Everyone knows that the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran was born in an act of hostage-taking, with the unlawful seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran and the detention of 52 diplomats for 444 days. Now Iran is trying to take the entire world hostage. The Islamic Republic has attacked nearly a dozen countries, attempted to seal off the Strait of Hormuz with mines, explosive drone boats, and shore-based missiles, and unleashed its proxy army in Yemen to threaten shipping in the Red Sea. Two of the world’s most vital maritime arteries are being held at gunpoint by the Iranian regime and its terrorist tentacles.

The Strait of Hormuz is not just another shipping lane. It is a maritime chokepoint through which roughly 20 million barrels of crude oil pass every day, about a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade. Unlike the Strait of Malacca or the Panama Canal, there is no economically viable alternative route; the oil either passes through Hormuz or it does not move. Iran knows this and has deliberately turned the Strait into a weapon. Commercial shipping has dropped by approximately 70 percent since March, with over 150 tankers anchored outside the passage awaiting safe transit. Meanwhile, Iran’s proxy on the Arabian Peninsula, the Houthis of Yemen, have placed an equally vital corridor under siege. The Red Sea is the lifeline of the Suez Canal system; when Houthi attacks render it unusable, shipping from Europe to Asia must circumnavigate the entire African continent, costing the global economy billions in additional freight, insurance, and delay costs.  The Houthis, for their part, make their beliefs perfectly clear; their official slogan, printed on their flag, reads: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, a curse on the Jews, victory to Islam.”

As a Palestinian human rights activist and a refugee who grew up in the Shuafat Refugee Camp in Jerusalem, I have watched foreign powers exploit my people for decades. The Jordanian government made me a refugee in 1966, relocating my family from the Jewish Quarter of the Old City when I was eight years old. The Arab League, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and now Iran have all used Palestinians as a political weapon. I know what it looks like when a regime sacrifices ordinary people for its own ambitions, because I have lived it. What Iran is doing today to the Gulf states, to Jordan, to the shipping lanes that feed the global economy, is the same pattern writ large: the ayatollahs do not care how many lives they destroy, so long as they preserve their grip on power. My people have been pawns in this game for generations; now the whole world is finding out what that feels like.

In pursuit of regional hegemony, Iran has directly struck not only the United States and Israel but every one of its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf. According to CNBC, the Gulf nations have absorbed roughly 83 percent of Iran’s attacks in the current war, as against only 17 percent directed at Israel. Saudi Arabia’s largest refinery was set ablaze. Three people were killed and 78 were injured in the UAE alone. Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG facility was hit. Even Oman, which for years attempted to mediate between Washington and Tehran, was attacked without hesitation. Qatar, long the host of Hamas’s international leadership, came under such sustained fire that it declared Iranian diplomats persona non grata and began pressuring Hamas to condemn Tehran’s strikes.

Iran’s belligerence does not stop at the Gulf. NATO member Turkey has been forced to intercept at least four Iranian ballistic missiles. A drone struck Britain’s RAF Akrotiri base on Cyprus. Iranian drones hit Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan airport, injuring four civilians. Iraqi Kurdistan has endured more than 470 attacks in a single month, with 14 killed and 93 wounded. Against Jordan, Iran has launched approximately 281 missiles and drones.

The Iranian aggression against its neighbors demonstrates the urgent need for a new postwar regional security architecture, anchored by Israel and the United States. The spirit of that cooperation was already presaged by the Abraham Accords in 2020, which formalized security, economic, and diplomatic ties between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. A mutual enemy has now confirmed what the Accords anticipated:  Israel and the Arab states share a common interest in confronting the Islamic Republic, and they are stronger together than apart.

America’s prime goal must be to keep Iran from strangling the world’s most critical waterways. Iran’s strategy recalls the German campaigns of unrestricted submarine warfare in the two World Wars, which sought to sever the commercial arteries that sustained free nations. Tehran’s twenty-first-century variant involves mines at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, explosive drone boats targeting tankers, and shore-based missile batteries along hundreds of miles of Iranian coastline. The Houthis, meanwhile, have resumed attacks on the Suez corridor, breaking a ceasefire that had held for barely five months.

The United States responded forcefully when the Houthis first menaced global shipping after October 7, 2023. Operation Poseidon Archer struck dozens of Houthi targets and helped bring the group to a ceasefire. Now that the Houthis have rejoined the war, the United States and its allies must not hesitate to deploy the full weight of their military arsenals to blast the sea lanes back open. There can be no negotiation with a group whose motto is death to America. The only way to live in a world that is not held hostage by Iran and its proxies is to dismantle their capacity to threaten the global economy and the sovereignty of their neighbors. Ideally, that means ending the regime itself. At a minimum, it means building a new security architecture for the region with a central role for Israel, which has emerged as the indispensable protector of the small nations of the Persian Gulf and West Asia. As a Palestinian who has spent a lifetime watching dictators sacrifice ordinary people for power, I say this with no hesitation: we will not cower, we will not retreat from the seas, and we will not allow the ayatollahs to hold civilization hostage. The time to act is now, before the next mine is laid and the next tanker burns.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)