The Houthis see a Jewish conspiracy behind the campaign against them. But in the Yemeni civil war of the 1960s, Israel helped the Shiite tribes from which the rebels hail.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels accuse Israel of standing behind the Saudi-led military campaign launched against them in February. The charge is not unusual—blaming Israel for the Mideast’s sundry ills is a time-honored regional pastime. For once, though, the allegation has some historical basis: During Yemen’s 1962-1970 civil war, the Jewish state airlifted a steady supply of money and arms to the ruling monarchy. On one point, however, the Houthis’ accusation falls flat: That monarchy actually represented the same Shiite tribes from whom today’s rebels spring.
At the time, Yemen was divided—as it was for most of its history—between the absolute monarchy of the Mutawakelite dynasty in the north, and a British protectorate in the south centered on the strategic port of Aden. The Mutawakelites were Zaydis—a sub-minority within the Islamic minority of Shiism who consider Muhammad’s great-great grandson Zayd the rightful heir to the prophet’s mantle. (Zaydis are commonly known as Fivers, because they deem Zayd the fifth and final leader of the faithful, as opposed to the majority of Shiites who recognize a chain of 12.)
In 1962, nationalist army officers led by Gen. Abdullah al-Sallal—and inspired by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s anti-monarchist coup in Egypt a decade prior—staged a coup against Imam (King) Muhammad al-Badr. Britain, fearing unrest in its neighboring colony, backed the royalists, as did the fellow monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and a 16-year-old state of Israel.
At the time the Jewish state’s chief antagonist was not, as today, the Shiite theocracy of Iran but its own neighbor—and the Arab world’s largest state—Egypt. In one of the oddities of the Cold War (think Cubans in Angola), Nasser had sent 70,000 troops—a third of his army—to Yemen to fight to a blood-drenched stalemate that historians have dubbed “Egypt’s Vietnam.” Of the 100,000 to 200,000 men killed in the war, some 25,000 were Egyptian.
Two years into the war, a disillusioned Egyptian pilot defected to Israel, and told his interrogators that his fellow Egyptians were using chemical weapons in Yemen. Then-Foreign Minister Golda Meir feared Israel would be next, and hoped that bogging down the Egyptians in a faraway country would keep them too busy to threaten her own.
British intelligence had for months sought Israeli support for the royalists, and soon found a willing partner. On the night of May 26, 1964, Imam Badr called a strategy session of tribal leaders who were backing the monarchy, including one Sheikh Hassan al-Houthi, the patriarch of the Houthi tribe that today leads the fight against Yemen’s internationally recognized government. Around midnight, the assembled dignitaries heard a plane hum overhead and saw 14 parachutes drop, prompting one elder to marvel, “Look! Even God is helping the imam.” The plane—carrying military materiel, medical supplies and money—was flown by Israeli pilots.