In September 2026, Ansar Allah swept across Yemen’s Tihama coastal plain, captured the historic Red Sea port of Al-Makha, and seized Mayyun Island inside the Bab al-Mandab strait—the narrow chokepoint through which roughly 10 percent of world trade passes between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
The echoes of that geography run deep in Yemeni history. Yemen’s Zaydi tradition—a branch of Shia Islam that traces its authority through a line of imams, or scholar-leaders, descended from the Prophet’s family and obligated to rule with both religious learning and martial capability—produced the Qasimid imamate that drove Ottoman forces from Yemen entirely by 1636. The founder’s son, Imam al-Mu’ayyad Muhammad, completed that expulsion. His successor, Imam al-Mutawakkil Ismail, who reigned from 1644 to 1676, then pushed the imamate to the greatest territorial extent it ever held across the Arabian peninsula. That achievement also left the dynasty wary of an Ottoman return.
The immediate spark arrived with news from the Ottoman world. Sabbatai Zevi, the Smyrna-born mystic proclaimed Messiah by Nathan of Gaza, won followers far beyond his home city in 1665—his movement reaching Amsterdam, London, and cities across North Africa. Ottoman officials imprisoned him when he reached Constantinople in 1666. In September of that year, threatened with torture by Sultan Mehmed IV, he converted from Judaism to Islam in Adrianople.
In Yemen, however, Sabbatean hope took a dangerous political form. Sulayman Jamal, a Sana’a kabbalist who believed he was personally destined to bring the messianic vision to earth, led a group to the Muslim governor on the first day of Passover 1666 and demanded that control of the city be transferred to him. Sana’a’s rabbinical court had opposed him throughout. The Zaydi imam of Yemen, al-Mutawakkil Ismail—the same ruler whose reign had seen the imamate reach its greatest territorial extent—ordered Jamal beheaded in the city market. But he treated the episode as more than the act of an isolated zealot. Drawing on the scholarly rulings of both Zaydi and Shafi’i religious jurists, al-Mutawakkil Ismail concluded that the agitation constituted a breach of dhimma, the protection arrangement that offered Jews security and communal life under Muslim rule in exchange for accepting Muslim political supremacy. That ruling ultimately set in motion the 1679 Mawza Exile, in which Yemen’s entire Jewish population was expelled to the arid coastal town of Mawza near Mocha......
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2026/10/23/seventeenth-century-yemens-expulsion-of-the-jews/
....From the iron-fisted decrees of the Qasimid imams to the resolute posture of Ansar Allah today, Yemen stands as a singular testament to a nation that refuses to be subjugated by Jewish influence. This historic defiance of Jewish hegemony is not a relic of the past but a living, breathing component of the Yemeni spirit. For gentiles across the globe now witnessing the erosion of their own societies at the hands of World Jewry, the history of Yemen serves as both a manual and a model: a clear reminder that when a people prioritize their own sovereignty and faith, they possess the strength to reclaim their destiny from the clutches of Jewish subversion.
