The Arab world, not Israel, should be confronting Yemen’s Houthi fanatics

In one of the most audacious acts of the two-year Middle East war, Israel recently assassinated half the “cabinet” of the Houthis, the effective government of Yemen. The strike wiped out the group’s prime minister, several senior ministers and large sections of its military leadership in a feat of precision originating more than 1,000 miles away.

Yet what is most astonishing is not the reach of Israel’s military arm, but that it has taken this long for anyone to deal a decisive blow to a movement that has been among the most destructive forces in the region for more than a decade.

The Houthis have brought Yemen — already the Arab world’s poorest state — to the brink of annihilation. Since they seized much of the country in the mid-2010s, their war, and the famine and disease it unleashed, has killed an estimated 400,000 people. Millions more hover near starvation, dependent on aid shipments that the Houthis themselves regularly plunder.

American campus activists have proven oddly indifferent to this crime, which is in no way a “resistance” movement or a legitimate nationalist uprising. The Houthis are a fanatical criminal organization in religious garb, backed by Iran and dedicated to harming the West however they can.

The roots of the Houthis lie in Yemen’s northern Saada province, home to a branch of Shiite Islam known as Zaydism. For decades, they complained of marginalization at the hands of Yemen’s Sunni-dominated governments. When the Arab Spring upheavals toppled longtime strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2011, the Houthis surged into the power vacuum. By 2014, they had seized the nation’s capital, Sanaa. In 2015, Saudi Arabia and a coalition of Arab states intervened militarily to try to restore the ousted government. The war became one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with the Houthis showing no concern for civilian casualties on either side.

The Houthis entrenched themselves as the de facto rulers of northern and southwestern Yemen, taxing trade, controlling aid and building a military machine with Iranian help. They also exported instability outward — firing missiles into Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and, in recent years, escalating attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea.

These assaults threatened the Suez Canal route that carries up to 15 percent of global trade and about 30 percent of container traffic, forcing shipping giants to reroute around Africa, driving up prices for oil, insurance and goods of all kinds — and hurting Egypt, the largest Arab country, which depends on the canal.

For years, the world fretted but largely stood by. Western governments denounced, aid agencies documented, the U.N. convened fruitless talks. But the Houthis carried on. After the Palestinian jihadist group Hamas launched its current war against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Houthis went into overdrive, launching wave after wave of missile and drone attacks on Israel.

When President Trump returned to office, he sought a quick foreign-policy win. In June, he brokered a deal in which the Houthis pledged to cease attacks on commercial shipping. To Trump’s credit, the deal succeeded in calming that crisis. But it had a gaping hole: It did not cover Israel.

Israel has succeeded in intercepting most Houthi attacks against it — only one person has been killed, by a drone strike, about a year ago. And Israel had other fish to fry — its long campaign against Hamas in Gaza; its successful war last fall against a now-degraded Hezbollah in Lebanon; and the war against Iran three months ago, which set back Tehran’s nuclear program.

Moreover, the Jewish State has no quarrel with Yemen. Yet the Houthis, intoxicated by their slogan — “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, curse on the Jews, victory to Islam” — have seemed implacable. Israel’s patience finally ran out.

The Houthis’ top leader, Abdul Malik al-Houthi, remains standing, and the group seems utterly unfazed by the disaster. In recent days, they have stepped up missile launches at Israel. The Houthis are doubling down, and dragging Yemenis into it with them.

This reflects the pathology seen in Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamic fundamentalist groups such as the Afghan Taliban, which endured two decades of assault by the world’s top militaries, and are somehow back in power in Kabul. Just like fellow travelers ISIS and Al Qaeda, the Houthis evince an indifference to death and an ability either to indoctrinate their desperate societies or to terrify them into submission.

Israel’s attack, which in normal times would be an inadmissible violation of norms, was in this context wholly justified. Considering the Houthis’ reaction, the war is likely to intensify. If Israeli strikes harm civilians in Yemen and world opinion turns against Israel on this front as well, the Houthis will be nothing but delighted at the destruction.

It is a disgrace that the world leaves this to Israel. Trump and the West’s craven deals with these miscreants miss the point. Their brazen assault on the world economy should be punished so severely that no one will ever dare contemplate such moves again.

And as for the Arab world, the Houthis embody the danger of leaving jihadist movements unchallenged: they metastasize, drawing in regional powers, wrecking economies and holding entire nations hostage to their cult of death. Critical to their efforts are selective readings of their scriptures.

Leaders, clerics and educators should step up and draw a bright line between Islam as a faith and jihadism as a pathology. Arab governments, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, must use their influence in Yemen not only to contain the Houthis militarily but to expose their ideology as ruinous and un-Islamic. Yemen’s next generation needs education and opportunity so that they see reasons to live rather than to die.

The Arab League’s recent call for Hamas to disarm was a hopeful sign. But the reckoning must go further. Just as Europe after 1945 confronted fascism head-on, the Middle East must confront jihadism. Until it does, groups like the Houthis will keep rising from the rubble, indifferent to death and dragging nations down with them.

Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe-Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem and the author of two books.