How Yemen’s Houthis became intolerant

My family left Yemen for Israel in 1935, at a time when tens of thousands of Jews were still living in the country. Their journey was particularly noteworthy because a member of my family was riding on a camel. My pregnant mother sat in the saddle, while my father and brother walked beside her. For centuries in Yemen, Jews had only been permitted to ride on donkeys. This was just one of a litany of laws that humiliated and subjugated Jews, and slowly pushed them to leave a country that they loved.

Almost a century later, the climate for Jews in Yemen has turned from prejudiced to perilous. Only one Jew now remains in Sanaa. He is a prisoner of the Houthis and bears the weight of their hateful ideology on his shoulders.

The Houthis are responsible for closing the book on 3,000 years of Jewish history in Yemen, which began in the time of King Solomon. But they are not solely responsible for its long decline. In fact, the Houthi movement derives from Zaidi tribes living in the north of the country, and for many centuries they were the most tolerant subsection of Yemeni society.

The Houthis are responsible for closing the book on 3,000 years of Jewish history in Yemen

The generational power struggle between the fiercely independent Zaidi tribes and the Imams in Sanaa had long influenced how the Zaidis treated their Jewish neighbors. Only in Zaidi tribal territory would you find a Jew riding a camel or horse, and Jews were generally afforded freedoms that were prohibited elsewhere.

It may seem strange then that when the northern Zaidi tribes marched into Sanaa during the civil war, they did so under a flag emblazoned with the slogan “A curse upon the Jews.” The Houthi’s antisemitism has nothing to do with the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, and everything to do with Iranian influence, which was allowed to grow among the Zaidi tribes from the 1980s after almost the entire Yemenite community had already departed.

It only took one generation for Iran to convert the Zaidis from tolerant tribesmen to militant extremists. Iran’s ideological indoctrination has been so effective that even as Yemen hovers on the brink of starvation, the Houthis are determined to take on the entire western world in a military conflict and block global shipping in the Red Sea. In setting the policy priorities for its proxies, Tehran does not care for the needs of Yemen’s Muslims much more than it does for its last remaining Jew.

As a result of turning a blind eye and even appeasing Iran’s regional and global ambitions, the world is now facing a hyper-aggressive adversary that will not be deterred by airstrikes alone. The only long-term solution to the Houthi problem, and for any other conflict that is tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolution, is to remove and reverse Iran’s influence in the country. From Yemen to Gaza, Iran’s ideology and methodology is to exacerbate conflicts throughout the region and destabilize other countries.

As a historian of Yemenite Jewry, witnessing the Houthis write the final chapter of my community is bittersweet. It is bitter because so much of my people’s history is still buried and unexplored, including the ruins of the ancient Jewish Himyar Kingdom, which will likely stay hidden for a long time to come. It is sweet because my own life, and those of half a million other Yemenite Jews living largely in Israel today could not be more different from the sorry existence that would have befallen us had we not left in time.

I still hold out hope that this is not truly the end of the story. If Yemen can be wrested from Iranian control, the country could one day open back up to relations with the Jewish people, in the model of Morocco and the UAE thanks to the Abraham Accords. If the Zaidi tribes can return to their more tolerant roots and peace can be found in the country, a new chapter of Yemenite Jewish history may still be written.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.