42 Middle East and Africa The EconomistFebruary 3rd 2018
(^2) Yet Mr Netanyahu will probably not
water down his policy much more. His vot-
ers like it and he worries that rival parties
might outflank him on the right. Last year
Gallup, a pollster, named Israel near the
bottom of an index in which it measured
people’s acceptance of immigrants. Some
fret that refugees are causing crime; others
that theywill dilute the Jewish state. Ayelet
Shaked, the justice minister and a member
of the nationalist-religious Jewish Home
Party, gibed that “Israel is not Africa’s em-
ployment agency”.
Such concerns are overblown. Israel’s
booming economy has driven unemploy-
ment so low that the country is short of la-
bour. And the addition of 34,000 Africans
will hardly transform the character of a
population of almost 9m. In any case, the
flow of African migrants to Israel through
Egypt ended in 2013, after Mr Netanyahu
erected a new border fence.
Yet the debate is widening cleavages be-
tween those championing Jewish nation-
alism and what others deem the Jewish
values of charity and humanism that also
underpin the state. Yehuda Bauer, a former
director of Israel’sHolocaust museum, Yad
Vashem, has denounced Israel’s policy of
herding African migrants into “modern
concentration camps” in the desert.
Critics also contrast this with Israel’s
Law of Return, one of the underpinnings
of Israel’s existence which grants citizen-
ship to Jews no matter where they are
born. Under it some 27,000 Jews immigrat-
ed to Israel last year. Yet this two-tiered sys-
tem provides no standard process of natu-
ralisation for non-Jews. That may have
made sense when Israel offered a vital ha-
ven for persecuted Jews and could not af-
ford to open its doors more widely. But 70
years on it is a prosperous country in need
of workers. Meanwhile most Jews around
the world live in peace and do not want to
exercise their right to move to Israel. 7
An uncomfortable comparison
I
T WAS typical Aden. Bomb blasts, gunfire
and fireworks lit up the night in a chaos
of conflict and celebration. Southerners
marched through Yemen’s second city pro-
claiming independence from northern
taskmasters. Tanks punctured their cries
with shells. Soldiers of the United Arab
Emirates (UAE) joined in the mayhem,
raining artillery fire on bases loyal to the
vestiges of a central government that they
had supposedly entered Yemen to protect.
The fighting that began on January 28th
subsided after two days, leaving at least 36
dead. For the second time in three years of-
ficials loyal to the titular president, Abd
Rabbo Mansour Hadi, prepared to flee
from their offices. AsThe Economistwent
to press Mr Hadi’s presidential guard held
out on justone small hilltop. But his gov-
ernment’s bases, the lucrative container
port and the refinery were all under con-
trol of the Security Belt, a southern rebel
militia trained and armed by the UAE.
As a result, Yemen is left with three cen-
tres of power and Mr Hadi’s coalition is
split in two. The Houthis, a Shia rebel
group supported by Iran, rule Sana’a, Ye-
men’s capital, which they captured in 2014.
Ali Mohsin, a veteran warlord and the
vice-president, oversees the remains of Ye-
men’s national army from the city of Ma-
rib (see map), east of Sana’a, together with
his allies from Islah, a clutch of Islamist-
leaning northern Sunni tribes. And now
the Security Belt’s political arm, the South-
ern Transitional Council, isruling the roost
in Aden under a former governor, Aidarus
al-Zoubaidi, and his Emirati patrons.
The big loser is Mr Hadi. He has no loy-
alistsleft on the ground. “An emperor with
no clothes,” sneers a foreign observer.
From his gilded exile in Riyadh, the Saudicapital, he still has choices. He could pro-
claim Yemen a federation and name Mr
Zoubaidi as his deputy. Though Mr Zou-
baidi has raised the flag of the former
South Yemen, he is tempering his separat-
ist rhetoric for now. He says he just wants
Mr Hadi to shuffle his cabinet to bring his
men on board.
But Yemen’s cracks go deeper. Bar the
past 28 years, the south and north have
rarely been united. For centuries Sunni
Muslim fighters manned ribats, or citadels,
on the coast and in the Hadhramaut region
in the south and east. Their aim was to stop
the northern imamate, which followed a
Shia version of Islam known as Zaydi,
from encroaching. Britain ruled the south,
with its capital in Aden, as a separate colo-
ny for 128 years. South Yemen became a
state of its own when Britain withdrew.
Unification of north and south in 1990
was meant to be a merger. But southerners
saw it as a takeover by the more populous
north. Even now, southerners consider
themselves more cosmopolitan and north-
erners asqat-chewing highland tribesmen.
They regard Mr Mohsin and his friends in
Islah less as allies against the Houthis than
as occupiers set on pilfering their oil. “The
Yemen army should go and fight in the
north, and leave the south to defend its
own land,” says Haider al-Attas, a former
president of South Yemen.
In an effort to marshal the south under
his rule, Mr Zoubaidi has held an assembly
in Aden for representatives of the south’s
six provinces, and staged rallies in places
Mr Hadi never visited during his six years
in office. Although expelled from Aden, Mr
Mohsin and Islah still have bases in the
south that can threaten the separatists.
Southern warlords, too, will be loth to
surrender autonomy to Mr Zoubaidi. Just
as Aden wants to cut loose from the north,
many southern cities crave independence
from Aden. Hadhramis would like their
provincial capital, Mukalla, to leave them
alone. In turn Mahra, an eastern province,
fears Hadhramaut. A Yemeni federation
may be better than an anarchic break-up.
But neither Mr Zoubaidi nor Mr Hadi may
be able to halt the slide into chaos. 7Disintegrating YemenAnarchy beckons
MARIB
Yemen’s second city follows the
rebellious example of the capitalHajjahMazraqAreas where
al-Qaeda
operatesAmranBeihanSAUDI ARABIAYEMENDJIBOUTIOMANER
ITREASana’aAdenTaizHADHRAMAUTMAHRAMukallaal-ShihrBalhafGhayda
SeiyunWadiaSharorahMaribHodeidaMokhaSaadaGulf of AdenArabian SeaRed
SeaSocotra (to Yemen)Former north-
south Yemen
borderAreas where
al-Qaeda
operatesSparsely
populatedAreas of control, January 2017
Houthi Saudi-led coalition
Sources: Risk Intelligence; Critical Threats Project150 km