Yemen’s civil war, which began in 2011, has since 2015 become a proxy conflict between Iran—which supports the Houthi rebels—on the one hand and Saudi Arabia and a few of its allies—which support the pre-2011 regime—on the other. By arming the Houthis with advanced missiles and drones, training them in their use, and developing tactics that can make the most of these weapons, Tehran has turned them into a formidable threat to Riyadh. Israel should pay attention, writes Uzi Rubin:

The war is being exploited by Iran to test strategies, tactics, and weapons in battle conditions. It stands to reason that the weapons and tactics employed in Yemen today will be used against Israel tomorrow.

With remarkable persistence and ingenuity and in the face of a UN arms embargo enforced by a Saudi led blockade, Iran managed to build an effective war machine for its Houthi ally. This is the lesson that Israel should derive from the Yemen conflict: that arms blockades are porous, and that a determined enemy like Iran can always find a way to supply its allies. This is not to say that blockades are completely redundant: rather, their effectiveness is limited in scope and volatile in time. . . . As for Israel’s ongoing effort to curb the development of a Hizballah rocket-production industry [in Syrian and Lebanon], time will tell whether [it] can succeed.

More remarkably, the Iranians have provided the Houthis with knowhow, production machinery, and expertise to set up an unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV) industry of their own in their stronghold of Sad’ha in northern Yemen. The Houthi UAV industry is now producing unique designs of long-range machines, some equipped with jet engines, obviously designed in Iran. Beyond the classic UAV roles of reconnaissance and light bombardment, the Houthi/Iranian alliance is using them for direct “suicide” attacks on Patriot [anti-missile] batteries. . . . [S]ignificantly, the Houthi–Iranian alliance exploits the Patriots’ limitations in engaging low and slow threats in order to penetrate beneath the Saudi air/missile defense shield.

UAVs were first used by Hizballah for reconnaissance over Israel even prior to the 2006 Lebanon war. . . . The Yemen war demonstrates how UAVs will be employed in future wars in significant numbers to erode Israel’s missile-defense capabilities by attacking Iron Dome, David Sling, and Arrow batteries. Hostile UAVs, in conjunction with precision rockets, may well be tasked with damaging Israel’s critical infrastructures such as desalination plants.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”