Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Ansar Allah (Helpers of God) government of North Yemen, led by Abdel Malik al-Houthi, declared an aerial blockade of Israel on Sunday, as they successfully fired a missile at Ben Gurion International Airport. The missile evaded Israeli air defenses and landed on the outskirts of the airport, causing panic and leading to cancelled flights, either for Sunday or for the next few days, on the part of international carriers.
Inevitably, the Israeli Air Force will retaliate massively, and it has already demonstrated that its fighter jets can come down the Red Sea and hit Yemeni targets, using an accompanying civilian jet liner to carry fuel for the return trip.
Yemen’s de facto government has few cards, as Trump would say. It presides over the bulk of a 41 million population, roughly the size of Canada’s. But Yemen is among the poorest countries in the world, and despite having a few rockets and drones it is hardly a military power. In a way, it is a guerrilla country, the way some militant movements are guerrilla movements. It has a strategic position dominating the transit from the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea into the Red Sea, and has been harassing container ships plying that body of water heading to and from the Suez Canal. The Houthis seized power in the north in 2014-15, and their advent was so unwelcome that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates spent 7 fruitless years attempting to dislodge them.
The Helpers of God, a militia drawn from militants of the Zaydi Shiite branch of Islam, rules over about 80 percent of Yemen’s population, though it hasn’t been able to take the thinly populated and rugged south, which is entirely Sunni in creed.
So why are the Houthis bombing Ben Gurion Airport? First, they mind the ongoing Israeli genocide against the people of Gaza. That these Israeli war crimes are a prime motivation is demonstrated by their having ceased their attacks during the brief ceasefire earlier this year.
Second, the Houthis need both Zaydi and Sunni supporters, since Zaydis are only a third of the country’s population — though they are a bigger proportion of the north. Taking a strong stand against the Israeli war on Gaza, they seem to hope, burnishes their Arab nationalist credentials and helps unite Sunnis and Zaydis domestically. That is, as with most wars the Zaydi entry into the Gaza conflict has domestic roots.
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Americans and Western Europeans, who are not seeing the Gaza genocide on their TV screens as the Arab world is, have no idea how furious the nearly 500 million Arabs are. Egyptian news anchors talk about “our children” being killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes. Their governments know they are weak and saw what happened to Hezbollah. But the people are jumping up and down mad. The Houthis are playing to that boiling anger to bolster their position inside the country and in the region.
That this move is having some success is demonstrated by the inability of the US to convince any Arab countries to take up the fight against the Houthis. If Abdel Fattah al-Sisi deployed Egyptian armed forces against the Helpers of God, he’d be seen as a mere Gurka or helpmeet of the Israelis, and it would profoundly undermine him. He saw what happened to his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, when the people turned against the government.
Photo of Sanaa by Mohammad mansour on Unsplash
Yemen has not flourished economically under Houthi rule, to say the least, and the movement is undemocratic and dictatorial. A war is a form of “wagging the dog,” attempting to make people rally around Sanaa and forget the tribulations of their daily lives.
Although Israeli and American leaders see an Iranian hand behind Houthi attacks, this factor is much smaller than they make it. Yes, Iran gives some money, weaponry and technical know-how to Sanaa. But it is limited. A lot of the Houthi weapons were captured from government storehouses and consist of American arms given to the old Arab nationalist government of Ali Abdallah Saleh, deposed in January 2012. The Houthis are a hardscrabble rural Zaydi movement, very Arab, and don’t behave as they do because some Iranian in Tehran orders them around. Zaydi Shiism is not like the Twelver Shiism of Iran. It doesn’t have ayatollahs and there is no impetus to clerical rule. The Houthis are not made up of clergy but of village militiamen.
Israel is as unlikely to succeed in bombing the Houthis into submission as the Saudis and Emiratis. As the US found out 50 years ago, bombing guerrilla groups from the sky doesn’t usually defeat them. Although the Israelis have had success in their battle with Hezbollah in Lebanon this past year, Yemen is much farther away and much harder for intelligence to penetrate. Houthis have remained clannish in a way that Hezbollah did not, especially once it went into Syria.
“Hypersonic,” Digital, Midjourney, 2025
So, yes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can bomb Yemen. It is a little unlikely that he can thereby remove the irritant of the Houthis from Israeli policy. Only a ceasefire can effectively calm things down in the region, and Netanyahu is too committed to genocide to contemplate such a thing.
If the Arab world were not largely made up of weak states ruled by corrupt dictators, many more countries would be acting as the Yemenis are. And while the extremist Israeli government can take some satisfaction in having achieved impunity for the most part for its Gaza atrocities in the present moment, I’m not sure that translates into peace and security among several hundred million Arabs in the future. We saw beginning in 2011 that the corrupt dictatorships are not immortal. If a populist wave ever swept the region, Israel’s security position would rapidly deteriorate. Unfortunately, the Israeli equivalent of Neo-Nazis now in power can’t think past the next few months, and so are likely mortgaging their future to a project of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the present.
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