The first combat action in space, the oldest war
The first combat action in space, the oldest war
The long and winding line from slings and stones to ballistic missiles
When Israel’s Arrow missile defense system shot down a ballistic missile launched by the Houthi Movement from Yemen last week, it marked the first combat engagement in space. This little noticed event will be better appreciated in the years to come, like those moments when we look back and see a before and an after.
At first glance, what’s most striking about the event is the combatants involved. Would anyone have predicted that this first ballistic missile would’ve been fired by Yemeni tribal militia? In a war being fought in the Levant?
But after a moment’s reflection, this makes as much sense as any other possibility. There is perhaps no other place in the world where you can trace the current conflicts so far back with such a straight line. Well, not straight. It’s rather winding, convoluted, and knotted. But a continuous line, it is.
Outside Sana’a, Yemen, there are ruins of a once vibrant Jewish community. All that remains now are faded mud walls and outlines of old foundations, but against the surrounding green and rocky plain, it stands out. According to legend, Sana’a was founded by Shem, Noah’s son. It was later ruled by the Queen of Sheeba, and is possibly the longest continually occupied municipality on the planet, sitting at the crossroads of east and west since civilization began.
After the third failed rebellion against the Romans in the 1st Century CE, Jews fled to Sana’a in large numbers. By the 4th and 5th centuries, even the kings were converting to Judaism. Today, the locals in Sana’a refer to the ruins as ‘The Jewish Cemetery.’ The place is rather revered, though not so much with solemnity than with the good-natured respect and graciousness often given by the descendants of conquerors toward the long dead and gone conquered.
The story is similar in Afghanistan. To this day, the largest ethnic group in the country – the Pashtuns, also called Pathans – claim descent from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. When Robert Byron (who, like his namesake, died young on the periphery of a great war) rode and walked through Afghanistan in the 1930s, he noted that Afghans sometimes considered themselves Semitic and sometimes Aryan, depending on the subject at hand. (Byron suggests - and my experience agrees - the subjects depend as such: politics, then Aryan - if war, history, art, then Semitic.)
According to legend, Saul had a grandson named Afghana who, after his father died, was raised by David and later became the chief commander of David’s army. Following the Babylonian captivity, the sons of Afghana withdrew to the mountains in the east and there remained until the time of the Prophet Mohammed when Khalid bin al-Walid called in their banners.1
Khalid bin al-Walid was one of Mohammed’s closest companions, the first great Arab conqueror, and also a descendant of Afghana. So, when asked by Mohammed to raise an Army, he went first to his distant cousins in the eastern mountains in Afghanistan. They answered, and under the command of “one (named) Qais… waged war most gallantly on the Prophet’s behalf.” The Prophet was so grateful that he “lavished praise on them,” and said that God would surely make the descendants of Qais so numerous, and their attachment to the faith would be so strong, “that it would be like the wood upon which they lay the keel when constructing a ship, which seaman call Pahtan.” Thus, the descendants of Saul in the eastern mountains past Persia became Pathans.
That almost none of this legend of Afghana is true proves the point yet further: the importance of origin stories and deep Jewish roots as far afield as Yemen and Afghanistan. Consider the fact that the Afghan chroniclers who drafted this narrative felt compelled to tie the story of their people directly to Saul - the first monarch of the Kingdom of Israel. Consider also the years covered. Saul lived sometime in the 11th century BCE. The Babylonian Captivity was in the 6th century BCE. Mohammed lived in the 7th century CE, and these stories were not written down in Afghanistan until sometime after 1,200 CE. Eighteen centuries passed from Saul to Mohammed, and another half millennia from that point to when this was all put to parchment. A story must be deeply rooted to pass through so many generations, so many families.
The book that came out of Robert Byron’s trek to Afghanistan, The Road to Oxiana, began in what was then Mandatory Palestine, the western hub of the Silk Road. Oxiana was - along with Ariana, Bactria - an ancient name for the region stretching across northern Afghanistan; variously conquered through history by the Greeks, Persians, Arabs, Timurids, Mongols, Russians, others. The book is a travelogue, but it’s as much a journey through time as it is space; the ghosts of the past are ever-present and the entire journey has the feel of an end, or beginning, of something.
At one point, Byron notes the “infection of uncontrolled detail” seeping into the book, which he blames on reading Proust whilst in Turkestan. Pages later, he writes that he wished he could endow a prize for the “sensible traveler” who could cover the Marco Polo trail (from Palestine to Afghanistan, in this case) while consuming three books a week and a bottle a wine a day. “That man might tell one something about the journey.” This was in contrast, he wrote, to the well-funded academic and scientific expeditions which carry to the region all the instruments and equipment known to man, yet learn nothing. All of which I note just to give a sense of Byron’s eye on the road to Oxiana.
The book opens with a description of his departure from Trieste, Italy, in August 1933:
(It) was attended by scenes first performed in the Old Testament. Jewish refugees from Germany were leaving for Palestine… the boys and girls struck up a solemn hymn, in which the word Jerusalem was repeated on a note of triumph… The crowd on shore joined in… At that moment Ralph Stockley, (a deputy) to the High Commissioner on Palestine, also arrived to find that he missed the boat. His agitation, and subsequent pursuit of the launch, relieved much of the tension.
Tension, indeed. Recall that Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the same year that Hannah Arendt - who would later write The Origins of Totalitarianism - began work with the German Zionist Organization to publicize the brutality of the Nazis. It’s ever present in the background of the opening pages where Byron writes one moment about the decoration of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem (“harmonious and restrained, almost severe”), then in the next we see the SS Martha Washington where the conditions of the Jews already desperate to escape Europe were such that “had (they) been animals, a good Englishman would have informed the RSPCA.” This is like Byron, very British, at once both descriptive and removed.
Later, walking on King David Street on his way to the Dome of the Rock, Byron finds “the desert Arab, furiously mustached…” the Arab woman, face tattooed with henna and dress embroidered, the Orthodox Jew, the Greek priest, the Latin father, the monks from Egypt, Abyssinia, and Armenia; and ever in the background a camera-strapped tourist. He then writes, “I don’t know how long they think the Arabs will suffer a single Jew to exist once the English went.”
We look back now and know the question would’ve been better put to the Europeans. Or the Soviets, from whom 30,000 Jewish refugees fled to Afghanistan in the early 1930s. Or Afghanistan, which that year would begin confiscating Jewish property and developing close ties to the Germans; the latter having determined – in an effort to project power between Russia and south Asia – that the Afghans were in fact Aryan (as Byron found of the Afghans themselves on the subject of Germany) and natural allies of the Nazis.
That same year on the other end of the Silk Road from Afghanistan, Yemen was at war with Saudi Arabia, as it would be again in 2014; a war in which the Houthis captured Sana’a, and, according to the UN in 2022, drove out all remaining Jews save one. In Afghanistan, the last Jew left in 2021, with the withdrawal of US forces. Anyway, the point is, by 1933, the Jews had long since internalized questions about their existence.
Osama bin Laden had a deep fondness for Yemen. Both his father and youngest wife were born there, and much of his inner circle was Yemeni at one time or another. He often referenced a passage in the Qu’ran that predicted the rise of a great army in Yemen’s Hadhramaut valley that would defeat the enemies of Islam and pave the way for the return of the Mahdi (the final leader in Islam who will appear after the return of Jesus, who is known to Muslims as Isa ibn Maryam) to rule the world in peace and justice.2
The Hadhramaut valley is in southern Yemen, running along the Gulf of Aden. Like so many names in that part of the world, there are debates about the etymology. Jews relate the name to Genesis and Hazarmaveth, another descendent of Shem. I vaguely recall Yemenis telling me that the name developed from the Arabic for “death has come” (a suspicion reinforced by Wikipedia – also, death to something feels like a common trend for ancient names from the Arabian Peninsula to the Oxiana).
The Houthis are a Zaydi Shia Muslim tribe from the northern Yemeni highlands, near the Saudi border and the Red Sea. Often called The Houthi Movement, or Ansar Allah, the group was founded by the followers of Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, a tribal and political leader who was assassinated by the Yemeni government in 2004 for allegedly plotting a rebellion.
It was not the first time a Zaydi group was accused of rebellion. The Zaydis are a sub-sect of Shia Islam who have been a minority on the Arabian Peninsula since Zayd ibn Ali‘s unsuccessful rebellion against the Umayyad Caliphate in the 8th century CE and their expulsion to the southern (in reference to the Umayyads – northern when in reference to Sana’a) highlands. Centuries later, the Zaydis fighting Ottoman rule would roll boulders down the tight passes at soldiers and horse drawn artillery, crushing and pinning animals and man alike for a slow, screaming death unless put from their misery. An Ottoman folk-song captured the sense of things:
Yemen, your desert is made of sand
What did you want from my son?
I don’t know your way or your sign
I am just missing my son
O Yemen, damned Yemen
(It reminds me of Afghanistan where during the Soviet Jihad the Mujahideen claimed to throw rocks from the peaks onto the Soviet helicopters struggling in the thin air. A large rock striking a rotor blade can be fatal at that altitude, killing half a dozen men and a multi-million-dollar machine with a slingshot. Long before the Soviets, Kipling wrote: When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, An' go to your Gawd like a soldier).
A government minister in Sana’a remarked wryly to me in 2010 that the Zaydi ride down every hundred years or so to capture and plunder Sana’a, then return to the mountains when they grow weary of administration. The time previous was 1905 when Imam Yahya led a Zaydi force in a siege of the city that led to the death by starvation of two-thirds of the population. According to Yemen by Victoria Clark, “the city’s 8,000- strong community of Jews were hit especially hard. On a visit to Sana’a after the siege… (a British) diplomat reported that the city’s ghetto ‘was like the dream of some haunted painter. Many of the men were still skin and bone, and the crowd of dark faces with cavernous cheeks, half-hidden by twisted, black elf-locks that hung on either side, begging eyes and clutching hands, were horrible.’” Just five years before, foreign diplomats had called Sana’a the finest city in the Ottoman empire save Bagdad.3
That siege was eventually broken by the Ottomans. But the next time the Zaydis marched on Sana’a was in 2015 (my Yemeni inoculator was off by ten years, it seems), under the banner of the Houthis. This time they took the city, triggering another Yemeni civil war and another war with the Saudis.
The question is: how did the Zaydi militias go from boulders to ballistic missiles in the span of a century? For the answer, go back to 1979, the year of the Iranian Revolution.
In the US, we tend to remember the event as a jarring humiliation, ranging from the hostages in the US Embassy to the failure of Desert One (which, incidentally, is another key date as this marks the beginning of the Joint Special Operations command that would change special operations forever). But for the Sunni Arabs, the establishment of a Shia Islamic Republic in Iran was a strategic earthquake.
Under the rule of Pahlavi Dynasty from 1925 - 1979, Iran was generally secular, with an identity that was more Persian than Shia. But the creation a Shia Islamic Republic in 1979 stirred fears in the Sunni Arab world that Iran would reignite tensions between Sunni and Shia that dated to the schism following the Prophet Mohammed’s succession in 632 (the Shia believed that Mohammed’s successor should be from his family, and supported Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law; whereas the Sunnis, who are 80-90% of Muslims, wanted a successor chosen by the elite of the early community).
This was especially true in neighboring Iraq, which had a substantial Shia population. Fearing that the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, would foment rebellion among Iraq’s Shia, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980. The entire Arab and western world backed Iraq. Iran was left with two allies: Syria and Libya.
After the Iran-Iraq war ended (with 1-2 million dead, including untold numbers of Iranian child soldiers who were used to trigger mines so advancing platoons behind them could safely cover the ground) Iran resolved never again be so isolated, and began building proxy forces among Shia populations across the region; including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Badr Brigades in Iraq, and others.
For sake of clarity, a pause here to focus on a few broad factors at work in the last two decades in the Middle East. First, the destabilizing effects of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequent withdrawal ultimately gave Iran vastly more influence in the region and expanded support to proxies across the Shia crescent.
Second, increasing frustration among Arab (and American) leaders at the corruption and intransigence of the Palestinian leadership led to decreased Arab (and American) attention on the Palestinian issue.
Third, Benjamin Netanyu’s governing coalition includes settlers who do not support a two state solution and have rapidly expanded settlements in the West Bank (in part to make a two-state solution impossible, in part because they believe Jews have a divine right to the land). Further, Netanyahu’s coalition has pushed for increasing Israeli control over al-Aqsa compound, which is the third holiest site in Islam. This is in violation of an agreement dating to the Ottoman Empire and endorsed by the UN in 1947 that says Muslims shall have exclusive control over the site; an agreement that was designed to reduce religious tensions as the area includes the Dome of the Rock and was built on the ruins of the Jewish Temple destroyed by the Romans.
Fourth, Israel’s growing economic power, a desire by the Gulf States to diversify their economies, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s effort to modernize Saudi Arabia; these all led to closer economic and diplomatic ties in the region. In 2020, Israel normalized relations with multiple Gulf States, and the US had been working to facilitate a similar deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel. (If the latter had been successful and included a path to a Palestinian state as the Saudis claimed it must, then it would have been the most important diplomatic development in the region since 1947 - President Biden has said he believes negotiations will resume at some point, though Saudi Arabia did announce a pause in talks after the attack on 10/7).
The combination of these factors has both increased a sense of desperation among the Palestinians and increased Iranian influence. Hamas leaders – who are opposed to a two-state solution4 – called warming relations between Israel and the Arab states a “stab in the back.” For its part, Iran in recent years further consolidated power among Shia groups and strengthened relations with Sunni Palestinians, especially Hamas. In the last few years, Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah have become as well armed, equipped, and trained as many nation states. Further, many analysts observed that a deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel would have been extremely damaging to Iran’s ambitions in the region. This led many to assume that Iran directly encouraged the attack on 10/7 in an effort to force an end to Saudi-Israeli negotiations.
However, Tehran immediately and strongly denied any foreknowledge of the attack, both publicly and privately. As a friend of mine recently back from Israel, said, Tehran was terrified that Israeli missiles were already on the way and couldn’t get a denial out fast enough.
Consider also that Iran’s economy is struggling after years of sanctions, and internal discontent is straining political stability. In March of this year, Iran reestablished diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia in a deal that Tehran viewed as an important step in reversing its diplomatic and economic isolation. In the view of one person with whom I spoke who has deep knowledge of the region, Iran is not eager to risk war with Israel, the reversal of newly reestablished ties with Saudi Arabia, nor further sanctions from the US. This does not mean that Iran is not complicit in the Hamas attack on Israel; they certainly are that given the history of support. But assuming they did not have a direct role, where does that leave us?
Possibly worse off than it seems at first glance. If Iran has full control over their proxies, then these proxies can be deterred through threat of force against Iran. Indeed, this is the current state of affairs, and it is why Hezbollah and the Houthis have engaged in the fight just enough to demonstrate solidarity with the Palestinians, but not so much to merit a stronger reaction from Israel or the US. The danger is that Iran will have its hand forced by events on the ground, and/or that Hezbollah and the Houthis will be tempted to escalate without Iran’s consent. If they (whether Hezbollah and Houthi leadership, or their rank and file) really see a chance to damage Israel in a way that all the Arab armies have failed to do since 1948, the momentum may gather such that its impossible to stop. In short: If the only thing preventing escalation is the degree to which Tehran can and will retain control, then the situation is tenuous indeed.
Consider also that for decades Israel was a nation of less than ten million that had been invaded or threatened multiple times by nations whose populations total 200 million. Now add to that Islamist militias who, as the Houthis do, have slogans that say: Death to America, Death to Israel, Cursed be the Jews. And who also have more than 100,000 rockets and missiles in their stores. Even Arab diplomats are quietly saying that Hamas must be destroyed or it will embolden the other militias in the region in a way that no one will be able to control.
Jake Sullivan, the President’s National Security Advisor, took much criticism for his recent essay published before 10/7 in which he said the Middle East was quieter than it had been in decade. But he wasn’t entirely wrong. The Abraham Accords in 2020 were historic agreements, and talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel seemed promising. But how often in history has the moment before historic peace been the cause of historic war by those for whom peace would cost too much. Hamas, for whom death is preferred to two-state peace, has brought us close. Should Hamas survive, it may embolden the Houthis and Hezbollah in a way that will put the entire region over the brink. Indeed, not only Riyadh but also Tehran may be quietly hoping that Israel succeeds. If Israel fails, then historic war it may be.
Ian Allen is the CEO and cofounder of Civil
The Pathans, 1958, Sir Olaf Carol, Pg. 5.
The Prophecy is from the Haddith of Aden-Abyan. Today, the Abyan governate is distinct from the Hadhramaut, and Aden is a city along the coast. Like most legends, the geography is flexible through history. Whether Abyan is Hadhramaut is Yemen depends often on the speaker and the story and the time.
Yemen, Dancing on the Heads of Snakes, 2010, Victoria Clark, Pg. 41
Khaled Meshaal, leader-in-exhile of Hamas, presented in 2017 a new Hamas charter which claimed to accept the 1967 borders, while stopping short of recognizing Israel. Many analysts at the time suggested this was an effort to reconcile disagreement between more moderate Hamas political leaders and hardline military leaders. Since 10/7, analysts with whom I spoke did not believe that the Hamas political wing was aware of the attack, and that the 2017 charter recognizing the 1967 borders was hollow. For more on the charter: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/5/2/hamas-accepts-palestinian-state-with-1967-borders