Israel bans Arab parties from election: Who they are, why it matters

Israeli politicians under ICC arrest warrants or international sanctions remain eligible to run.

By Caolán Magee

Published On 26 Sep 2026

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/26/israel-bans-arab-parties-from-election-who-they-are-why-it-matters

Israel’s Central Elections Committee has voted to bar the country’s two main Arab-majority political lists from next month’s parliamentary election, potentially leaving Palestinian citizens of Israel without their principal representatives in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.

The committee also voted to disqualify Ofer Cassif, a Jewish politician from the Arab-Jewish Hadash party, and Sami Abu Shehadeh, the leader of the Palestinian nationalist Balad party.

The votes are not the final word on who can run in the October 27 election. The Supreme Court is expected to review the decisions next week and has overturned previous attempts to exclude Arab parties and candidates.

But the committee’s decision has already prompted accusations of double standards, with Palestinian-led parties facing exclusion while parties led by far-right ministers, some of whom have been sanctioned internationally, remaining on the ballot. Here is what the decision means.

Which parties have been barred?

The committee voted to disqualify two separate groups. The first is the Joint List, an alliance of Hadash, Balad and Ta’al. The second is Ra’am, also called the United Arab List, which is running on its own. Both rely on support from Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about one-fifth of the country’s population.

The Joint List

This brings together three parties. Hadash is a left-wing party with Jewish and Arab members, Ta’al campaigns primarily for the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Balad calls for a state with equal rights for all its citizens. They agreed to contest this election on a single list, meaning their candidates would appear together on the ballot.

It is an electoral tactic used to not split votes among parties that are similar ideologically. A list must also win at least 3.25 percent of the national vote to enter the Knesset, so by joining forces, smaller parties combine their votes and reduce the risk that each falls below the threshold – in which case none of them would win seats.

In the current 120-seat Knesset, the Hadash-Ta’al alliance holds five seats. Of the Hadash-Ta’al seats, three belong to Hadash politicians and two to Ta’al. Balad has no seats.

Ra’am

Led by Mansour Abbas, it is running separately. It has been more willing to negotiate with other parties over funding and services for Arab communities. Ra’am joined the broad coalition that governed Israel from 2021 to 2022. The Joint List did not join that government.

In the current Knesset, Ra’am holds five seats.

Why have these parties been barred?

The decision followed petitions by the right-wing parties, Likud and Otzma Yehudit, which accused the parties and candidates of denying Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state, supporting armed struggle against Israel or inciting racism.

The committee is chaired by a Supreme Court justice, but its voting members represent parties in the outgoing Knesset. Politicians therefore vote on whether rival parties and candidates can contest the election, although the Supreme Court has the final say.

The committee voted 18-5 to bar Ra’am and, in a separate vote, 18-5 to bar the Joint List. It also voted 18-5 to bar Cassif and 31-4 to bar Abu Shehadeh, according to Adalah, the Palestinian legal rights group representing the lists and candidates.

Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara opposed the disqualification of the two lists and Cassif, saying the evidence did not meet the legal threshold. She took a different position on Abu Shehadeh, however. The case against him centres in part on an article he wrote on October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas’s attacks on Israel.

The article was published on the Arab 48 website and referred to the attack as “an important historic event militarily, politically and strategically”.

The attorney general claimed its wording could amount to support for armed struggle.

Abu Shehadeh rejects that reading. He said on X that he opposed armed struggle and supported a “political and civil struggle for peace, justice, and equality”.

Other opposition parties in Israel support the disqualification of Abu Shehadeh. Yair Golan, leader of the opposition Democrats party, said of Abu Shehadeh: “Whoever wants a Jewish-Arab partnership does not speak this way, period,” he said, calling any legitimacy given to armed struggle or harm to civilians “a red line”.

Adalah disputes the case against Abu Shehadeh. It says the article contains no call for violence and argues that the petitions against the Joint List largely rely on old material or positions previously examined by the courts. It plans to challenge the decisions in the Supreme Court.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, remains eligible to run, despite being the subject of an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and a corruption trial that began in 2020 and remains ongoing. Netanyahu denies the allegations against him.

Cassif, whose disqualification from a previous election was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2019, called Wednesday’s decisions “another nail in the coffin of the remnants of democracy” in Israel. He said he and the Joint List would be in the next Knesset.

Attempts to exclude Arab candidates are not new. Adalah has documented challenges in elections in 2003, 2013, 2015, 2020 and 2022. The Supreme Court has repeatedly reversed committee decisions, but that history offers no guarantee of what it will do this time.

What about the far right?

Petitions which sought to disqualify the two far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, were rejected by the election committee.

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have both advocated the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of the occupied West Bank, and face international sanctions over their actions and rhetoric towards Palestinians.

Attorney General Baharav-Miara, who has repeatedly clashed with Netanyahu’s government, said the bids to bar the far-right parties lacked a legal basis, according to Haaretz. However, for his part, Golan has said he supported disqualifying Ben-Gvir as well.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, remains eligible to run, despite an International Criminal Court arrest warrant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and a corruption trial that began in 2020 and remains ongoing. Netanyahu denies the allegations against him.

Human rights advocate Ubai Al-Aboudi condemned the decision. The committee, he told Al Jazeera, has decided “not to bar Israeli politicians, parties or lists that are openly calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians”.

“It has not even decided to view their statements as extreme.

“This shows that the current Israeli political structure still views Palestinians as a demographic threat, is still vilifying Palestinians.”

What happens now?

About one-fifth of Israel’s population is Palestinian. If the Supreme Court upholds the votes against both Ra’am and the Joint List, voters could still cast ballots for other parties, but neither of the two main Arab-majority lists would be able to contest the election. The court will also decide whether Cassif and Abu Shehadeh can stand.

Al-Aboudi said earlier attempts to bar Arab representatives had been overturned, but this vote went further. “It is the first time that all representation has been barred,” he said, describing it as a sign of “the mentality and extremism of the current Israeli political structure”.

The final decision rests with the Supreme Court. Al-Aboudi said its past rulings offer some grounds for hope, but added that, given the present political atmosphere, it is unclear whether it would overturn “part, all or none” of the committee’s decisions.

A quarter-century after the 'war on terror' began, the American Middle East is over

Hesham Gaafar

24 September 2026

The US-built regional order is not collapsing in a single dramatic moment. It is fading quietly into the background - until one day people wake up to an entirely new reality.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/quarter-century-after-war-terror-american-middle-east-over

Last month, a photographer in Tehran captured a passing scene that seemed unremarkable: people walking past a large anti-American billboard in the city, without so much as glancing up at it. 

The image ran alongside a lengthy essay titled “The End of the American Middle East” by Marc Lynch, a political science professor at George Washington University, in the September/October issue of Foreign Affairs. 

Lynch, who belongs to a critical current within the American academic establishment rather than its fringes, writes that the regional order Washington has sponsored since 1991 has fallen, and that the American-Israeli war with Iran was merely the final bullet in a body that had been bleeding for years.

The question is not whether Lynch is correct - the evidence is difficult to refute - but why it took this long for it to be stated so plainly, in a magazine long seen as a near-official reference point for the American foreign policy establishment. 

What does it mean, for the region’s people before their rulers, that an order presented for decades as inescapable fate is now being declared over?

The order that took shape after the 1991 Gulf War rested on two pillars that appeared contradictory, yet worked in tandem. These included dual military containment of Iran and Iraq through bases stretching from the Gulf to the Eastern Mediterranean, and an unwritten bargain with Arab rulers, trading American security guarantees for silence over domestic repression and erasure of the Palestinian question. 

Entire generations of Arabs lived this as daily reality: military aid to rulers who were never questioned about their prisons, a “peace process” renewed every few years without ever approaching a Palestinian state, and an American shield protecting Israel from accountability at the UN Security Council. 

The arrangement never needed popular legitimacy, because it was never built to answer to anyone at home.

Accountability gap

This absence of accountability, which for decades looked like the order’s strength, ultimately became the point of its collapse. A superpower that grants allies unconditional security guarantees exempts them from the price of their own decisions; those who know someone else will bear the consequences take greater risks.

This is what happened in Yemen, where Riyadh found in American backing cover for a war with no clear horizon for victory, sliding the country into catastrophe without a decision-maker paying a political price. 

It happened more dramatically in Gaza, where unconditional American protection became a de facto mandate for an Israeli campaign that has killed more than 73,000 people, many of them women and children. Various international bodies and experts have described it as a genocide. 

The same Washington that mobilised the world to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty simultaneously defended its ally’s right to expand settlements and raze Gaza with impunity - a double standard that deepened the fractures in the perceived legitimacy of the regional order.

That contradiction cost the American system much of its remaining moral authority in the Global South, while the elite consensus sustaining it at home began to crack, amid unprecedented student protests on American campuses and a sharp generational shift in how Americans view Israel. 

When domestic opinion inside the sponsoring state itself questions the bargain, it is no longer just a matter of image abroad, but the start of a rupture in the consensus that lets the bargain continue.

From the outset, American strategy rested on the assumption that ordinary Arab citizens’ opinions carried no real weight, so long as their rulers stayed cooperative - a deeper flaw than any calculation of immediate interest. 

When the 2011 uprisings erupted, demanding bread and dignity, Washington searched less for ways to support democratic transitions, and more for a formula to preserve the existing structure at the lowest cost - a logic that peaked with the Abraham Accords, a security bargain among ruling elites dressed up as historic peace, pushed through without ever reaching a ballot box. 

An order built on such disregard for public opinion does not need a major crisis to be shaken.

Double shock

What distinguished recent years was a double shock: moral, in the collapse of whatever authority Washington claimed following its position on the Gaza holocaust, and military - more painful still for an establishment that defined its regional influence through deterrence.

Despite its devastating campaign against Hezbollah, Israel failed to secure its northern border. The Houthis imposed an effective naval blockade on Israeli-linked Red Sea shipping, withstanding months of American and British strikes - proof that a non-state actor could disrupt global trade against the most formidable military power in history. 

Iran then launched a direct missile barrage towards Israel, shattering a decades-old red line and forcing the American fleet to intervene, highlighting Israel’s dependence on costly US backing. 

In the 2026 war, Washington proved unable even to protect its Gulf allies. The very things that justified the American base network from Qatar to Bahrain - the capacity to deter, guarantee freedom of navigation, and protect allies without direct war - crumbled at once. 

The question now is no longer whether American influence will contract, but how long before that becomes undeniable to everyone.

Lynch invokes the 1956 Suez crisis, the moment Britain and France lost the capacity to impose their will on the region - though both empires needed decades before full withdrawal.

What makes the current moment different is that regional hedging began before the death certificate was written: when Riyadh and Tehran restored relations in 2023 through Chinese mediation that excluded Washington, it signalled regional powers were willing to resolve disputes through other channels. 

Since then, Gulf states have expanded partnerships with Beijing and Moscow, while some joined Brics - insurance against a day when American guarantees no longer demand exclusive loyalty.

Profiting from chaos

The painful irony is that Israel and Iran, the two actors most capable of shaping a new regional order, share an interest in keeping the region on the edge of instability. 

For Israel, a persistent state of war justifies settlement expansion and postpones any reckoning over the state’s treatment of Palestinians. For Tehran, permanent tension offers a ready-made narrative to justify domestic repression - especially after the war left the regime emboldened, having shown it could close the Strait of Hormuz and strike Washington’s allies. 

Caught between them, Washington has no real tools to restrain either - even as it remains, formally, the region’s largest security guarantor.

The Gulf states, which long wagered that Washington would tip this balance in their favour, now face a painful conclusion: a power that cannot protect its partners from direct attack, nor consult them before a war that reaches them anyway, is no longer the reliable partner the 1991 arrangement was built upon.

The real costs fall not on those who designed the order, but on the peoples never consulted about its shape. Egypt is a stark example: while headlines dwell on missiles and mediation, Cairo bears the direct economic costs of a war it did not choose - fuel and food prices spiking, and Suez Canal revenue collapsing, atop an already deepening financial crisis. These daily bills deserve counting, alongside maps of influence and balances of power.

Lynch closes with a reformist appeal: abandoning military intervention as a first resort, engaging Iran diplomatically instead of isolating it, tying aid to human-rights standards, and accepting a multipolar region that Washington no longer solely defines. This is reasonable in theory, but he never clearly answers who possesses the will to carry it out. 

By his own diagnosis, the current administration is not equipped for a coherent approach of any kind, let alone one requiring real concessions on tools Washington has long treated as axiomatic to its influence. History teaches that institutions abandon entrenched habits only once the costs of continuing exceed the costs of change - which is precisely what appears to be happening now, albeit too slowly for those living through this moment to notice.

This returns us to the image of people walking past that Tehran billboard without a glance - an exact summary of what is happening more broadly. 

The old order is not collapsing in one dramatic moment for all to witness; it is fading slowly into the everyday scenery, until people wake up one morning to a wholly different reality, no longer remembering quite when it began.

Trump rejects Iran ceasefire bid, plans renewed bombing after midterms: Report

Iranian officials offered a ceasefire and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz on the sidelines of the UNGA, based on the previous MoU signed by Washington and Tehran in June

News Desk

SEP 26, 2026

https://thecradle.co/articles/trump-rejects-iran-ceasefire-bid-plans-renewed-bombing-after-midterms-report

US President Donald Trump has rejected an Iranian proposal for a seven-day ceasefire and intends to resume bombing the Islamic Republic after upcoming midterm elections, the Wall Street Journal reported on 26 September, citing US officials.

Tehran relayed a proposal to Washington, offering to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and resume nuclear talks in exchange for a cessation of hostilities and the US lifting its naval blockade of Iranian ports.

Iranian diplomats conveyed the offer during meetings on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York earlier this week.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi ⁠discussed the offer while speaking with reporters at the UN on Friday.

"If the necessary conditions are met, the strait can be reopened, a normal maritime passage restored within seven days. The choice ‌now ⁠rests with the United States," he said.

"The actions that the United States should take ⁠are not new. They are all already in the MoU," signed between Washington and Tehran in June, he ⁠added.

However, Trump has rejected the plan and expressed skepticism regarding Tehran's ability to meet his demands, including the "complete dismantling" of its nuclear program as a condition for any agreement.

US officials believe their naval blockade is putting intense pressure on the Iranian economy.

At the same time, Iran's seven-month closure of the Strait of Hormuz in response to the US war has disrupted oil flows, putting severe pressure on Washington's Gulf allies, who rely on oil exports.

The strait’s closure has also sent energy prices soaring worldwide, putting pressure on the global economy.

Trump is seeking to reduce oil and fuel prices ahead of the midterm elections in November to avoid harming the chances of his party.

Once the elections have passed, there will be less need to appease US voters, thereby giving Trump more freedom of action to attack Iran again.

The US last bombed Iran in early September, including attacking a wedding party, killing five and wounding dozens. Iran responded with strikes on US bases in the region.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian discussed a possible ceasefire in an interview with CBS News on the sidelines of the UNGA.

Pezeshkian said the ceasefire would take effect immediately if Washington accepted it, based on the MoU it previously signed in Islamabad.

"We will negotiate with all our heart, but we do not accept bullying and coercion, and we will not accept being forced into submission," the Iranian president said.

At the same time, he expressed distrust in the US, citing its failure to live up to its previous commitments under the MoU and under a 2015 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

In 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal, which provided Iran relief from US sanctions in exchange for curbs on Iran's nuclear program.

Pezeshkian affirmed that Iran does not seek nuclear weapons and is prepared to address the issue within the framework of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and other international arrangements.

He also cited US military attacks on Iran, including the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, during periods of negotiations as a source of Iranian mistrust.

"You put yourselves in our position. If someone comes and kills your leader and then does not honor the agreement you reached, what would your reaction be?"

The Iranian president also said Tehran's new plan to reopen the strategic Strait of Hormuz was coordinated with the new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the slain Iranian leader's son.

New York City mayor slams 'lies' in Netanyahu's UN speech, cites ICC warrant for his arrest

Israeli Premier Netanyahu 'used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians,' says Zohran Mamdani

Diyar Güldoğan

24 September 2026

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/new-york-city-mayor-slams-lies-in-netanyahus-un-speech-cites-icc-warrant-for-his-arrest/4068590

WASHINGTON DC

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Thursday hit back at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's criticisms in his UN General Assembly address, pointing to the international warrant seeking the visiting prime minister’s arrest.

Netanyahu’s “lies” in his UN address cannot erase the warrant for genocidal war crimes issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), said the mayor.

“As he has done time and again, Prime Minister Netanyahu used his speech to repeat baseless lies meant to sanitize his genocide of Palestinians," Mamdani said in a statement, local media reported.

"Yet no lie can change the fact that he remains the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

In November 2024 the ICC, based in The Hague, issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip.

This July, Mamdani urged US federal authorities to enforce the ICC arrest warrant for Netanyahu, acknowledging that New York City authorities lack the legal power to carry it out.

US Democrats to propose sanctions targeting Israel’s E1 settlement project

Senator Chris Coons said the US ‘must send a strong message’ condemning the behavior of ‘violent extremist settlers’

News Desk

SEP 23, 2026

https://thecradle.co/articles/us-democrats-to-propose-sanctions-targeting-israels-e1-settlement-project

A group of Democratic senators will put forward legislation on 23 September calling for US sanctions on individuals and organizations facilitating Israel’s ongoing, illegal E1 settlement project in the occupied West Bank. 

The bill would place sanctions on any company, person, or entity responsible for or complicit in the construction of illegal settlements linked to the E1 project.

This would also include the submission of tenders linked to the E1, according to the legislation.

Senators Chris Coons ​of Delaware, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Ruben Gallego of Arizona are the main sponsors of this bill.

“As Palestinian civilians face a campaign of ​devastation and fear from violent extremist settlers, the US must send a strong message that this behavior is unacceptable and that it remains committed to freedom, security, prosperity and self-determination for all Israelis and Palestinians,” said Coons. 

The Democratic Party currently holds 47 seats in the Senate, which is made up of 100 members. Recent polls indicate they could secure majorities in midterm elections, planned for November.

The bill coincides with a rapid advancement of the Israeli settlement project, which was paused for years due to international opposition but has now been revived. 

Israel recently tripled the number of housing units it will begin constructing in the illegal E1 settlement.

According to an Israeli rights group, Tel Aviv has added ⁠2,167 additional housing units ‌to its tender for the E1 settlement expansion plan, after an initial tender was issued in August to build 1,234 units in the Jewish settlement.

This brings the total number of illegal housing units to 3,401 units.

The revival of the E1 project came last year. In August 2025, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the plan, approving construction of housing units and vowing at the time to “bury the idea” of a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu signed the plan back into motion in September last year. 

The E1 settlement project – which aims to link occupied East Jerusalem, viewed as integral to any future Palestinian state, to the illegal Maale Adumim settlement – had been frozen for decades as a result of strong opposition from the international community. 

The advancement of the plan comes as settler terror attacks and illegal land grabs are at an all-time high in the occupied West Bank. 

The Houthis could tip the Iran war in Tehran's favor

Rapid changes on the ground in Yemen are a serious setback for Washington's military effort

Paul R. Pillar

Sep 18, 2026

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/iran-war-houthis/

The conflict between the United States and Iran has become a contest in enduring economic pain and the political consequences that may flow from that pain. This has characterized the conflict since the breakdown of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in June that had raised brief hopes that the war would end. Each side appears confident that it can outlast the other in the pain-endurance contest.

Fundamental change of this situation is unlikely anytime soon despite some indications Iran is considering military escalation as a possible way to break the stalemate. The Trump administration, after the failure of other options, appears to be hoping that the Iranian regime either will be toppled by an economically strained Iranian public or will somehow give up and make concessions.

One of the more significant recent developments with potential for changing this stalemate, however, is renewed military action by the Houthi regime in Yemen, which includes interdicting shipping traversing the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The Houthis constitute a regime and not just a militia or opposition group. They captured the Yemeni capital of Sanaa in 2014, and for years have been the governing authority over territory that includes about two-thirds of the Yemeni population. Their principal domestic opponent, although commonly labeled the “internationally recognized Yemeni government,” is a weak client of Saudi Arabia, where its leaders spend most of their time.

Earlier Houthi interference with Red Sea shipping was aimed at Israel and intended as a gesture of solidarity with the mauled Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip. This time, the Houthis’ grievance is with Saudi Arabia, and they have declared a blockade on Saudi shipping.

The background to current Yemeni-Saudi strife is a multi-year Saudi aerial assault on Yemen that turned the country into a humanitarian disaster zone before ending with a truce in 2022. The truce mostly held until this year. But the past month has seen rapidly escalating exchanges of fire. Among other recent attacks across the Saudi-Yemeni border, the Saudis say the Houthis sent a drone over Mecca, and the Houthis claim to have shot down a Saudi fighter jet over Yemeni territory.

The Houthis began attacking Saudi ships in the Red Sea last month, and in the past two weeks their gains on the ground against their opponents within Yemen have increased their ability to conduct more such maritime attacks. They captured the port of Mokha (origin of the coffee-and-chocolate drink) and Perim Island, which is in the middle of Bab el-Mandeb. These conquests provide bases for further interdiction of shipping in, and just north of, the strait.

Meanwhile, an attack, evidently by militia in Iraq, on the oil pipeline spanning the Saudi peninsula has forced the Saudis to shut the line down for now. The main direct effect of these recent events is a further reduction in Saudi oil exports. The Saudis had been the world’s biggest oil exporter before the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran suddenly dropped Saudi exports to a 13-year low of 3.2 million barrels per day (bpd). The Saudis have relied heavily on the pipeline to the Red Sea as an alternative to its interrupted exports through the Strait of Hormuz. About 4 million bpd—representing four percent of total worldwide oil consumption—was going through the pipeline at one point during the war, and the Saudi oil company Aramco says improvements had increased its capacity to 7 million bpd.

The Saudis hope to repair the damage and put the pipeline back in operation soon, but the prospect of the Houthis gunning for tankers carrying Saudi oil through Bab el-Mandeb means their problem of finding a secure export route will persist. The Saudis could send tankers north toward the Mediterranean Sea, with the oil traversing either the Suez Canal or a pipeline in Egypt, but this is the wrong direction to reach most of Saudi Arabia’s customers, which are in Asia.

Markets have taken note of this predicament. Brent crude oil futures contracts surged over $100 per barrel and have lingered there.

A major indirect effect of these events is to tip the balance in the U.S-Iranian endurance contest more in favor of Iran and against the United States. The principal pain mechanism affecting the Trump administration is the higher oil price, which means higher gasoline and diesel fuel prices, more overall inflation, and more dissatisfaction among American voters. Iranians certainly have been suffering more pain, economic and physical, than Americans have, but for Iran the stakes also are higher. For the regime in Tehran, the stakes involve survival, whereas the United States and Trump administration have nothing remotely comparable at stake.

Further damage to the global economy—with effects felt within the United States—from the Houthis’ activity may involve disruption of shipping other than oil. Nine percent of worldwide maritime shipping traverses the Suez Canal, Red Sea, and Bab-el-Mandeb. Even though the Houthis say they are aiming their fire only at Saudi Arabia, the nervousness of shipping companies and insurers about sailing through a war zone may curtail this activity, as it has with the Strait of Hormuz.

With the prospect of Tehran crying “uncle” still as dim as ever, any end to the U.S.-Iran war would require a negotiated agreement. Like the earlier MoU, it would almost certainly have to be a ceasefire and skeletal framework that would punt difficult issues to later negotiations. Just as navigation through the Strait of Hormuz was part of the MoU—with disagreement over interpretation of that clause being central to the later breakdown of the ceasefire—navigation through Bab el-Mandeb would likely need to be addressed in any new ceasefire agreement.

Although Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea are outside the main theater of the war in the Persian Gulf, presumably the U.S. side would insist that this subject be addressed, just as Iran insisted that the earlier ceasefire extend to Israel’s attacks in Lebanon. This parallel goes farther, in ways that underscore a difficulty in negotiating a future ceasefire. The United States does not control Israel’s actions, and Iran does not control the Houthi regime’s actions. The label of “Iranian proxy” that usually is applied to that regime is a misnomer. The Houthis have acted against Iranian advice—most significantly in their capture of Sanaa—and development of their ability to make their own weapons makes them less dependent on Iran’s support. The Houthis sympathize with their Iranian allies, but their chief concerns are closer to home and mostly involve their confrontation with the Saudis.

The United States does not control Saudi actions, either, and the kingdom, like Israel, could become a spoiler of any U.S.-Iranian peace. The parallel ends regarding motivation, however. Although the Israeli government opposes any peace agreement with Iran, the Saudis presumably would welcome an end to the war that has been the source of so many of their current economic and security problems. But with no such end in sight, with a financial crisis looming from the sharp curtailment of Saudi oil exports, and with the Trump administration declining so far to take new action against the Houthis, the Saudis may decide they need to escalate further against the Houthis, making Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea even more of war zone than before.

This scenario, besides complicating any diplomacy aimed at ending the U.S.-Iranian war, would further demonstrate the prescience of those who warned that a U.S. military attack on Iran would spread into a wider Middle East conflagration. The Iran war has triggered new violent phases of old conflicts such as Israel-Lebanon and Yemen-Saudi Arabia, which then escalate further according to their own destructive logic.