemen. This would mainly be an IDF operation.
The IDF argues that an unprovoked attack on Iran would unnecessarily reopen a direct front between Israel and Iran, with questionable benefits. The military would rather wait and see how the incoming Trump administration plans to deal with Iran.
The Mossad argues that the Houthis are undeterred by sporadic and unsustained military attacks and therefore Iran is the target. The Houthis control over 40 percent of Yemen, a country of 37 million people and 550,000 square kilometers (214,000 square miles), which is 2.5 times the size of Britain. In American parlance, that's right between Texas (695,000 square kilometers) and California (424,000 square kilometers).
Both Yemen and Iran are long-range targets: 2,000 kilometers (1,300 miles) from Israel, depending of course on flight paths and the location of targets.
What is this debate really about? It's a combination of real security concerns, policy alternatives and self-defense, on top of Benjamin Netanyahu's delusions of grandeur about reshaping the Middle East and toppling the Iranian regime. The Houthis are considered a nuisance that needs to be taken care of to achieve the real objective: Iran. Is Iran a legitimate objective? Sure. Is it a prudent policy to provoke a war? Doubtful.
Iran's atomic energy chief, Mohammad Eslami, right, at a ceremony in Tehran earlier this month.Credit: Atomic Energy Organization of Iran/AFP
Let's start with the option of attacking Iran. There is a growing probability, or at the very least a feasible scenario, that by February or March, Israel will launch a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.
Obviously, any decision of this magnitude will be determined after Israel understands Washington's stance and policy, but Netanyahu is counting on an American green light without direct American involvement. He seems to believe that even if the efficacy of an Israeli attack is partial and the damage is limited, it's worth it.
Israel lacks the ability to undertake a sustained aerial campaign 2,000 kilometers away and doesn't possess the munitions to cause irreversible damage to many of Iran's fortified nuclear reactors and uranium-enrichment facilities. But according to Netanyahu, this is an opportune moment: Iran has been severely weakened geopolitically as a result of Hezbollah's military degrading, the fall of the Assad regimein Syria, a sagging Iranian economy including a crippling energy crisis, and the election of Donald Trump.
Netanyahu has wrongly predicted the end of Iran's nuclear program twice. In 2002, he recommended that the United States invade Iraq because this would "reverberate" to Iran, and in 2018 he helped convince Trump to unilaterally withdraw from the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal and apply "maximum pressure." Both failed.
Now he believes that the job can be done with tacit support from Washington: Trump will employ coercive diplomacy – threats and more sanctions – Israel will attack and Iran's military nuclear program will dissolve. Netanyahu will frame this as "self-defense," a supplement to the fall of Bashar Assad, and claim credit for saving Western civilization. This will be marketed to Trump as a facilitating factor conducive to a new and improved agreement with Iran.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on Sunday just before he delivered a speech in Tehran.Credit: Iranian supreme leader's office/AFP
"You'll correct the abject mistake made by Obama and succeed where Biden failed," Netanyahu will probably say to a fascinated Trump.
But what if the Iranian regime perceives this as an attempt at regime change and retaliates with full force? That doesn't concern Netanyahu since it fits perfectly with his narrative that October 7, 2023, was never just a Hamas attack but an existential war against Israel planned and executed by Iran. This not only contains the promise of a remodeled Middle East, but in his mind it absolves him of any responsibility for the calamity of that Black Saturday.
But, as the IDF thinks, the Houthis are the more urgent threat. Both the IDF and the Mossad have concluded that the Houthis are "undeterred." Again, Israel is using the term "deterrence" in an anachronistic way that has already proved inaccurate and led to wrong conclusions.
Was Hamas deterred? No. Was Hezbollah deterred? No. Both catastrophically miscalculated and suffered dire consequences, but they weren't deterred. Was Iran deterred? No. So why would the Houthis be deterred?
The prevailing premise in Israel was that Hezbollah and the Houthis were Iranian-operated proxies, puppets mastered from Tehran to create a 360-degree "unity of fronts" against Israel. There is no question that Iran created a threatening web of proxy militias that Tehran armed, funded and mentored. But the assumption that they all operate through Iranian instructions and guidelines is simplistic. They all have indigenous contexts and political calculations that aren't shaped or resolved in Tehran.
Houthi gunmen in the suburbs of Sanaa on Monday.Credit: Mohammed Huwais/AFP
The Houthis have wide latitude, and they're using it, as Hezbollah did after October 7, 2023. They're more Iran's terror franchisees than subordinate organizations. In a way we're seeing a repeat of the false assumption in the United States during the Cold War that the Soviet Union controlled all the Communist parties around the world, from North Vietnam and North Korea, across to Italy and France, and down to Cuba and Nicaragua.
Israeli Military Intelligence has a widely used acronym that roughly translates as "designated important information," DII. It denotes an intelligence priority and defined target to be monitored closely and be allocated resources.
The Houthis weren't a prime DII until last year. That's why the assumption that they operate based on Iranian instructions, the whereabouts of their top commanders, the number and exact locations of their ballistic missiles (supplied by Iran) are all unclear.
More importantly, Netanyahu may be making another mistake here: "Israelizing" the Houthi problem. He was right years ago to warn that a nuclear Iran was an international issue and wrong when he "Israelized" the issue by opposing the nuclear agreement and promising yet never delivering a better deal or an Iran relinquishing its nuclear program as a result of U.S. pressure.
Now he may be repeating this with the Houthis. They're firing at Israel and there should be a devastating response, no doubt. But the response should be international.
The Houthis control the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which leads into the Red Sea en route to the Suez Canal. That affects 10 percent of seaborne oil exports and 8 percent of liquefied natural gas from the Persian/Arab Gulf to Europe (more if you factor sanctions on Russian oil) and 60 percent of China's exports to Europe.
This is hardly an exclusively Israeli problem. The United States and Britain both periodically attack Houthi strongholds, but that hasn't had a major impact on the group's ability or willingness to launch missiles at Israel. That requires an international effort – as does Iran – and that's what Israel needs to do, rather than publicly deliberate who it should attack and when it should do so.