The morality of Yemeni resistance to the Gaza genocide
The US and its vassal states are dealing with a very different foe in Yemen.
Imagine being the military target of the American superpower, its British vassal, and two of their staunchest allies in your neighbourhood, for nearly a decade during which your multiple cities are constantly bombarded with incendiary weapons that kill innocent civilians by the thousands, push your country into a horrific civil war, render valuable farmland in your poverty-stricken country unusable, lead to outbreaks of epidemics like cholera, and leave millions of your fellow countrymen on the brink of human-induced famine that threatens to wipe off entire bloodlines. Imagine a brutality so depraved that it produces sickening images of starving children with skin barely hanging onto their bones and eyes seemingly about to pop out of their sockets.
Yemenis don’t have to imagine. This has been their lived experience for nearly the entirety of the last decade.
However, despite facing years-long brutality and its reality as the Middle East’s “poorest” country, Yemen has emerged as the only state that has militarily attempted to prevent the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Within days of Israel’s extermination campaign in the besieged enclave, Ansarallah (also known as the Houthis) who control significant parts of Yemen and nearly all of its state apparatus — including the armed forces — launched a series of missile and drone attacks on October 19 in a bid to halt the genocide.
A month later, Ansarallah showed that they were willing to go even further as they started a naval blockade of ships meant for Israel and seized an Israeli cargo ship in the Red Sea in spectacular fashion.
Their efforts to put an end to the Israeli barbarity have only escalated since then as the Zionist regime has shown no intent of halting its genocidal campaign despite the International Court of Justice’s provisional measures asking it to do so, and near-universal condemnation of its actions by most of the world, barring the United States and its bloodthirsty, immoral vassals.
Unlike the US and the rest of the West where the actions of the state appear to bear no resemblance to the demands of their fervently anti-genocide populations, whom they claim to represent in their so-called democratic regimes, the actions of Ansarallah are backed by the enthusiastic support of the Yemeni people, who have been as steadfast in their resolve to denounce the barbarity in Gaza as their leaders have been in using the full force of their military prowess to stop it. Yemenis have marched in millions in their “million-man marches” every Friday in all their major cities bearing Palestinian flags, shouting chants of Palestinian liberation, and demanding an end to their genocide.
Threatened by the Yemeni audacity to halt an extermination campaign that has their full backing, the United States and its vassals launched a military assault on Yemen. They strung together a coalition of the willing, grotesquely named it Operation Prosperity Guardian, and launched military strikes on nearly all major Yemeni provinces, beginning January 12. The coalition with its main protagonists, the United States and its loyal attack dog, the UK, counted the relatively sickly dogs of Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, and New Zealand in its ranks. But hundreds of unrelenting strikes later, they realised their intervention to be going the exact same way as some of their recent adventures in the Third World: towards abject failure.
Pretty early in their campaign against Yemen, Joe Biden made a surprisingly honest admission that the attacks were ineffective and they won’t deter the Houthi opposition to the Gaza genocide. Biden: “Well, when you say working are they [the attacks on Yemeni cities] stopping the Houthis? No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.” Because when has logic stopped the US from using its military might?
Not only did the pro-genocide attacks on Yemen not yield any positives for the Western genocidaires, they also had the unintended effect of revealing the military weaknesses that lie underneath the West’s bombastic rhetoric. Yemen has thus far targeted well over a hundred vessels. The British vessel HMS Diamond had to be replaced after coming under Yemeni fire barely a month into the operation, another British vessel was sunk, a Danish frigate had to cut short its Red Sea adventures in April after it failed to stave off the Yemeni firepower — it also led to the firing of the Denmark Chief of Staff, precipitating something of a scandal in Danish politics.
A French frigate went the same way as its Danish counterpart that same month. The French captain of the ship admitted that his crew wasn’t quite prepared for the Yemeni assault. “We didn’t necessarily expect this level of threat. There was an unbridled violence that was quite surprising and very significant. The Houthis do not hesitate to use drones that fly at water level, to explode them on commercial ships, and to fire ballistic missiles,” the frigate’s commander Jerome Henry was quoted as saying. “We had to carry out at least half a dozen assistances following Houthi strikes.”
Next up were the Dutch. Earlier this month, a Dutch frigate named Tromp withdrew from the Red Sea.
Amidst the Yemeni carnage in the sea, a bombshell admission was made by an American official. Timothy Lenderking, the US’s Special Envoy for Yemen, admitted: “I do think that ultimately diplomatic solutions will have to be found.” He went on to add: “We know that there is no military solution.”
The Americans, who are engaged in their first naval combat since the Second World War, appear to be all at sea when it comes to Houthi capabilities, as one American navy deputy commander told CNN:
Unfortunately, we don’t get a lot of heads up on most of this stuff — especially the ballistic missiles.
While the Americans struggle to combat the threat of ballistic missiles, the Houthis appear to also possess hypersonic missiles in their extensive arsenal, which AP reports, “could pose a more formidable challenge to the air defense systems employed by America and its allies, including Israel.”
Its nothing short of an incredible feet of military achievement for a country suffering from a decade-long assault to build up a military arsenal strong enough to thwart some of the most powerful armies in the world and keep them at an arm’s length despite relentless assaults.
Yemenis have not only made the virulent war hawks, who only ever speak the language of violence, talk diplomacy, but their efforts in hurting the Israeli economy has also borne fruit.
The constant Yemeni assaults — with help from resistance factions in Iraq — has shut down the important Israeli port of Eilat. By late December, Reuters reported an 85 percent drop in activity at the port. In March, Israeli media reported half the port’s staff had to be laid off as a result of consistent Houthi attacks that had made the port virtually inoperative.
Furthermore, the Yemeni attacks on ships bound for Israel forced them to take a longer route, thereby significantly increasing costs and adversely affecting Israeli economy already struggling due to a ban on Palestinian workers and the enlisting of reserves for deployment on the multiple fronts that the genocidal Israelis have opened. The northern part of the illegitimate state remain veritable ghost towns since the Palestinian resistance attacks of October 7. Construction projects have come to a complete halt. Israel’s debt doubled last year. The Israeli economy had shrunk by a fifth in the December 2023 quarter. Things have only worsened since then.
But the Houthis aren’t in it for the theatrics and easy wins. They won’t stop until the Gaza genocide stops.
They have consistently expanded their area of operation to put pressure on the Israelis. Starting in October with the Red and Arabian Seas, the Houthis have consistently escalated their attacks as the Israeli barbarity has continued unabated. In mid-March, Ansarallah leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi declared plans to “expand the scope of our operations to reach sites the enemy would never expect.”
He went on to add: “Our main battle is to prevent ships linked to the Israeli enemy from passing through not only the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, but also the Indian Ocean towards the Cape of Good Hope. This is a major step and we have begun to implement our operations related to it.”
The expansion of operation to the Indian Ocean was largely due to the fact that vessels meant for Israel were routing to an Indian port before making their way to Saudi Arabia from where they followed a land route into Israel. Yemenis will have none of it.
When the brutal images of mass graves from Gaza’s hospital came to light, it only fired the Houthi resolve further as they again vowed to escalate their operations. “For the seventh month in a row, the genocidal crimes of the Israeli enemy continue, the latest of which is the brutal massacre in the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis,” the Yemeni armed forces said via a statement. “The genocidal crimes that the Palestinian people are facing in Gaza and the occupied West Bank reflect an unparalleled level of Zionist hatred and crime.”
After failing to protect the interests of its Zionist vassal with military power, the United States switched gears to inducements.
In a remarkable April 11 report published by The Cradle, the United States promised the Houthis everything they have been fighting for over the past decade. The US offer included an acknowledgment of the Houthi regime’s legitimacy — Sana’a has a competing government led by Saudi-backed Presidential Council of Rashid al-Alimi.
Furthermore:
The sources further reveal that the Americans pledged to immediately release withheld Yemeni public sector salaries from the National Saudi Bank, lift the country’s siege entirely, reopen Sanaa Airport, ease restrictions on the port of Hodeidah, and facilitate a comprehensive prisoner exchange agreement with all involved parties.
And that wasn’t all:
[Washington] pledged to repair the damages, remove foreign forces from all occupied Yemeni lands and islands, and remove Ansarallah from the State Department’s ‘terrorism list’ – as soon as they stop their attacks in support of Gaza.
The Houthis aren’t taking the American offer. Used to dictating terms to their Arab vassals, Ansarallah let the US know they were dealing with a very different set of men.
According to The Cradle report:
Their exact words to the Americans were: “We are not within the circle of those you dictate to.”
The Houthis don’t appear to be sellouts whom the US and its allies could buyout with the highest bid. They are guided by morality, the stuff the Western leadership — comprising of ghouls who are used to dealing only with fellow ghouls — appears to have no understanding of.
The Houthis have been very clear about their reasons for attacking Israel and ships bound for its ports. They will stop the day the Zionist entity stops its genocide in Gaza. Talking to The Grayzone in January, Mohammed Al-Bukhaiti, the spokesperson of Ansarallah, made it clear: “Our goal is a simple one: to stop the genocide in Gaza. And to help get fuel, food, and medicine into Gaza.”
Al-Bukhaiti revealed that the Yemeni resolve to halt the Gaza genocide came as a result of a similar situation that his countrymen have endured: “We have suffered a similar plight, starting in 2015 until today as a Yemeni people. We suffered equally from strikes and a siege. That’s why we cannot allow these crimes to be repeated. And of course if any other group had been suffering what the Palestinians are suffering now, we would have equally supported them.”
As the Gaza genocide enters its eighth month, Yemenis are still escalating some more.
On May 3, in what the Yemeni resistance called the “fourth round of escalation,” it announced its intent to hit Israeli-linked ships “anywhere within our reach,” including in the Mediterranean Sea.
A report by The Cradle based on a statement by Yemeni armed forces spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree, who has become something of a cult figure in the resistance axis with his pronouncements about hitting Israel-bound ships with “appropriate weapons” and achieving “direct hits,” added:
Friday’s [May 3] statement from the Ansarallah-led government also warns Tel Aviv against launching their assault on the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, saying that, with immediate effect, any ships “linked to the provision of supplies and entry into the Palestinian ports under occupation” would be subject to “severe penalties.”
The Houthis are in this as long as the genocidal Israelis don’t cease their barbaric campaign. For them it’s a moral war that will go on until Gazan suffering is alleviated, as Al-Bukhaiti insisted in his interview with The Grayzone:
Our position is a moral one, and our war is a war of morality.
Yemen may be the “poorest” country in the Middle East financially, but its actions have proven that being financially underprivileged is no shame so long as your morals remain intact enough to be repulsed by the brazen barbarity of a genocidal entity hellbent on erasing an entire identity. In that respect, no one is richer than Yemen.
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It should be obvious to all, but I will say what I think, not just the Houthi government, but also the good and decent Yemeni People—don’t have an ounce of hubris in their entire body, but what they do have is a sense of morality, responsibility, integrity,as well as backbone, I cannot see into the future but I do suspect that history will be very kind to them. I will keep them and there loved ones in my thoughts and heart.
Ansarallah have no western leaders to sanction, no western assets to freeze, no western toys to take away, and consequently no fucks to give. Contrast with the gulfie tyrants.
Was it not written of old that "freedom's just another word, for nothing left to lose."?