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.
Read more on Politico: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/israel-yemen-shiites-117208.html