Rockets and rain are a miserable combination for a holiday but there is something quintessentially Israeli about the reaction to both this week, during Hanukkah.
The missiles, mainly from Yemen and a few rockets from Gaza, disrupted sleep for millions of Israelis who ran to stairwells and shelters in the middle of the night.
For several nights in a row, Houthi projectiles triggered alerts in the center of the country; last Friday night it was Jerusalemites who heard the sirens warning of a Houthi missile.
Wherever they are, Israelis wake up the morning after a rocket attack and carry on with what passes as normal life.
The heavy rains, on the other hand, caused havoc for traffic in many places. Rain and snow can bring Israel to a halt in a way that rockets and terror attacks don’t.
But that doesn’t mean we should be expected to normalize missile and drone attacks, relying on the Iron Dome and other anti-missile systems. (And we need to fix infrastructure problems that exacerbate the flooding.)
The increasing rocket and drone attacks on Israel from Yemen, more than 2,000 km. away, are not an existential threat to the Jewish state, but they are part of a broader axis of evil. Indeed, the lesson of October 7, 2023 is that the country can never again afford to be complacent.
Sporadic missiles left untreated can, and will, turn into an “Al-Aqsa flood,” in Hamas terms.
There is something almost comical in the delivery of the speeches by Houthi spokesman Gen.
Yahya Qasim Sare’e. His style is reminiscent of the addresses of North Korean TV anchor Ri Chun Hi. But neither should be laughed off.
Among the dark joker cards of 2024 was the presence of North Korean forces on Russian soil, fighting in the war against Ukraine and, by extension, the West.
Yemen’s Houthi forces, led by Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, are also fighting a broader war against Western and Sunni Muslim countries. Israel serves as a rallying battle cry, but Houthi sights are set beyond Israel’s tiny borders.
Kan 11 recently reported on Houthi ground exercises simulating Hamas-style attacks and abductions in Israeli communities.
Even though it would be harder for them to reach Israel, without a direct border, it would be foolish, pre-October 7 thinking to dismiss the declaration of intent.
Humor has long been part of the Israeli self-defense system and famed resilience. Eylon Levy, head of the Israeli Citizen Spokespersons’ Office and host of the State of a Nation podcast, delivered a perfect parody on social media in response to the attacks this week.
Dressed in a seasonal-looking sweater, in the soothing tones of someone reading a rhyming bedside story to a child, Levy in his measured British accent, told the tale of “The Houthis who stole Hanukkah.”
“They armed their Iranian ballistic missile with glee, and aimed it at Israel for the whole world to see… The Houthis afar watched their evil plan fail, but kept hijacking ships and indeed they set sail, while Israel hit back and prepared to retaliate against the Iranian regime’s piratical caliphate.”
To paraphrase Levy, who used the “F” word in his message and Hanukkah lesson to the Houthis: Don’t mess with the Jews. “Just like the Maccabees, we don’t bow to tyrants. We’ll face down these tyrants with steely defiance.”
The Houthis have reportedly fired some 1,150 missiles and drones since October 7, 2023, some 400 of them at Israel.
This is ostensibly in solidarity with the Palestinians following the Hamas invasion and mega-atrocity, but the crux of the crisis is an inability to read the Middle East’s geophysical and political map.
In the Houthis’s case, they boast their mindset in plain sight. The flag of the Iranian-backed Shi’ite Islamists loses nothing in translation. Their raison d’etre is literally spelled out in Arabic calligraphy: “Allah is the greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A curse upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
Ironically, it should be noted that there are hardly any Jews left in the once-thriving Jewish Yemenite community.
Like the Jewish communities of Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Arab world, these Jews became the Middle East’s overlooked refugees. But having no Jews doesn’t mean there’s no antisemitism.
The Houthi motto should not be ignored. It is not only a warning flag, it is also a form of indoctrination.
Like terrorist organizations elsewhere, it is part of the brainwashing that leads to atrocities.
LAST WEEK, I was invited to a screening at Jerusalem’s Museum of Tolerance of Raphael Shore’s documentary film Tragic Awakening: A New Look at the Oldest Hatred along with the launch of his book Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Jew? Learning to Love the Lessons of Jew-Hatred, on which the film was based.
The impetus for the movie was the global rise in antisemitic attacks following October 7, including in Shore’s native Canada.
No less important than examining the roots of Jew-hatred, the film aims at instilling Jewish pride.
It was produced in conjunction with the Aseret Movement, founded by Rabbi Shalom Schwartz, which promotes the Ten Commandments as a central element of Israeli and Jewish identity and values.
The undoubted star of the film, and the panel discussion that followed the screening, was the courageous and charismatic Rawan Osman, a former Syrian-Lebanese social activist.
She recalled growing up in a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon, where she was taught to hate the Jews. She thought they were so evil that the first time she saw Jews – in a grocery store in France – she ran away in fear.
That was when she was a newly arrived student in Strasbourg in 2011. Gradually, through exposure to the local community, she realized that Jews and Israelis weren’t the bloodthirsty monsters she had been led to believe.
She has come a long way. Calling herself a “recovered antisemite,” she now runs the Arabic-language online platform, “Arabs Ask” and actively advocates for the normalization of relations between Muslim states and Israel.
Wearing a Star of David, she told the audience that she is in the process of converting.
Pertinently, she noted that more Muslims are killed by their own regimes and Islamist forces than by Jews. And it’s worth remembering the starvation in Yemen and the poverty in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere at a time when the regimes spend billions of dollars on sophisticated weapons.
The Israeli intelligence establishment needs to swiftly come up with out-of-the-box ways to eliminate the threat and create a true deterrent.
The success of the exploding pagers and walkie-talkies against Hezbollah shows there are creative possibilities, but these may take time.
Meanwhile, it is vital that the rest of the world understands that this is not Israel’s battle alone.
By holding international shipping hostage and firing rockets on and over different countries, the Houthis have already turned this from a regional conflict into a part of global jihad, a war orchestrated by the arch-terrorist regime in Tehran.
As Seth Mandel wrote in Commentary: “Iran could, of course, rein in the Houthis by not supplying them with the weapons they know will be fired at Israeli towns, Western naval vessels, and civilian cargo ships.
“But Iran does not want the Houthis to stop firing. Which means the only method left to prevent more Houthi-caused bloodshed is for the West to take away the group’s freedom of action.”
The Houthis are a terrorist army, like Hamas and Hezbollah, and they must be met with a forceful response – something stronger than the current Israeli, US, and UK airstrikes.
Don’t rely on the rationality of a regime fueled by jihadist ideology.