Stephen M. Flatow is an attorney and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror (now available in an expanded paperback edition on Amazon.com) and is the chair of the Religious Zionists of America-Mizrachi. An oleh chadash, he divides his time between Jerusalem and New Jersey.
I still remember a photograph I saw more than sixty years ago.
I believe it was in Life or Look magazine, during the civil war then raging in Yemen. As I recall it, the severed head of an Egyptian soldier had been placed on a captured tank. Whether every detail of my memory has survived six decades intact, the impression certainly has.
Yemen seemed like another world: tribal, mountainous, impoverished and brutally violent.
For Jews, Yemen evokes another image entirely.
Between 1948 and 1950, nearly 50,000 Jews were brought from Yemen and neighboring areas to the newborn State of Israel in Operation Magic Carpet, also known as Operation On Wings of Eagles. Many had trekked across mountains and hundreds of miles of desert before reaching Aden and boarding airplanes for Israel.
Some came from communities so isolated from the modern world that the airplane carrying them to Israel represented technology almost beyond imagination.
Three-quarters of a century later, Yemen is again connected to Israel by objects flying through the sky.
This time they carry warheads.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the Iranian-backed Houthis are working to produce their own version of Iran’s Kheibar Shekan medium-range ballistic missile, using components obtained from Chinese suppliers. With a range approaching 1,200 miles, such a weapon puts Israel comfortably within reach.
Think about that transformation.
One of the poorest countries in the Arab world, a country whose very name once conjured images of isolation and underdevelopment, now hosts an armed movement capable of threatening Israel, Saudi Arabia and international commerce with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones. And it's people are as poor as they were then.
How did we get from Magic Carpet to missiles?
Part of the answer lies in Yemen’s history.
Yemen has actually been a strategic battleground for much longer than many Westerners realize. Its ancient civilizations prospered from trade. Its location near the entrance to the Red Sea made it important to empires. The British occupied Aden; the Ottoman Empire dominated much of the north.
And in the 1960s, Yemen became the scene of one of the Arab world’s bloodiest proxy wars.
After republican officers overthrew the monarchy in North Yemen in 1962, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser intervened to support the new republic. Saudi Arabia backed the royalists.
Nasser apparently expected a manageable expedition.
Instead, Egypt became trapped.
What began with a relatively modest deployment eventually grew to some 70,000 Egyptian troops. A modern army equipped with tanks and aircraft discovered that technological superiority did not guarantee victory against determined tribal fighters operating in mountains they knew intimately.
The war became known as Nasser’s Vietnam.
There was even a remarkable Israeli role in that conflict.
Israel had every reason to keep Nasser occupied. Egyptian soldiers fighting Yemenite royalists were soldiers unavailable for use against Israel. Beginning in 1964, Israeli aircraft secretly dropped weapons and other supplies to the royalists.
It was hardheaded strategic thinking: Israel understood that a war hundreds of miles away could directly affect its security.
That lesson remains relevant today.
The players have changed. The weapons have changed. The fundamental reality has not.
The Houthi movement began in northern Yemen as a Zaydi Shiite religious revivalist movement. It evolved into an insurgency, fought repeated wars against Yemen’s government and eventually seized the capital, Sana’a, in 2014.
Then Iran recognized an opportunity.
Tehran did not need to turn Yemen into a technologically advanced country. It needed only to help turn the Houthis into a technologically advanced fighting force.
That distinction is enormously important.
Iran supplied designs, weapons, expertise and training. Commercial and clandestine supply networks provided electronics, machinery and components. The Houthis learned to assemble weapons, modify them and increasingly manufacture portions themselves.
Now Chinese components reportedly are helping them move still further toward indigenous production of sophisticated missiles.
Yemen has not become Silicon Valley.
Modern warfare has become accessible to Yemen.
That may be one of the most important military developments of our time.
Once upon a time, the ability to threaten a country hundreds or thousands of miles away required an advanced industrial society. You needed enormous factories, sophisticated research centers, a huge military budget and extensive scientific infrastructure.
Not anymore.
A well-financed armed movement with a foreign sponsor, imported technology, competent engineers and access to international supply chains can acquire capabilities once reserved for nation-states.
And Yemen possesses something technology cannot manufacture: geography.
It overlooks the Bab el-Mandeb, one of the most important maritime chokepoints in the world. Ships moving between Asia and Europe through the Red Sea and Suez Canal pass virtually by its doorstep.
Give the organization controlling that territory missiles and drones, and suddenly a militia in one of the world’s poorest countries can affect global shipping, oil prices, airline routes and military deployments.
It can also threaten Israel.
And here is where Yemen offers a lesson that Western policymakers should consider before lecturing Israelis about the risks we ought to take for peace.
Israel really does live in a rough neighborhood.
That observation has become such a cliché that many people outside the Middle East no longer seem to hear it.
From Washington, London, Paris or Brussels, Yemen can appear far away. Lebanon is a small country on a map. Gaza is a narrow strip of land. Iran is hundreds of miles from Israel.
From an Israeli perspective, distance is measured differently.
A missile does not care about borders.
A drone does not care whether the organization launching it has a seat at the United Nations.
A terrorist organization does not need an air force if someone can provide it with precision weapons.
And a poor country does not necessarily present a poor-country military threat.
None of this means that Israel can never take any risks for peace. It does mean that those risks have to be calculated by the people who will bear the consequences when optimistic assumptions prove wrong.
Western governments can propose diplomatic experiments. Israelis live inside the laboratory.
We have seen supposedly temporary terrorist organizations become governments. We have seen rockets evolve into precision missiles. We have watched Iran build a network of proxies stretching across the region.
Now we are watching Yemen.
The country where Egypt once discovered that superior firepower could not easily defeat determined irregular fighters has again demonstrated the ability of unconventional forces to frustrate far richer and technologically superior nations.
Only the weapons have become vastly more dangerous.
When Yemen’s Jews made their way to Israel in 1949 and 1950, the airplane symbolized their passage from an isolated ancient community into the modern Jewish state.
Today something very different flies between Yemen and Israel.
Missiles.
That is quite a journey in three-quarters of a century.
But the larger lesson is not how far Yemen has advanced. It is how far the technology of war has spread.
And for Israel, surrounded by enemies learning that lesson every day, the neighborhood is not getting safer.
It is getting rougher.