If Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted defeat in June 2021, finally yielding the stage to a coalition of his opponents, he could have retired at the age of 71 with a decent claim to having been one of Israel’s more successful prime ministers.

He had already surpassed the time in office of Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion, becoming the country’s longest-serving prime minister in 2019. His second stretch in office, from 2009 to 2021, coincided with perhaps the best 12 years Israel had known since its founding in 1948. The country enjoyed relative security, with no major wars or prolonged Intifadas. The period was one of uninterrupted economic growth and prosperity. Thanks to its early adoption of widespread vaccination, Israel was one of the first countries in the world to emerge from the coronavirus pandemic. And toward the end of that span came three agreements establishing diplomatic relations with Arab countries; more were likely on the way.

Twelve years of Netanyahu’s leadership had seemingly made Israel more secure and prosperous, with deep trade and defense ties across the world. But this wasn’t enough to win him another term. A majority of Israelis had tired of him, and he had been tainted by charges of bribery and fraud in his dealings with billionaires and press barons. In the space of 24 months, Israel held four elections ending in stalemate, with neither Netanyahu nor his rivals winning a majority. Finally, an unlikely alliance of right-wing, centrist, left-wing, and Islamist parties managed to band together and replace him with his former aide Naftali Bennett in June 2021.

[Read: Netanyahu should quit. The U.S. can help with that.]

At that point, Netanyahu could have sealed his legacy. A plea bargain on offer from the attorney general would have ended his corruption trial with a conviction on reduced charges and no jail time. He would have had to leave politics, probably for good. Over the course of four decades in public life, including 15 years as prime minister and 22 as the Likud party’s leader, he had already left an indelible mark on Israel, dominating the second half of its history. But he couldn’t bear the thought of giving up power.

Within 18 months, he was back as prime minister for the third time. The unwieldy coalition that replaced him had imploded, and this time around, Netanyahu’s camp of far-right and religious parties ran a disciplined campaign, exploiting the weaknesses of their divided rivals to emerge with a small parliamentary majority, despite still being virtually tied in the vote count.

Nine months later, Netanyahu, the man who promised, above everything else, to deliver security for Israel’s citizens, presided over the darkest day in his country’s existence. A total breakdown of the Israeli military and intelligence structure allowed Hamas to breach Israel’s border and embark on a rampage of murder, kidnapping, and rape, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and taking more than 250 hostage. The calamities of that day, the failures of leadership leading up to it, and the traumas it caused will haunt Israel for generations. Even leaving completely aside the war he has prosecuted since that day and its yet-unknown end, October 7 means that Netanyahu will always be remembered as Israel’s worst-ever leader.

How does one measure a prime minister?

There is no broadly accepted ranking of the 13 men and one woman who have led Israel, but most lists would feature David Ben-Gurion at the top. Not only was he the George Washington of the Jewish state, proclaiming its independence just three years after a third of the Jewish people had been exterminated in the Holocaust, but his administration established many of the institutions and policies that define Israel to this day. Other favorites include Levi Eshkol, for his shrewd and prudent leadership in the tense weeks before the Six Day War, and Menachem Begin, for achieving the country’s first peace agreement with an Arab nation, Egypt.

All three of these men had mixed records and detractors, of course. Ben-Gurion had autocratic tendencies and was consumed by party infighting during his later years in office. After the Six Day War, Eshkol failed to deliver a coherent plan for what Israel should do with the new territories it occupied and the Palestinians who have remained under its rule ever since. In Begin’s second term, Israel entered a disastrous war in Lebanon, and his government nearly tanked the economy. But in most Israelis’ minds, these leaders’ positive legacies outweigh the negatives.

Who are the “worst prime ministers”? Until now, most Israelis regarded Golda Meir as the top candidate for that dismal title. The intelligence failure leading to the Yom Kippur War was on her watch. Before the war, she rejected Egyptian overtures toward peace (though some Israeli historians have recently argued that these were less than sincere). And when war was clearly imminent, her administration refrained from launching preemptive attacks that could have saved the lives of hundreds of soldiers.

[Read: The end of Netanyahu]

Other “worst” candidates have included Ehud Olmert, for launching the second Lebanon war and becoming Israel’s first former prime minister to go to prison for corruption; Yitzhak Shamir, for kiboshing an agreement with Jordan’s King Hussein that many believe could have been a significant step toward resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict; and Ehud Barak, for spectacularly failing to fulfill his extravagant promises to bring peace with both the Palestinians and Syria.

But Benjamin Netanyahu now surpasses these contenders by orders of magnitude. He has brought far-right extremists into the mainstream of government and made himself, and the country, beholden to them. His corruption is flamboyant. And he has made terrible security decisions that brought existential danger to the country he pledged to lead and protect. Above all, his selfishness is without parallel: He has put his own interests ahead of Israel’s at every turn.

Netanyahu has the distinction of being the only Israeli prime minister to make a once reviled movement on the right fringe of the country’s politics into a government stakeholder.

Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of a Jewish-supremacist group called Kach, won a lone seat in the Knesset in 1984. He openly called for replacing Israeli democracy with a constitution based on the laws of the Torah and for denying Israel’s Arab citizens equal rights. During Kahane’s single legislative term, the entire Israeli political establishment shunned him. When he got up to speak in the Knesset, all of its members would leave the plenum.

In 1985, Likud joined other parties in changing election law so that those who denied Israel’s democratic identity, denied its Jewish identity, or incited racism could be barred from running for office. Under this provision, Kach was never allowed to compete in another election. Kahane was assassinated in New York in 1990. Four years later, a member of his movement killed 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron, and the Israeli government proscribed Kach as a terror organization and forced it to disband.

But the Kahanists didn’t go away. With each Israeli election, they tried to rename their movement and adjust its platform to conform with electoral law. They remained ostracized. Then, in 2019, Netanyahu saw a roadblock on his path to reelection that they could help him get around.

Several Israeli parties had pledged not to serve in a government led by an indicted prime minister—quite possibly, enough of them to shut Netanyahu out of power. To prevent that from happening, Netanyahu needed to eke out every possible right-wing and religious vote for his potential coalition. The polls were predicting that the latest Kahanist iteration, the Jewish Power party, which is led by the thuggish but media-savvy Itamar Ben-Gvir, would receive only about 10,000 votes, well below the threshold needed to make the party a player on its own; but Netanyahu believed that if he could persuade the Kahanists and other small right-wing parties to merge their candidates’ lists into a joint slate, together they could win a seat or two for his potential coalition—just what he needed for a majority.

Netanyahu began pressuring the leaders of the small right-wing parties to merge their lists. At first the larger of these were outraged. Netanyahu was meddling in their affairs and, worse, trying to coerce them to accept the Kahanist outcasts. Gradually, he wore down their resistance—employing rabbis to persuade politicians, orchestrating media campaigns in the nationalist press, and promising central roles in future administrations. Media figures close to Netanyahu accused Bezalel Smotrich, a fundamentalist settler and the new leader of the religious Zionist party, of “endangering” the nation by making it easier for the hated left to win the election. Soon enough, Smotrich’s old-school national-religious party merged not only with Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power but with an even more obscure, proudly homophobic party led by Avi Maoz.

Netanyahu did worry a bit about the optics. Throughout five stalemated election campaigns from 2019 to 2022, Likud coordinated closely with Jewish Power, but Netanyahu refused to be seen in public with Ben-Gvir. During the 2022 campaign, at a religious festival, he even waited backstage for Ben-Gvir to leave the premises before going up to make his speech.

Two weeks later, there was no longer any need to keep up the act. Netanyahu’s strategy succeeded: His coalition, merged into four lists, edged out its squabbling opponents with 64 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

Netanyahu finally had the “right-wing in full” government he had often promised. But before he could return to the prime minister’s office, his allies demanded a division of the spoils. The ministries with the most influence on Israelis’ daily lives—health, housing, social services, and the interior—went to the ultra-Orthodox parties. Smotrich became finance minister; Maoz was appointed deputy minister in charge of a new “Agency for Jewish Identity,” with power to intervene in educational programs. And Ben-Gvir, the subject of numerous police investigations for violence and incitement over a period of three decades, was put in charge of a newly titled “Ministry of National Security,” with authority over Israel’s police and prison services.

As Netanyahu signed away power to the Kahanists, he told the international news media that he wasn’t forming a far-right government. The Kahanists were joining his government. He would be in control. But Netanyahu hadn’t just given Israel’s most extreme racists unprecedented power and legitimacy. He’d also insinuated them into his own formerly mainstream party: By March 2024, Likud’s candidates for local elections in a handful of towns had merged their slates with those of Jewish Power.

Likud long prided itself on combining staunch Jewish nationalism, even militarism, with a commitment to liberal democracy. But a more radical stream within the party eschewed those liberal values and championed chauvinistic and autocratic positions. For much of the past century, the liberal wing was dominant and provided most of the party’s leadership. Netanyahu himself espoused the values of the liberal wing—until he fell out with all the main liberal figures. By 2019, none was left to oppose the alliance with Ben-Gvir’s Kahanists.

Now more than a third of Likud’s representatives were religious, and those who weren’t preferred to call themselves “traditional” rather than secular. They didn’t object to cooperating with the Kahanists; indeed, many had already worked with them in the past. In fact, many Likud Knesset members by that point were indistinguishable from the Jewish Power ones. Israel’s worst prime minister didn’t just form an alliance of convenience with the country’s most irresponsible extremists; he made them integral to his party and the running of the state.

That Netanyahu is personally corrupt is not altogether novel in the history of the Israeli prime ministership. What makes him worse than others is his open contempt for the rule of law.

By 2018, Netanyahu was the subject of four simultaneous corruption investigations that had been in motion for more than a year. In one, known as Case 4000, Netanyahu stood accused of promising regulatory favors to the owner of Israel’s largest telecom corporation in return for favorable coverage on a popular news site. Three of the prime minister’s closest advisers had agreed to testify against him.

Investigations of prime ministers are not rare in Israel. Netanyahu was the subject of one during his first term. The three prime ministers who served in the decade between his first and second terms—Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert—had all been investigated as well. Only in Olmert’s case did police deem the evidence sufficient to mount a prosecution. At the time, in 2008, Netanyahu was the leader of the opposition.

“We’re talking about a prime minister who is up to his neck in investigations and has no public or moral mandate to make fateful decisions for Israel,” Netanyahu said of Olmert. “There is a concern, I have to say real, not without basis, that he will make decisions based on his personal interest of political survival and not on the national interest.”

[Graeme Wood: Why the most hated man in Israel might stay in power]

Ten years later, Netanyahu would be the one snared in multiple investigations. Then he no longer spoke of corruption in high office but of a “witch hunt,” orchestrated by rogue police commanders and left-wing state prosecutors, and egged on by a hostile news media, all with the aim of toppling a right-wing leader.

Netanyahu was determined to politicize the legal procedure and pit his supporters against Israel’s law-enforcement agencies and judiciary. Never mind that the two previous prime ministers who had resigned because of corruption charges were from the center left. Nor did it matter that he had appointed the police commissioner and attorney general himself; both were deeply religious men with impeccable nationalist backgrounds, but he tarred them as perfidious tools of leftist conspiracy.

Rather than contemplate resignation, on May 24, 2020, Netanyahu became the first sitting Israeli prime minister to go on trial. He has denied all wrongdoing (the trial is still under way). In a courthouse corridor before one session, he gave a 15-minute televised speech accusing the legal establishment of “trying to topple me and the right-wing government. For over a decade, the left wing have failed to do this at the ballot box, and in recent years have come up with a new idea. Elements in the police and prosecutor’s office have joined left-wing journalists to concoct delusional charges.”

The law didn’t require Netanyahu to resign while fighting the charges against him in court. But doing so had seemed logical to his predecessors under similar circumstances—and to Israel’s lawmakers, who had never envisaged that a prime minister would so brazenly challenge the justice system, which he had a duty to uphold. For Netanyahu, however, remaining in power was an end in itself, one more important than preserving Israel’s most crucial institutions, to say nothing of Israelis’ trust in them.

Netanyahu placed extremists in positions of power, undermined confidence in the rule of law, and sacrificed principle to power. Little wonder, then, that last summer, tensions over the role of Israel’s judiciary became unmanageable. The crisis underlined all of these reasons that Netanyahu should go down as Israel’s worst prime minister.

For 34 of the past 47 years, Israel’s prime ministers have come from the Likud party. And yet many on the right still grumble that “Likud doesn’t know how to rule” and “you vote right and get left.” Likudniks complain about the lingering power of “the elites,” a left-wing minority that loses at the ballot box but still controls the civil service, the upper echelons of the security establishment, the universities, and the media. A growing anti-judicial wing within Likud demands constitutional change and a clamping-down on the supreme court’s “judicial activism.”

Netanyahu had once minimized these complaints, but his stance on the judiciary changed after he was indicted in 2019. Indeed, at the start of his current term, Likud’s partners demanded commitments to constitutional change, which they received. The ultra-Orthodox parties were anxious to pass a law exempting religious seminary students from military service. Such exemptions had already fallen afoul of the supreme court’s equality standards, so the religious parties wanted the law to include a “court bypass.” Netanyahu acceded to this. To pass the legislation in the Knesset, he appointed Simcha Rothman, a staunch critic of the court, as the chair of the Knesset’s Constitution Committee.

He also appointed Yariv Levin, another fierce critic of the court, as justice minister. Just six days after the new government was sworn in, Levin rolled out a “judicial reform” plan, prepared by a conservative think tank, that called for drastically limiting the court’s powers to review legislation and gave politicians control over the appointment of new justices.

Within days, an extremely efficient counter-campaign pointed out the dangers the plan posed, not just to Israel’s fragile and limited democracy, but to its economy and security. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested in the streets. Likud began to drop in the polls, and Netanyahu privately urged the leaders of the coalition parties to delay the vote. They refused to back down, and Levin threatened to resign over any delay.

Netanyahu’s motives, unlike those of his partners, were not ideological. His objective was political survival. He needed to keep his hard-won majority intact and the judges off-balance. But the protests were unrelenting. Netanyahu’s independent-minded defense minister, Yoav Gallant, pointed to the controversy’s dire implications for the Israel Defense Forces as hundreds of volunteer reserve officers threatened to suspend their service rather than “serve a dictatorship.”

Netanyahu wasn’t sure he wanted to go through with the judicial coup, but the idea of one of Likud’s senior ministers breaking ranks in public was unthinkable. On March 25 of last year, Gallant made a public statement that the constitutional legislation was a “clear and major threat to the security of Israel” and he would not be voting for it. The next evening, Netanyahu announced that he was firing Gallant.

[Anne Applebaum: Netanyahu’s attack on democracy left Israel unprepared]

In Jerusalem, protesters besieged Netanyahu’s home. In Tel Aviv, they blocked main highways. The next morning, the trade unions announced a general strike, and by that evening, Netanyahu backed down, announcing that he was suspending the legislation and would hold talks with the opposition on finding compromises. Gallant kept his post. The talks collapsed, protests started up again, and Netanyahu once again refused to listen to the warnings coming from the security establishment—not only of anger within the IDF, but that Israel’s enemies were planning to take advantage of the country’s disunity to launch an attack.

The debate over judicial reform pitted two visions of Israel against each other. On one side was a liberal and secular Israel that relied on the supreme court to defend its democratic values; on the other, a religious and conservative Israel that feared that unelected judges would impose incompatible ideas on their Jewish values.

Netanyahu’s government made no attempt to reconcile these two visions. The prime minister had spent too many years, and all those toxic electoral campaigns, exploiting and deepening the rift between them. Even when he belatedly and halfheartedly tried to rein in the radical and fundamentalist demons he had ridden back into office, he found that he could no longer control them.

Whether Netanyahu really meant to eviscerate Israel’s supreme court as part of a plot to weaken the judiciary and intimidate the judges in his own case, or whether he had no choice in the matter and was simply a hostage of his own coalition, is immaterial. What matters is that he appointed Levin as justice minister and permitted the crisis to happen. Ultimately, and despite his professed belief in liberal democracy, Netanyahu allowed Levin and his coalition partners to convince him that they were doing the right thing—because whatever kept him in office was right for Israel. Democracy would remain strong because he would remain in charge.

Trying to diminish the powers of the supreme court isn’t what makes Netanyahu Israel’s worst prime minister. The judicial reform failed anyway. Only one of its elements got through the Knesset before the war with Hamas began, and the court struck it down as unconstitutional six months later. The justices’ ruling to preserve their powers, despite the Knesset’s voting to limit them, could have caused a constitutional crisis if it had happened in peacetime. But by then Israel was facing a much bigger crisis.

Given Israel’s history, the ultimate yardstick of its leaders’ success is the security they deliver for their fellow citizens. In 2017, as I was finishing my unauthorized biography of Netanyahu, I commissioned a data analyst to calculate the average annual casualty rate (Israeli civilians and soldiers) of each prime minister since 1948. The results confirmed what I had already assumed. In the 11 years that Netanyahu had by then been prime minister, the average annual number of Israelis killed in war and terror attacks was lower, by a considerable margin, than under any previous prime minister.

My book on Netanyahu was not admiring. But I felt that it was only fair to include that data point in his favor in the epilogue and the very last footnote. Likud went on to use it in its 2019 campaigns without attributing the source.

The numbers were hard to argue with. Netanyahu was a hard-line prime minister who had done everything in his power to derail the Oslo peace process and prevent any move toward compromise with the Palestinians. Throughout much of his career, he encouraged military action by the West, first against Iraq after 9/11, and then against Iran. But in his years as prime minister, he balked at initiating or being dragged into wars of his own. His risk aversion and preference for covert operations or air strikes rather than ground operations had, in his first two stretches in power, from 1996 to 1999 and 2009 to 2021, kept Israelis relatively safe.

Netanyahu supporters on the right could also argue, on basis of the numbers, that those who brought bloodshed upon Israel, in the form of Palestinian suicide bombings and rocket attacks, were actually Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the architects of the Oslo Accords; Ehud Barak, with his rash attempts to bring peace; and Ariel Sharon, who withdrew Israeli soldiers and settlers unilaterally from Gaza in 2005, creating the conditions for Hamas’s electoral victory there the following year. That argument no longer holds.

If future biographers of Israeli prime ministers undertake a similar analysis, Netanyahu will no longer be able to claim the lowest casualty rate. His 16th year in office, 2023, was the third-bloodiest in Israel’s history, surpassed only by 1948 and 1973, Israel’s first year of independence and the year of the Yom Kippur War, respectively.

[Read: This war isn’t like Israel’s earlier wars]

The first nine months of 2023 had already seen a rise in deadly violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as terrorist attacks within Israel’s borders. Then came the Hamas attack on October 7, in which at least 1,145 Israelis were massacred and 253 kidnapped and taken to Gaza. More than 30 hostages are now confirmed dead.

No matter how the war in Gaza ends, what happens in its aftermath, or when Netanyahu’s term finally ends, the prime minister will forever be associated above all with that day and the disastrous war that followed. He will go down as the worst prime minister because he has been catastrophic for Israeli security.

To understand how Netanyahu so drastically failed Israel’s security requires going back at least to 2015, the year his long-term strategic bungling of the Iranian threat came into view. His mishandling didn’t happen in isolation; it is also related to the deprioritization of other threats, including the catastrophe that materialized on October 7.

Netanyahu flew to Washington, D.C., in 2015 to implore U.S. lawmakers to obstruct President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Many view this gambit as extraordinarily damaging to Israel’s most crucial alliance—the relationship with the United States is the very bulwark of its security. Perhaps so; but the stunt didn’t make subsequent U.S. administrations less supportive of Israel. Even Obama would still go on to sign the largest 10-year package of military aid to Israel the year after Netanyahu’s speech. Rather, the damage Netanyahu caused by presuming too much of the United States wasn’t to the relationship, but to Israel itself.

Netanyahu’s strategy regarding Iran was based on his assumption that America would one day launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear program. We know this from his 2022 book, Bibi: My Story, in which he admits to arguing repeatedly with Obama “for an American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Senior Israeli officials have confirmed that he expected Donald Trump to launch such a strike as well. In fact, Netanyahu was so sure that Trump, unlike Obama, would give the order that he had no strategy in place for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program when Trump decided, at Netanyahu’s own urging, to withdraw from the Iran deal in May 2018.

Israel’s military and intelligence chiefs had been far from enamored with the Iran deal, but they’d seized the opportunity it presented to divert some of the intelligence resources that had been focused on Iran’s nuclear program to other threats, particularly Tehran’s network of proxies across the region. They were caught by surprise when the Trump administration ditched the Iran deal (Netanyahu knew it was coming but didn’t inform them). This unilateral withdrawal effectively removed the limitations on Iran’s nuclear development and required an abrupt reversal of Israeli priorities.

Senior Israeli officials I spoke with had to tread a wary path here. Those who were still in active service couldn’t challenge the prime minister’s strategy directly. But in private some were scathing about the lack of a coherent strategy on Iran. “It takes years to build intelligence capabilities. You can’t just change target priorities overnight,” one told me.

[Read: A shocked and frazzled collective mind]

The result was a dissipation of Israeli efforts to stop Iran—which is committed to the destruction of Israel. Iran sped further than ever down the path of uranium enrichment, and its proxies, including the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border, grew ever more powerful.

In the months leading up to October 7, Israel’s intelligence community repeatedly warned Netanyahu that Iran and its proxies were plotting a major attack within Israel, though few envisaged something on the scale of October 7. By the fall of 2023, motives were legion: fear that an imminent Israeli diplomatic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia could change the geopolitics of the region; threats that Ben-Gvir would allow Jews greater access to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and worsen conditions for Palestinian prisoners; rumors that the deepening tensions within Israeli society would render any response to an attack slow and disjointed.

Netanyahu chose to ignore the warnings. The senior officers and intelligence chiefs who issued them were, to his mind, conspiring with the law-enforcement agencies and legal establishment that had put him on trial and were trying to obstruct his government’s legislation. None of them had his experience and knowledge of the real threats facing Israel. Hadn’t he been right in the past when he’d refused to listen to leftist officials and so-called experts?

Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 was the result of a colossal failure at all levels of Israel’s security and intelligence community. They had all seen the warning signals but continued to believe that the main threat came from Hezbollah, the larger and far better-equipped and trained enemy to the north. Israel’s security establishment believed that Hamas was isolated in Gaza, and that it and the other Palestinian organizations had been effectively deterred from attacking Israel.

Netanyahu was the originator of this assumption, and its biggest proponent. He believed that keeping Hamas in power in Gaza, as it had been for nearly two years when he returned to office in 2009, was in Israel’s interest. Periodic rocket attacks on Israeli communities in the south were a price worth paying to keep the Palestinian movement split between the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank enclaves and Hamas in Gaza. Such division would push the troublesome two-state solution off the global agenda and allow Israel to focus on regional alliances with like-minded Arab autocracies that also feared Iran. The Palestinian issue would sink into irrelevance.

Netanyahu’s disastrous strategy regarding Gaza and Hamas is part of what makes him Israel’s worst prime minister, but it’s not the only factor. Previous Israeli prime ministers, too, blundered into bloody wars on the basis of misguided strategies and faulty advice from their military and intelligence advisers.

Netanyahu stands out from them for his refusal to accept responsibility, and for his political machinations and smear campaigns since October 7. He blames IDF generals and nourishes the conspiracy theory that they, in alliance with the protest movement, somehow allowed October 7 to happen.

[Hillary Rodham Clinton: Hamas must go]

Netanyahu believes that he is the ultimate victim of that tragic day. Convinced by his own campaign slogans, he argues that he is the only one who can deliver Israel from this valley of shadows to the sunlit uplands of “total victory.” He refuses to consider any advice about ending the war and continues to prioritize preserving his coalition, because he appears incapable of distinguishing between his own fate, now tainted by tragic failure, and that of Israel.

Many around the world assume that Israel’s war with Hamas has proceeded according to some plan of Netanyahu’s. This is a mistake. Netanyahu has the last word as prime minister and head of the emergency war cabinet, but he has used his power mainly to prevaricate, procrastinate, and obstruct. He delayed the initial ground offensive into Gaza, hesitated for weeks over the first truce and hostage-release agreement in November, and is now doing the same over another such deal with Hamas. For the past six months, he has prevented any meaningful cabinet discussion of Israel’s strategic goals. He has rejected the proposals of his own security establishment and the Biden administration. He presented vague principles for “the day after Hamas” to the cabinet only in late February, and they have yet to be debated.

However one views the war in Gaza—as a justified war of defense in which Hamas is responsible for the civilian casualties it has cynically hidden behind, or as an intentional genocide of the Palestinian people, or as anything in between—none of it is Netanyahu’s plan. That’s because Netanyahu has no plan for Gaza, only one for remaining in power. His obstructionism, his showdowns with generals, his confrontations with the Biden administration—all are focused on that end, which means preserving his far-right coalition and playing to his hard-core nationalist base.

Meanwhile, he’s doing what he has always done: wearing down and discrediting his political opponents in the hope of proving to an exhausted and traumatized public that he’s the only alternative. So far, he’s failing. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of Israelis want him gone. But Netanyahu is fending off calls to hold an early election until he believes he is within striking distance of winning.

Netanyahu’s ambition has consumed both him and Israel. To regain and remain in office, he has sacrificed his own authority and parceled out power to the most extreme politicians. Since his reelection in 2022, Netanyahu is no longer the center of power but a vacuum, a black hole that has engulfed all of Israel’s political energy. His weakness has given the far right and religious fundamentalists extraordinary control over Israel’s affairs, while other segments of the population are left to pursue the never-ending quest to end his reign.

One man’s pursuit of power has diverted Israel from confronting its most urgent priorities: the threat from Iran, the conflict with the Palestinians, the desire to nurture a Westernized society and economy in the most contested corner of the Middle East, the internal contradictions between democracy and religion, the clash between tribal phobias and high-tech hopes. Netanyahu’s obsession with his own destiny as Israel’s protector has caused his country grievous damage.

Most Israelis already realize that Netanyahu is the worst of the 14 prime ministers their country has had in its 76 years of independence. But in the future, Jews might even remember him as the leader who inflicted the most harm on his people since the squabbling Hasmonean kings brought civil war and Roman occupation to Judea nearly 21 centuries ago. As long as he remains in power, he could yet surpass them.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus 'heartbroken' by killing of engineer Emad Shehab.

Masih Alinejad has been persecuted by the Iranian government for decades for speaking out against women’s rights violations in Iran. Now, she is urging people to unite against gender apartheid.

The 26th Thessaloniki Film Festival kicked off with the film “They Shot the Piano Players” by Fernando Trueba, who also received the honorary Golden Alexander for his lifetime contribution to cinema.

Footage aired on Chinese state television showed the Chinese, Iranian and Russian navies conducting a joint exercise in the Gulf of Oman, near the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

Iran's monarchists have moved closer to Israel, which they see as a key ally in their fight to reinstate the Pahlavis.

United Nations mission finds Iranian authorities committed murder, torture, rape and other crimes in the crackdown.

Growing up in a country where mixed-sex raves are illegal, the women getting the crowds dancing are now pushing cultural boundaries.

The Leader is a man of about 40, with a smooth, youthful face and a thin beard and mustache. In televised speeches, he wears a blazer with a shawl over his shoulders, his dark eyes menacing and humorless. Apart from that, so little is known about him that he might as well be a phantom. He has no birth certificate or passport and is said to have spent his formative years living in caves. No foreign diplomat has ever met him in person. He presides over a starving, brutalized people in northern Yemen and has sent an armada of child soldiers to their deaths. In January, one of his courts condemned nine men to be executed for homosexual behavior—seven by stoning, two by crucifixion.

Yet Abdulmalik al-Houthi may now be the most popular public figure in the Middle East. Ever since his soldiers began attacking and boarding commercial ships in the Red Sea in November—ostensibly in defense of Palestine—he has been treated like a latter-day Che Guevara, his portrait and speeches shared on social media across five continents. The Houthis’ bravado may not have done much for Gaza, but it has gouged a hole in the global economy, forcing maritime traffic away from the Suez Canal. It has also made the Houthis into heroes for young Arabs and Muslims who are embracing the Palestinian cause as their own. The Houthis have even made inroads among Western progressives, who helped make a TikTok star of “Tim-Houthi Chalamet,” a handsome young Yemeni who advertises his loyalty to the group.

The consequences of the Houthis’ Red Sea attacks are still hard to fathom. Almost overnight, a militant movement in the remote badlands of Yemen has found a terrifying new relevance: It has choked off the waterway that carries about 15 percent of the world’s trade. The U.S. Navy began firing back at Houthi launch sites in January—its most intense exchange of the 21st century to date—but even then, the Houthis did not back down.

One measure of the Houthis’ new power is that the proud Arab autocrats who hate them hardly dare to criticize them. They fear drawing more attention to the gap between their own tepid statements of support for Palestinians and the Houthis’ brazen defiance. Some are afraid that they, too, will become targets for Houthi missiles. The Arab leaders have long seen the Houthis as dangerous proxies for Iran, the group’s main military supplier, but some observers now say the truth may be even worse: that the Houthis are fanatics who answer to no one.

The Red Sea crisis has pushed the Arab world—and Saudi Arabia in particular—into a painful dilemma. Saudi diplomats have been working for years on an ambitious peace plan that would ease the Houthis’ political and economic isolation and reconcile them with their rivals in Yemen’s “legitimate” government in the south (which controls perhaps 30 percent of the population). But now, with dramatic new proof of the Houthis’ recklessness, the Saudis face the possibility that their efforts will only make Abdulmalik al-Houthi even more powerful, and more dangerous.

The Houthi spokesman was right on time for our meeting. I was a little surprised by his appearance; I had half expected to see a swaggering tribesman of the kind I used to meet in Yemen—mouth bulging with khat leaves, a shawl over his shoulders and a curved dagger in his belt. Instead, Abdelmalek al-Ejri was a neat-looking fellow in a blue-tartan blazer and a button-down shirt. He kept a physical distance as he greeted me, his manner polite but guarded, as if to register that we stood on opposite sides of a chasm.

We met in a spotless café in Muscat, the capital of the Sultanate of Oman. The city has for years been a kind of portal to the outside world for the Houthis, whose control of the Yemeni capital is not recognized by any country other than Iran. But it is an odd place to discuss Yemen because—despite their physical proximity and shared desert landscape—Oman is essentially the inverse of its neighbor. Where Yemen is lawless and violent, Oman is almost impossibly sedate and tidy, an Arab Switzerland. Omanis glide around in their elegant cloth head wraps and white dishdashas, looking serene; you can be arrested for rude public gestures or loud swearing, even for littering. Some of this, one imagines, is a deliberate effort to keep Yemen’s chaos at bay.

[Read: Were the Saudis right about the Houthis after all?]

I had been warned that al-Ejri, a diplomat of sorts, might downplay the aggressiveness and radicalism of the Houthis, who prefer to call their movement Ansar Allah, or “Partisans of God.” He did start off a little defensively, with a long speech about the unfairness of America’s blind support for Israel. But he also made clear that the Houthis are very, very pleased with their new global status, and they aim to wield it like a club. “We are more confident now, because we have huge public support,” he said. “This encourages us to speak on behalf of Yemen.” He meant all of Yemen, though the Houthis control less than half of Yemen’s territory.

He went on to boast that the Houthis have outpaced their longtime patron in the so-called Axis of Resistance. “Our stance on Gaza is more advanced than anyone, even Iran,” he said. “Iran was shocked that Ansar Allah had the guts to do what we did.” Although the relationship is clearly very close—Iranian Revolutionary Guard officials are said to be in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, right now—the Houthis do appear to have considerable independence and are believed to have shrugged off Iranian advice several times in the past. (Unlike some other Iranian allies, the Houthis are not mainstream Shiites and are not bound by the Khomeinist doctrine of rule by clerics.)

I asked him whether the Houthis would be willing to share power with other Yemeni political groups and was amazed again by the brashness of his answer. Abdulmalik al-Houthi will remain the supreme political authority in Yemen under any future government, he said, because his power comes directly from the people and is therefore beyond question. He then volunteered a comparison with Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah and another close ally of the Iranian regime. But al-Ejri added that al-Houthi will be “stronger and bigger” than his Lebanese counterpart, because the Houthis are and will be “the main player, the main stakeholder” in Yemen. In other words, al-Houthi will be a kind of counterpart to the supreme leader in Iran, who has the final word on all affairs of state.

The Houthis weren’t always this open about their political agenda. I first came across them in 2008, when I made frequent trips to Yemen as a Beirut-based correspondent for The New York Times. I was standing outside a Sanaa courthouse one morning when an armored vehicle charged up and screeched to a halt. It had barred windows, and as the guards got out, I could hear the prisoners inside chanting in unison: “God is Great! Death to America! Death to Israel! A curse on the Jews! Victory to Islam!”

The Yemeni reporters alongside me were as baffled as I was. We knew that the Houthis were an insurgent group in the country’s northern mountains who had been fighting an on-and-off war with the Yemeni state for years. We knew that they placed enormous, almost comical importance on their freedom to recite the words we had just heard, known to them as the sarkha, or “shout” (it had been banned by the government). But no one seemed to know what they wanted, why they were fighting, or how many they were. Al-Houthi, their leader, said in interviews at the time that they were simply defending themselves and wanted only to be left alone.

Even 10 years later, when they had conquered Yemen’s capital and were ruling most of its population, a penumbra of mystery surrounded them. I used to discuss the movement with Hassan Zaid, who knew its founders and was a well-respected scholar of Zaydi Islam, the sect to which the Houthis belong (like most people in the far north). During my last visit to Sanaa, in late 2018, I asked Zaid if the Houthis had a political vision. He replied promptly that they had none. He was serving as the group’s youth minister at the time, so I was a little taken aback. “The problem with the Houthis is that they are a reaction to other people’s behavior,” he said.

Zaid had doctrinal differences with the Houthis, whose ideology strays far from Zaydi orthodoxy. When he was gunned down by mysterious assailants in 2020, I was saddened—I had always liked him—but not surprised. Several other eminent Zaydi figures who had criticized the Houthis were murdered under similar circumstances. The Houthis, naturally, blamed the Saudis.

Abdulmalik al-Houthi speaks at a ceremony honoring the birth of the Prophet Muhammad in Saada province, Yemen, February 4, 2012. (Khaled Abdullah / Reuters) Houthi boats escort the hijacked Galaxy Leader cargo ship in the Red Sea in this undated photo, released on November 20, 2023. (Houthi Military Media / Reuters)

Being coy may have suited the Houthis in the early days, and their ambitions may have evolved over time. But a will to power is built into their origin story. The Houthi family belongs to a caste that stood at the top of the social hierarchy in northern Yemen for more than 1,000 years. As Sayyids—claiming lineal descent from the Prophet Muhammad—they were part of the same group as the religious monarchs known as Imams who ruled the area for most of that time. Their fortunes changed when a group of young officers ousted the last Imam in 1962 and formed a republic. Afterward, the northern Sayyids were scorned as relics of a benighted theocratic era, and many fell into poverty.

Things got even worse for the Houthis in the early 1980s, when the Saudis—shaken by the Iranian revolution—began promoting their own brand of hard-line religion in northern Yemen. Yemen had never had a serious sectarian problem. But as Saudi-funded preachers spread their intolerant Wahhabi faith, the Zaydi clerics decided that they had to fight back. They trained a new generation of revivalist Zaydis who were steeped in anger at the House of Saud and its American ally. Among the most zealous was a young man named Hussein al-Houthi.

Hussein’s ambitions went far beyond defending Zaydism. He traveled to Iran and to Sudan, which was an entrepôt for all sorts of Islamists in the 1990s. When he came home, he transformed his family’s experience (and his own) into a new ideological weapon: a combustible blend of historic entitlement and outraged victimhood. He grew even more radical after Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s longtime president, pledged his full support to George W. Bush in the War on Terror, which some Islamists saw as a war on Islam. It was then that the Houthi sarkha was first heard.

Hussein’s teachings, gathered in a 2,129-page online document called the Malazim (“installments”), are now revered by the movement almost as much as the Quran itself. Gun-toting Houthi soldiers can be found scrutinizing them with a special Android smartphone app.

The Malazim contains a kind of blueprint for religious dictatorship—an updated version of the Imamate. According to the Princeton-based scholar Bernard Haykel, who lived in Yemen for years, Hussein proclaimed the need for a supreme leader who embodies a “cosmic revolutionary ethos” and will act as a “guide for the community and the world.” Most mainstream Muslims (and even many Zaydis) would consider all of this hideously idolatrous.

Hussein’s status was further elevated by his martyrdom at the hands of Yemeni soldiers in 2004. His younger brother Abdulmalik then took the helm and led the intermittent wars against the Yemeni government until 2010. Much of northern Yemen was devastated during these years, but the movement came out stronger after each conflict, thanks to the Yemeni government’s corruption and perceived cruelty. The Houthis have always been lucky in their enemies.

One reason the Houthis have been so poorly understood is that their movement arose in the shadow of the Saudi monarchy. The arrogance and wealth of the Saudis, and the poisonous influence of their puritanical Wahhabi clerics, lent credence to the Houthis’ argument that they were just defending themselves. And the Saudis share some blame for creating this desert Frankenstein, having meddled recklessly in Yemen for many years.

Riyadh tried to play a more constructive role after 2012, when protests brought down Saleh. Saudi Arabia oversaw a shaky transition and pumped billions of dollars into Yemen. But in the political vacuum that followed, the Houthis—with an army hardened by years of war—seized much of the country while pretending to play along with a democratic process.

In early 2015, a few months after capturing the capital, the Houthis signed a deal with Iran, which had already been surreptitiously providing them with weapons and training. The Houthis began running 14 flights a week between Sanaa and Tehran, while the Iranian Revolutionary Guards sent officers and arms directly to their new allies in the Axis of Resistance. This was too much for Riyadh. The Saudis assembled a coalition and declared war. The Obama administration reluctantly supported them, worrying that it would be pulled into an unwinnable proxy war against Iran.

[Read: The Houthis have backed Iran into a corner]

The war backfired, as expected. Poorly trained Saudi pilots, fearing anti-aircraft fire, dropped their bombs from too high, and indiscriminate raids killed thousands of Yemeni civilians. With the Saudi coalition imposing a blockade, food became scarce and much of the population was pushed to the brink of starvation. The Yemeni forces fighting alongside the coalition were weakened by factional divisions and corruption. As the years passed, the Houthi counterattacks became more effective. By 2019 the Houthis were firing ballistic and cruise missiles at Saudi oil fields and airports, and although the Saudis were able to intercept most of the strikes, the struggle was becoming painfully asymmetrical. Patriot interceptors can cost more than $1 million apiece, while Houthi armed drones are worth a few hundred dollars.

In early 2022, a Houthi missile struck an oil-distribution station in Jeddah during Formula 1’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, one of the kingdom’s signature tourist events. A huge plume of black smoke was visible from the track. The Saudis had made efforts toward a peace deal for several years, but this time Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman appears to have decided that enough was enough. The United Nations brokered a cease-fire a week later. Saudi negotiators, together with a UN envoy, began talking to the Houthis about a longer-term peace agreement.

The accord, known in diplo-speak as “the road map,” goes well beyond ending the war. It aims to pave the way for a happier future in Yemen, with provisions for reconstruction, the departure of all foreign forces, and an “inclusive” political dialogue between the Houthis and their rivals in southern Yemen, whom they have fought intermittently for a decade.

The road map will also withdraw restrictions on the Houthis’ main ports and airports, which have been blockaded for years. That will open their doors to the world and bestow a legitimacy they have long craved while providing a huge boost to their income. On top of this, the agreement would commit the Saudis to paying salaries to state employees in every part of Yemen, including soldiers, for at least six months. This could amount to as much as $150 million a month, a vast sum in Yemen. Most of it would go to the Houthi-controlled part of the country, where the bulk of the population lives. In all likelihood, some percentage of those salaries will be funneled into the Houthi war machine, which has mastered various methods of extorting cash from an impoverished population.

Houthi recruits take part in a military parade in the port city of Hodeidah, September 1, 2022. (Getty)

In other words, the road map will transform the Houthis from a terrorist group into a state. Whether this will nudge them toward greater maturity or merely enable their worst instincts remains to be seen. It may, among other things, allow Iran to airlift weapons directly to the Houthis rather than shipping them surreptitiously in disguised boats, as it has been doing for about 15 years. The Saudis are taking these risks because MBS does not want any more disruptions to Vision 2030, his extravagant bid to transform Saudi Arabia’s economy and society.

The road map is also likely to equip the Houthis for a war of conquest against all the areas of Yemen they do not already control. They have tried to capture these areas in the past, and they have made no secret of their desire to dominate the entire country. Whether they would stop at the border is anyone’s guess. Houthi propaganda includes threats to strike deep into Saudi Arabia and capture Mecca, and (even more improbably) Jerusalem. The Saudis are so nervous about this that none of the officials I met with during a recent trip to Riyadh would agree to be quoted.

The road-map negotiations were long and difficult. Hearing about them made me pity the people whose job it was to sit across the table from the Houthis. Several I spoke with described a string of exhausting sessions with men who are masters at the art of upping the ante, which they did, time and again. One example: The salaries of Yemeni government workers were initially supposed to be covered partly by taxes on a Houthi-controlled port and partly by profits from Yemen’s own oil and gas. By the end, the Saudis had agreed to pay for it all.

Abdulmalik al-Houthi followed the negotiations closely and is clearly in charge: “The buck stops with him,” one diplomat who was involved told me. “He has a command of the details, not just the vision.” Only on rare occasions does he engage directly with foreigners, and the ritual is always the same. The visitors arrive in Sanaa, where they are driven by Houthi officials to a private house. They are shown into a room with a desk and computer monitor, and al-Houthi speaks to them by video link from his stronghold in the northwestern city of Saada, 110 miles away.

In the end, the Houthis got what they wanted, because the Saudis were desperate to close the deal. “Their attitude is, We won,” the diplomat told me. “Anyone who wants to share power must do so under their terms.”

The Saudis say that they only facilitated the discussions over the road map, which is billed as an agreement between the Houthis and their rivals in Yemen’s “internationally recognized” government, based in the south. This is a legal fiction. The southern government is an unelected puppet, entirely dependent on Saudi largesse to stay afloat. It is also a facade, beneath which is a congeries of mutually hostile southern factions. One thing they agree on is hatred of the road map, which they see—with some justification—as a capitulation to Houthi demands. But they cannot say so, because that would endanger the paychecks from Riyadh.

This was painfully apparent when I went to meet the president of Yemen, Rashad al-Alimi. Although his government is based in Yemen, he lives and holds his meetings in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh—a palacelike building set apart from the rest of the city, with a marble ballroom where four prancing horses, cast in brass and copper, loom over the guests. The symbolism of the setting was impossible to ignore. Back in 2017, the Ritz-Carlton was transformed into the world’s most lavish prison when Mohammed bin Salman arrested dozens of Saudi Arabia’s richest and most powerful figures, accused them of corruption, and forced them to sign over much of their wealth.

[From the April 2022 issue: Absolute power]

Al-Alimi is not a prisoner, but he isn’t exactly free. A slim, bald 70-year-old with a tiny mustache, he greeted me with pained courtesy, like a doctor who is reluctant to deliver bad news. He talked at length about the cruelties the Houthis have inflicted on the Yemeni city of Taiz, his hometown. The Houthis, he said, “broke all the taboos of wartime,” using snipers to fire on civilians and condemning female political prisoners to death.

When I asked about the road map, al-Alimi couldn’t bring himself to praise it. “I believe peace is the top priority for Yemen,” he said, looking melancholy. Not long afterward he said, “The Houthis will come to peace only after they are defeated.” He left it to me to draw the obvious conclusion. He would sign the accord, but he considered it a mistake.

The contrast between al-Alimi’s dour mood and the glowing confidence of the Houthis was almost embarrassing. When I mentioned al-Alimi to Abdelmalek al-Ejri, the Houthi representative in Oman, his face broke into a sarcastic grin. “We refuse to let the Saudis deal with us in the way they deal with the so-called legitimate government,” he said. He dismissed al-Alimi as a figurehead with no real authority, whose one virtue is that he will sign the road map if the Saudis tell him to: “Anything the Saudis say, he will reply ‘yes.’”

Some southern-Yemeni leaders are more willing to say what they think. In January, Aidarus al-Zoubaidi, who is al-Alimi’s deputy but also heads an armed faction that favors an independent state in southern Yemen, criticized the American-led air strikes, saying that they would not be enough to deter the Houthis. Zoubaidi has called for the West to provide arms, intelligence, and training to the factions in the south, so that they can at least contain the Houthis, if not push them back. His boldness is related to his pocketbook; his main patron has been the United Arab Emirates, not Saudi Arabia.

The southerners’ frustration is understandable. Although the Houthis have won a reputation as fierce warriors, they have suffered a few real setbacks at the hands of their Yemeni rivals. In 2018 the Houthis nearly lost their economic lifeline, the port of Hodeidah on the Red Sea coast. If the southern soldiers had pushed just another few miles to the port, they would have forced the Houthis to their knees. At a minimum, the Houthis would have had to make painful concessions, and in all likelihood, they would not be fighting a naval war in the Red Sea today.

Instead, the Saudi coalition withdrew from Hodeidah under pressure from the United States and aid groups who warned that the battle could lead to an even deeper humanitarian catastrophe. Some analysts and human-rights workers now believe that those concerns were exaggerated amid an atmosphere of widespread anger at the Saudis.

In fact, the Houthis may well have been rescued—not for the first time—by a bizarre twist of fate. In early October of that year, Saudi agents killed and dismembered the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. Gory details of the murder leaked to the press, and a wave of fury engulfed the Saudis, who were already being criticized for their indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen. I shared that anger; I knew Khashoggi well and had many long talks with him in Riyadh. But his death became a political football whose uses were difficult to foresee at the time.

The Saudi government was forced into a defensive crouch, and international allies no longer had the patience to support its fight for an obscure port on the Red Sea. The UN organized a cease-fire that required both sides to withdraw, but the Houthis have since violated it and regained control of the port. In retrospect, it seems possible that the outrageous public murder of a single famous man became the shield for a movement that has since killed thousands of Yemenis.

Can the Houthis be dislodged? They can seem invincible, especially now that they have successfully branded themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause. That posture appears to have entrenched their power at home as well, helping them recruit some 16,000 new soldiers in the first month of the Gaza war, according to one independent report. In the areas they control, they have made the schools into factories of propaganda and war-mongering. A recent university exam in the city of Ibb featured a question about geometry, using missiles fired into the Red Sea as an example. Women are now discouraged from driving, and gender segregation is more rigid. Fear and censorship are more pervasive. One of my longtime friends in Sanaa now erases his texts to me as soon as I have read them.

Even the Houthis’ weaknesses are dangerous, because they foster a dependence on war. Their government is incompetent and bankrupt. Food prices have shot up, and Yemen’s ability to export labor—its mainstay for decades—is crashing, thanks partly to a lack of job training. Remittances from abroad (mostly Yemeni laborers in Saudi Arabia) have dropped, and conditions are only getting worse. Acute malnutrition is rampant, leaving many young people with stunted limbs and brain damage. Inflows of food aid are way down even though roughly 80 percent of the population depends on them. The road map includes a formula for sharing revenues from Yemen’s oil and gas reserves, which are located outside the Houthi zone of control, and have been largely offline for years. But skeptics say that mutual hatred will scuttle that. The Houthis have clashed with southern factions in recent weeks, and some observers worry the two-year cease-fire may be fraying.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The Decatur option]

If civil war breaks out again, Iran hawks in the United States may call for re-arming the southern factions as a military counterweight. Some Saudi leaders may even see a civil war as useful in weakening the Houthis, as long as Riyadh can stay out of the fighting. But such a war would pit a Shiite alliance in the north against Sunni forces in the south, inflaming sectarian rivalries and drawing in jihadists from other countries. New versions of al-Qaeda or the Islamic State would bloom in the desert. Does anyone really want to go down that road again?

A man stands in front of billboards that read “Allah is the greatest of all. Death to America. Death to Israel. A curse on the Jews. Victory to Islam.” Sanaa, September 16, 2012. (Mohamed al-Sayaghi / Reuters)

Unfortunately, every possible course is risky. Breaking the Houthis may be impossible, but they don’t bend easily, either. Perhaps, without a war to rally the faithful, the Houthis could be pressured toward compromise and consensus. Yemenis are famously unruly and independent-minded, and they have shown signs of discontent with Houthi rule. Some observers think that the Saudis could play a positive role by reviving the deep network of influence they had before Saleh was overthrown, as long as they wield it more wisely. Promising pockets of local governance in areas of Yemen outside of Houthi control could ultimately serve as models in the north.

For the outside world, there is a larger concern: Now that the Houthis have shown what they can do in the Red Sea, what is to stop them from finding new pretexts to do it again? Their arsenal includes unmanned, explosive-packed boats and submarines, with parts provided by Iran. If one of these were to strike an American naval vessel, it could kill a lot of sailors. This is exactly what happened 24 years ago, when suicide attackers in a boat struck the U.S.S. Cole off the southern Yemeni coast, in one of the opening acts of al-Qaeda’s long confrontation with what it called “the far enemy.”

The diplomats who wrote the road map now say it must be revised with these dangers in mind. “We can’t just let bygones be bygones and forget all this happened,” one American official told me. “The peace process will have to ensure that the Houthi threat is contained, and that the Houthis are not further emboldened and empowered.”

How do you contain a force as volatile and reckless as the Houthis? The road map will need to provide an answer, or it could lead to a very dark dead end.

Shervin Hajipour says he was sentenced to more than three years in prison for 'inciting people to riot'.