分类： politics

A major escalation in Yemen’s years-long conflict has laid bare the gap between security cooperation and operational capability between Washington and Riyadh, as multiple sources confirm the two allies have no unified counterstrategy to reverse recent Houthi gains on the strategically critical Red Sea coast. Multiple anonymous U.S. officials confirmed to CNN that even with expanded American intelligence and targeting support provided to Saudi forces, Riyadh has failed to dislodge Houthi fighters from the recently seized island, a position that puts critical commercial shipping lanes at risk.

For months, U.S. intelligence agencies have warned that the Iran-aligned movement would seek to close off an additional key waterway for global trade, mirroring actions Tehran took earlier this year. Despite a decade of Saudi assurances that it had successfully trained Yemeni government forces loyal to Riyadh to counter Houthi advances, U.S. officials remain convinced that Saudi-led forces lack the capacity to reverse the group’s territorial gains.

The CNN disclosure follows a surprising early end to U.S. President Donald Trump’s weekend retreat at Camp David, where he cut his stay short Saturday to return to the White House. While the White House attributed the schedule shift to incoming severe weather in rural Maryland, the sudden departure aligned exactly with a major military escalation by the Houthi movement against Saudi Arabia.

Early Saturday morning, the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen confirmed that the Iran-backed group launched a ballistic missile targeting Riyadh. Local Saudi media reported that authorities issued an uncommon early-morning public alert ordering residents to take shelter indoors. First responders were called to extinguish a blaze at a fuel storage depot near King Khalid International Airport, where an Aramco-branded tanker caught fire following the attack.

Coalition spokesperson Major General Turki al-Maliki confirmed that Riyadh’s air defenses intercepted the missile over the capital, adding that additional incoming attacks targeting Taif, Baish, Farasan and the Red Sea coastal city of Yanbu were also intercepted before reaching their intended destinations. Houthi spokesperson Yahya Saree immediately claimed responsibility for the coordinated strikes, framing the attacks as retaliation for what he called “criminal attacks by the Saudi enemy on the Yemeni capital Sanaa.”

In response to the heightened risk of wider conflict, the U.S. State Department and multiple American diplomatic missions across the region issued urgent security warnings for U.S. citizens in the area. The alerts highlighted “the potential for unforeseen escalation” and noted that “Iranian-supported Houthis have engaged in hostilities against Saudi Arabia, including attacks targeting civilian airports.”

Weekend’s coordinated missile attacks are part of a wider, accelerated Houthi offensive aimed at seizing full control of Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline and the Bab al-Mandeb strait, one of the world’s most vital chokepoints for global oil and commercial shipping. The rapid advance has exposed critical gaps in Saudi military capabilities: regional defense sources confirm the kingdom is currently facing critical shortages of air defense interceptors needed to protect critical domestic infrastructure, and has already requested urgent air defense support from Paris, London, Islamabad and Cairo.

Recent defense agreements Riyadh signed with Ankara and Islamabad have failed to deliver immediate tangible military support. While Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan condemned the Houthi attacks and pledged to uphold the trilateral security pact with Saudi Arabia, he also warned Riyadh against becoming entangled in the broader standoff between Iran and the United States. For its part, Pakistan only stated it would take action “when the time comes,” offering no immediate commitment of support.

Despite the rapidly deteriorating security situation for Saudi Arabia, the Trump administration has repeatedly ruled out direct U.S. military involvement in the expanding conflict. Administration officials have made clear that the U.S. red line rules out direct American kinetic strikes against Houthi targets, limiting U.S. engagement to intelligence sharing and the provision of targeting data. That said, the State Department recently approved a $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, framed as a measure to “deter current and future threats” to the kingdom.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly held two phone calls with Trump last week to formally request U.S. military strikes against Houthi positions, but all requests for direct American intervention were rejected. Trump has repeatedly stated his goal to keep U.S. forces out of the Yemen conflict, telling reporters recently: “The Houthis called us and they don’t want to fight with us… It’s just one country they’re not too happy with, and we’ll get that straightened out.”

This deliberate hands-off approach from Washington has sparked deep alarm among other U.S. Gulf cooperation partners, who view the expanding Houthi offensive as a dangerous new escalation of broader regional proxy tensions between Iran and Western-aligned states. As Houthi advances worsen an already severe global energy crisis and force Saudi Arabia to reduce crude oil exports, Riyadh is confronting an increasingly grim reality: amid reports that Washington is negotiating its own separate ceasefire with the Houthis through backchannel talks in Oman, the kingdom is left to manage a rapidly expanding conflict largely on its own.

A new report from Israeli media has revealed that Israel intends to approach the United States to seek expanded weapons transfers and enhanced defense capabilities, framing the request as compensation for Washington’s recent greenlighting of a potential F-35 fighter jet sale to Saudi Arabia.

Israeli digital news outlet Walla first broke the story Friday, citing sources familiar with Israeli government planning that indicate senior Israeli officials will ask the Trump administration to approve a series of advanced weapons systems that the U.S. has previously rejected transferring to Israel.

According to Walla’s reporting, the scope of Israel’s requested capabilities stretches far beyond cutting-edge fighter aircraft and stealth technology. The proposed request covers a range of high-end military assets, including space-based weapons platforms and support for the domestic development and manufacturing of interceptor aircraft. Additionally, Israeli officials are set to ask for bunker-busting munitions and specialized underground military systems engineered to operate deep beneath rugged, rocky mountain terrain. All of these asks are tied directly to the U.S.’s approval of the potential Saudi F-35 deal, with Israel seeking a compensatory package to preserve its military positioning in the Middle East, the outlet reported.

The revelation of Israel’s planned request follows a formal announcement from the U.S. State Department, which gave preliminary approval to a potential $24.3 billion arms package that would deliver 48 F-35 Lightning II fifth-generation fighter jets to Riyadh. Alongside the aircraft, the proposed deal includes 49 Pratt & Whitney F135-PW-100 engines, specialized communications and cryptographic security equipment, electronic warfare support systems, pilot and maintenance training, and full logistics support, according to the formal notification the State Department submitted to Congress.

Despite the State Department’s preliminary approval, the proposed sale still faces a key procedural hurdle: it must secure final approval from the U.S. Congress before it can move forward.

Middle East Eye (MEE), an independent outlet focused on regional coverage, has tracked the progression of the deal for months, with multiple U.S. and Arab sources confirming that negotiations have moved at an accelerated pace. In November, MEE first reported that the F-35 purchase would be fast-tracked as part of a new comprehensive defense partnership between Washington and Riyadh, an agreement finalized during Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s high-profile visit to the White House. A follow-up MEE report in December revealed that the Trump administration had launched a formal review of Israel’s long-recognized qualitative military edge in the region, a required step in processing the Saudi sale.

Early this year, senior U.S. military officials held a series of closed-door, confidential meetings with members of Congress to brief lawmakers on the details of the proposed deal. This summer, Saudi Defense Minister Khaled bin Salman made multiple trips to Washington, with advancing the F-35 deal a top priority on his agenda, multiple U.S. officials confirmed to MEE.

If the sale is finalized, Saudi Arabia will become the first Arab nation to operate the F-35, the most advanced stealth fighter jet in current U.S. military inventory. For the moment, Israel remains the only country in the Middle East that operates the aircraft.

As international news outlet Reuters noted, the proposed sale puts Washington’s decades-long policy of guaranteeing Israel’s qualitative military edge over all regional adversaries to the test.

The move to acquire advanced fighter jets comes as Saudi Arabia faces escalating security threats from ongoing Houthi missile and drone attacks on its territory. At the same time, the Saudi-backed, internationally recognized Yemeni government has struggled to repel a recent Houthi offensive that has allowed the group to seize control of Yemen’s entire Red Sea coastline, as well as the Arabian Gulf side of the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait.

Days ahead of a critical round of German state elections, a public confrontation on a Berlin subway laid bare deep contradictions in how Germany frames antisemitism, debates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and enables far-right political gain. The incident centered on Karoline Preisler, a Free Democratic Party (FDP) politician and lawyer who has built a public profile staging provocative solo counter-protests at pro-Palestine demonstrations across the country.

Preisler shared a video of the subway encounter on the social platform X, where she is shown holding up a sign reading “Intifada is a call to violence” directed at two men she labeled “racist white terror supporters.” A supporter accompanying Preisler later claimed they had “experienced antisemitism up close” at the hands of a pro-Palestine activist. But the encounter carried a striking twist: neither Preisler nor her supporter are Jewish, while the activist accused of antisemitism is Jewish, and was wearing a shirt that read “Another Jew for a free Palestine.”

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, quickly responded to the incident with sharp criticism. “Feeling threatened by Jews who oppose genocide defies epistemology. Time to patent misplaced victimhood,” she wrote.

This small but loaded confrontation unfolded just one week before Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) secured a historic landslide victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, marking the strongest electoral result for a far-right party in Germany since the end of World War II. The win carries troubling weight: official data shows far-right actors are responsible for 84 percent of all antisemitic hate crimes committed in Germany, making them the dominant source of anti-Jewish violence in the country today.

Yet across mainstream German political and public discourse, antisemitism is routinely conflated with anti-Zionism and criticism of the state of Israel – even when that criticism comes from Jewish people themselves. This framing has enabled harsh, often violent repression of pro-Palestine speech and public protest across the country. The AfD led the charge on this shift as early as 2019, when it tabled a parliamentary motion to fully ban the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement calling for economic pressure on Israel over its occupation of Palestinian territory.

That motion paved the way for the German federal government to pass a non-binding anti-BDS resolution, urging all public institutions to refuse platforming any individual even remotely connected to the boycott movement. The policy has already led to dozens of public figures being disinvited from events or de-platformed for their support of BDS or Palestinian rights.

Far-right parties like the AfD have leveraged this mainstream framing to whitewash their own long history of antisemitism, experts argue. By positioning themselves as outspoken proponents of Israel and loud opponents of antisemitism, they have escaped scrutiny for their core ideological commitments. “As antisemitism has been equated with the critique of Israel, far right actors have been able to hide their antisemitism and present themselves as transformed,” explained Esra Ozyurek, an expert on Holocaust memory at the University of Cambridge. “Even though the AfD downplays its antisemitism and emphasizes its Zionism, it still follows the same playbook with its fascist predecessors in demonizing a religious/ethnic minority, scapegoating them for problems in society which have nothing to do with them, and trying to unite a ‘nation’ through the exclusion of a minoritised group.”

AfD officials have openly embraced this strategy. When the 2019 BDS ban motion was tabled, AfD MP Jurgen Braun claimed his party was the only “true friend of Israel” in the German parliament, repeating the false claim that “antisemitism comes from the left and Islam.” The party even elevated Yair Netanyahu, son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to a prominent poster figure for their cause after he labeled the European Union an “evil globalist organisation.”

While Germany’s diplomatic ties to Israel date back to the early years of the Israeli state, the framing of unwavering support for Israel as a core pillar of modern German national identity is a relatively recent shift, rooted in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. It was during this era that Germany began externalizing guilt for the Holocaust onto Muslim communities, redefining national “redemption” from its Nazi past through unconditional support for Israel. That shift was formalized in 2008, when then-Chancellor Angela Merkel delivered a landmark speech to the Israeli Knesset declaring that unwavering support for Israel’s security is part of Germany’s Staatsrason – its core “reason of state.”

For Hans Kundnani, editor of the book *Hyper-Zionism*, that speech marked a fundamental redefinition of how Germany remembers the Nazi era. “Germany went from a universalist understanding of the lessons of the Nazi past to a more particularist one,” he explained, shifting the meaning of the post-Holocaust mantra “Never Again” from a universal commitment to stopping all genocide to a narrow pledge to protect the state of Israel – not Jewish communities globally. “Merkel wanted to take support for Israel out of democratic contestation, to kind of lock it in before it is too late,” Kundnani added.

Today, this commitment cuts across Germany’s entire political spectrum. Even nominally left-wing parties, including the German Greens and Die Linke, routinely conflate pro-Palestine sentiment with Nazism and antisemitism. Remarkably, this elite consensus is not reflected in German public opinion. 2025 polling shows nearly 80 percent of German voters view Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as unjustified, while 62 percent describe it as genocide. Only 10 percent of respondents fully support the idea that Israel’s security should be Germany’s core reason of state, a view that holds across all political divides.

This gap between elite and public opinion is partially driven by generational and demographic change. Younger Germans and Germans with immigrant backgrounds are far more likely to oppose Israel’s actions and support Palestinian statehood, and Berlin is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora community outside the Middle East. For Kundnani, figures like Preisler – the FDP politician behind the subway confrontation – embody the moral arrogance of Germany’s pro-Israel elite. He describes Preisler as a “moral crusader” who actively seeks out confrontation with pro-Palestine members of the public, driven by a sense of national moral superiority.

“The way Germans think about it is that we did our exemplary engagement with the Nazi past, we have this exemplary memory culture, better than anyone else, and thus feel morally superior to the whole world,” Kundnani explained. Under this framework, antisemitism is framed as an external problem that has already been solved within Germany, with immigrant communities – particularly Muslim immigrants – blamed for “reimporting antisemitism” into the country.

Daniel Cohen, a historian at Rice University, argues this framing is tied to a narrow, exclusionary vision of German national identity. “It has become a matter of national identity,” Cohen told Middle East Eye. “Anybody who is defending Palestinian rights is labelled ‘unGerman’ or ‘non-German’ in the interest of protecting a certain German identity – a German white identity, since the fear of antisemitism is also the fear of immigrants.” He added: “Support for Israel has less to do with love for Zionism, but mostly the necessity at all costs to protect the redemption of Germany,” referencing the widespread elite narrative that Germany has fully purged itself of antisemitism to create a post-redemption national identity free of anti-Jewish hate.

Central to enforcing this narrative is Germany’s network of state-appointed Antisemitism Commissioners, who regularly intervene in public discourse to de-platform and cancel figures linked to the pro-Palestine movement. Most of these commissioners are not Jewish; the majority are self-identified Christians who have targeted everyone from German-Israeli academics to Jewish South African photographers for their support of Palestinian rights.

In one high-profile example, commissioner Michael Blume sparked widespread backlash when he labeled *Judische Stimme* (Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East) – a network of German Jews who advocate for Palestinian rights – “ostensibly Jewish,” drawing an official formal complaint from the organization. Blume has a long history of controversial statements about Judaism: in a 2015 public conference, he told audiences that Jews are not an ethnic or racial group, but part of an ancient intellectual school that brought literacy to the world, and that the roots of antisemitism lie in public resentment of this supposed special Jewish gift for literacy.

Cohen explains this form of opportunistic “philosemitism” emerged immediately after World War II, allowing German elites to preserve problematic myths about Jewish identity while co-opting Jewish history for their own national narrative. Even today, this dynamic persists: despite Germany having a tiny Jewish population, Jewish-themed baby names are the most popular among non-Jewish German parents, and the trend of non-Jewish Germans converting to Judaism has drawn criticism as an attempt to atone for family members’ Nazi pasts without addressing structural inequities.

Susan Neiman, who once wrote a 2019 book praising Germany’s model culture of Holocaust memory, has since acknowledged that the process has gone “haywire,” contributing to what Kundnani terms “hyper-zionism.” Neiman has labeled the current crackdown on pro-Palestine speech “philosemitic McCarthyism,” arguing that “the determination to root out antisemitism has shifted from vigilance to hysteria” in the months following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.

Amid this nationwide “witchhunt,” as Neiman terms it, *Judische Stimme* was formally classified as a “foreign extremist organization” by Germany’s domestic intelligence service – a designation that was later overturned by a Berlin court. Udi Raz, a board member of *Judische Stimme* and author of the upcoming book *JEW. DESPITE GERMANY*, argues that the entire framework of tying German post-Nazi redemption to Zionism is rooted in the same supremacist ideology that drove Nazism itself.

“For Germany’s governing policymakers, Zionism is the answer to Nazism,” Raz explained. “However, these are…continuations of the same supremacist ideology put into practice by Nazism. But while Nazism placed Jews outside the category of the superior, Zionism places us within it.” Raz added: “The unconditional support of Germany’s government for Israel suggests that Germany has never fully de-Nazified.”