SINCE November 2023, when Israel began its genocidal attack on the Palestinians in Gaza, Ansar Allah – the group that governs Yemen – began a series of attacks on Israeli-affiliated ships in the Red Sea and in the Gulf of Aden as well as at Israel itself. These attacks – more than a hundred at last count – resulted in a dramatic decline in commercial shipping through the Suez Canal and in the closure of Israel’s only Red Sea port of Eliat. Ansar Allah sent a clear message to Israel and the US that the Yemeni people will stand with the Palestinians by any means necessary, even if the Yemenis pay a price for their solidarity.

Ansar Allah, a political group, is erroneously known as the Houthis, which is the name of the tribe from which many of the group’s followers come. The group, which is the government of Yemen, has said that it is attacking Israeli-affiliated ships and Israel because of the Israeli government’s assault on Gaza (with US assistance). When Israel stops firing on Gaza, Ansar Allah said, it would cease its fire on Israel. Indeed, between January 15, 2025 and March 18, 2025, because of the ceasefire between the Israelis and the Palestinian factions, Ansar Allah halted its attacks. As soon as Israel unilaterally resumed its attack on Gaza (with a barrage that killed 400 civilians, including 174 children in one day), Ansar Allah said that it would recommence its own attacks in solidarity with the Palestinians. It did not break its word, either when it honoured the ceasefire or when it resumed attacks when Israel broke the truce.

TEN YEARS OF WAR

Yemen has been at war for over ten years. First, there was the civil war that began in the immediate aftermath of what was then called the Arab Spring (2010-2012). This civil war resulted in the total collapse of the centralised State apparatus due to the strengthening of al-Qaeda in the country’s east, the impunity of US aerial attacks on Yemen, and corrupt incompetence of the government of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. Saudi Arabia began to bomb Yemen in 2015 to defend Hadi from the mutinies across the country, but principally in the north (by Ansar Allah) and in the east (by al-Qaeda). An agreement in Stockholm (Sweden) signed in December 2018 between Hadi’s government (represented by Khaled al-Yamani, his foreign minister) and Ansar Allah’s senior representative Mohammed Abdelsalam resulted in a brief respite. But it was not going to last. Saudi Arabia was not prepared to tolerate an adversary on its borders. The bombing started soon afterwards.

Almost the entire population of Yemen (close to forty million) came to rely on the limited humanitarian aid that docked at the beleaguered port of Hodeidah. A quarter of Yemen’s population had been displaced from their homes. Ansar Allah swept the country, knocking out both the government of Hadi from Aden and al-Qaeda from its hideouts in the desert towns. But this did not bring stability to Yemen. Saudi Arabia continued to bomb Yemen, treating it as its own Gaza. By the close of 2021, the United Nations found that nearly 400,000 had died with two thirds of them by cholera, famine, and the overall destruction of society (including the health system). In August 2021, UNICEF chief Henrietta Fore told the United Nations, ‘Being a child in Yemen is the stuff of nightmares. In Yemen, one child dies every ten minutes from preventable causes, including malnutrition and vaccine-preventable diseases’. So it was then, so it remains now.

THE SULTANS OF ARABIA

Saudi Arabia’s problem with the civil war in Yemen emerged because the leaders of the kingdom knew that if the government of Hadi fell, they would no longer have the kind of control of their southern border that they had enjoyed for decades. The arrival of the Ansar Allah movement to power threatened the Saudi sense of control over the Arabian Peninsula. That was the main motivation for the war that the Saudis started in 2015. Sectarianism became the excuse for a war that had to do with power over the territory.

The Zaidi community – known as the Houthis – had formed the Ansar Allah movement in the 1990s, after the unification of Yemen in 1990. They sought political power for their largely impoverished community that is mainly found in the mountains of Yemen’s north, which is on Saudi Arabia’s border. The Zaidis follow a variant of Shiaism that is close to the Hanafi Sunni Islamic school of thought. Their ideological leader – Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi (1959-2004) – forged a view of the world based on Islamic teachings and a great hatred of both the United States and Israel. When Hezbollah ejected Israel from Lebanon in 2000, Ansar Allah developed a fealty to Hezbollah’s form of politics, but it was not merely – as Saudi Arabia began to argue – an ‘Iranian proxy’. The killing of al-Houthi by the army of the Yemeni State in 2004 radicalised the group and led to its eventual takeover of the remnants of State institutions in 2015. Their role within the country cannot be explained either by their religion or by their relations with Iran but is a straightforward story of Yemeni politics based on Yemeni grievances. This is not an ancient story, but one that is rooted in the contemporary history of this small country at the edge of Arabia.

GENOCIDE IN GAZA

During the 2000s, when the United States threatened Iran, the Iranian security services built an insurance policy for themselves. This policy – shaped by General Qasem Soleimani (1957-2020) of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – was built around groups such as Hamas (Palestine), Hezbollah (Lebanon), Ansar Allah (Yemen), and a set of smaller groups in Syria. It was understood by these groups that if the US or Israel seriously threatened Iran with destruction, they would fire rockets at Israel and make it pay the price. The retaliation by Israel and the United States against this insurance policy began with the assassination of Soleimani by the United States in Iraq. It was followed by Israel’s systematic degradation of Hamas and Hezbollah in 2024, and by the assistance from Israel and the US to the al-Qaeda shaped Hay-at Tahrir al-Sham to take over the government in Syria in 2024. The only part of Soleimani’s insurance policy that remained was in Yemen. It is why the United States is now pummelling Yemen to destroy this remainder of the outer ring of Iran’s defences.

In the United States, a scandal has broken out about the use of a Signal group by national security adviser Michael Waltz, in which he added a journalist and where high officials of the US discussed the bombing of Yemen. Interestingly, liberal sections of the US – including the Democratic Party leaders – used the exposure of this Signal group to argue for more secrecy about warfare by the US rather than for more transparency. Indeed, nothing that was discussed in the Signal group was that much of a surprise to anyone, since the US had already been bombing Yemen over its attacks in the Red Sea and advance notice to the Yemenis would hardly have provided them with any kind of advantage. It shows the imperialist consensus in the US that the outrage was not about the bombing as such but about the revelations that a journalist had been added to a Signal group that casually discussed the death and destruction of the poorest but most dignified country in the Arab world.

But what the United States has failed to recognise is that the Yemeni people, led by Ansar Allah, see their rocket attacks at Israel and Israeli shipping as an essential duty in their defence of the Palestinian people. Any attack by the US, however destructive, is not going to break that will easily. After each attack, the Ansar Allah forces fire back either at Israel directly or at US ships, with their leadership threatening to turn the Red Sea into a ‘graveyard’.