Why are the Houthis attacking Israel? 

By Jonathan Spyer

Last week, Israel made history when its Arrow [Jetz] air defense system intercepted a missile heading toward its territory in space. While this first Arab-Israeli battle in space captured the imagination of many media outlets, the identity of the force responsible for launching the missile was equally notable.

The Yemeni Houthis, also known as the Ansar Allah movement since 2012, immediately claimed responsibility for the launch. It was the organization's fourth attack against Israel since October 7.

For many Israelis, the participation of this distant organization in the current war effort against Israel is one of the most mysterious, even bizarre, aspects of the current moment. No one is entirely surprised by Lebanese Hezbollah's desire to try to pin down Israeli forces in the North as part of an effort to relieve pressure on its ally in Gaza.

But the Houthis? What could they possibly be looking for? And no less interesting: how did a Yemeni insurgent movement acquire the ability to launch a series of drones and missiles, including long-range ballistic missiles, against Israel?

What do the Houthis want?

Answering this question requires understanding a little more about the Ansar Allah/Houthi movement itself, and also its relations with its patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Houthis are an Arab tribe from Yemen, originating in the province of Saada, in the northwest of the country. Along with around 35% of the Yemeni population, they are adherents of a stream of Shia Islam known as Zaidiya, which differs significantly from the better-known Twelver or Imami stream professed by Iranians and most Arab Shia Muslims.

The political movement that bears his name was established by tribal leader Hussein Badr al Din al Houthi in the 1990s. Then, in 2004, he turned to insurgent activities against the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Saleh, also a Zaydi Shiite Muslim, was a military officer who took power in 1978 and presided over the reunification of Yemen in 1990. His regime was backed by the United States and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the Houthis had Iran's support from the beginning. In 2004, Hussein al Houthi was assassinated by Saleh's forces. Leadership of the movement and its insurgency then passed to Abd al Malik al Houthi, Hussein's brother, who continues to lead it today.

This background is important because it is noteworthy that Ansar Allah resembles Hamas and differs from the Lebanese or Iraqi Hezbollah movements in that it is a client of Tehran but not entirely a proxy [proxy] of this one. Hezbollah in Lebanon, Kataib Hezbollah in Iraq and the other militias that resemble them, such as Badr in Iraq, are direct franchises of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran (IRGC).

Tehran established and managed them during their formative period. They directly support the Iranian form of government and would have little basis for their existence without financial and other support from Iran.

Hamas, on the other hand, is a movement with genuine roots in the local Sunni Palestinian context. Ansar Allah/Houthis, similarly, emerged from an authentic local context and has distinct ideological and religious roots from the various IRGC franchise groups. For this reason, for a time it was common to hear analyzes describing the emphasis on Ansar Allah's ties with Tehran as too schematic.

However, such criticisms tended to overlook the fact that (again like Hamas), Ansar Allah's military capabilities do not derive from its local status, but entirely from its alliance with Tehran.

As a result of Iranian weapons and training, Ansar Allah was able to take advantage of the period of internal turmoil in Yemen in 2011, first participating in the riots and demonstrations that toppled the Saleh regime and then, starting in 2014, joining forces with the deposed Saleh, and taking control of the capital city, Sanaa, and much of northern and western Yemen.

The Houthis turned on Saleh in 2017 and executed him. The 2015 Saudi intervention failed to recapture areas lost to Ansar Allah, but it averted the disaster of an Iranian-backed militia taking control of the Bab al Mandeb Strait, a strategic chokepoint between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. .

Yemen remains divided between the Iran-backed Houthis/Ansar Allah, the official Yemeni government backed by Saudi Arabia, and the Southern Transitional Council separatists backed by the United Arab Emirates.

Iran officially denies arming the Houthis, but those denials are no longer taken seriously. The weight of evidence is formidable and shows that Tehran has in recent years been supplying, via sea routes, small arms, missiles and rockets that have allowed the organization to transform itself from a heterogeneous militia into a force that can attack Israel and Arabia. Saudi.

Tim Lenderking, UN special envoy for Yemen, told Reuters in May 2023: “The Iranians have continued to smuggle weapons and narcotics into this conflict, and we are very concerned that this will continue, despite the benefits that would be obtained from a Saudi-Iran deal. So I think that's a space we have to watch.”

In recent years, Iran has begun using Ansar Allah as its covert [or deniable] client for its strategic-level attacks against its regional enemies. Until the current war, the most famous example of this was the September 14, 2019 attack on Saudi oil processing facilities in Abqaiq and Khureis.

In this sophisticated two-wave attack, a swarm of drones and cruise missiles overwhelmed Saudi air defenses and caused heavy damage to the two facilities. Ansar Allah claimed responsibility. The sophistication and scope of the attacks led to this claim being immediately dismissed by US, Saudi and Western officials, who concluded that Iran itself was behind the attack.

Ansar Allah is particularly useful to Iran in such attacks for several reasons. Firstly, and obviously, Iran does not want to provoke retaliation against itself and is indifferent to the lives of those who are part of or live under its proxies [proxies].

But the Houthi-controlled part of Yemen has additional advantages. Iran controls or maintains military capabilities in several Arab states: it is dominant in Iraq and Lebanon and has freedom of action in parts of Syria. But in these three areas, the proxy [proxy] of Iran must take into account the complex local political realities and the interests of other actors: the Russians and the Assad regime in Syria, Shiite populations not aligned with Iran and non-Shiites with their own political connections and interests both in Lebanon like in Iraq.

In Yemen, this is not the case. There, the country is divided, and in areas controlled by the Houthis, the movement maintains a monopoly on power through overtly coercive means, with only the flimsiest pretense of a formal political process. And while a UN embargo against arms transfers to the Houthis has been in place since 2014, its enforcement remains poor.

For these reasons, the Houthis have become Tehran's preferred tool for carrying out strategic attacks by proxy [proxies]. The Houthis/Ansar Allah's use of ballistic missiles against Israel brings this process to its highest point yet.

The question that remains is whether Israel and the West will continue to bow to the obvious fiction of the Houthis' independent advanced missile capability, and for how long. On the one hand, this is clear absurdity. On the other hand, pointing out that would mean acknowledging that Iran has launched drone and missile attacks against Israel – that is, carried out clear acts of war – on four occasions since October 7.

Source: The Jerusalem Post