The Yemenite Houthi rebels, the Iran-backed Shiite sect that captured the capital city of Sanaa in January, include “Death to Israel! A curse on the Jews!” in their slogan and predictably blame Israel for the current Saudi-led campaign against them. But 50 years ago, in a different Yemenite civil war (1962-70), Israel supported the country’s erstwhile monarch—who belonged to the same sect. Oren Kessler explains:

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 . . . [Egyptian president Gamal Abdel] 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.” . . .

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, [the Yemenite king] 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 fourteen 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.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.