Geopolitical Chesterton’s Fence: if you can’t explain why the Houthis existed before 2023; then you shouldn’t give opinions on what motivates them now.
Oh, I have been aware of the Houthis and their agenda since their rise as part of the Yemeni revolution and subsequent civil war. Whether we like it or not, the Houthis are now a major player in Yemen.
As for the current situation, my point was to clarify that the Houthis didn’t just randomly wake up in the morning one day and start attacking commercial ships for no reason. They communicated their reasoning and demands from the very start, and made it clear that this was their response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The US response was to simply ignore their demands and just bomb Yemen. This is a mistake. The Houthis (and Iran by proxy) are no strangers to conflict. Bombing Yemen will do nothing to stop attacks on commercial shipping - in fact, it probably will escalate them. Worse yet, starting a new conflict doesn’t help the negative reputation the US has built up over the past few months in the eyes of the so-called global south. Instead, this gives China an excellent opportunity to step in as a (actually) neutral power.
you’d might want to google the amount of civilian casualties in the yemen civil war, its proportion to deaths in the Gaza war and houthis involvement in said civilian deaths.
You might be surprised how preoccupied they are with ‘preventing’ civilian death
Following the same logic, we also have plenty of examples of how US is (not) worried about democracy, free trade and attacks against civil targets. And therefore, we can dismiss its statements about these issues. No problem, it's a tie. Therefore, what remains to discuss is just how legitimate is the stated purpose of Houthi's attacks that is claimed to uphold article 1 from Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide from UN. According with that convention, which is signed by Yemen, their members must act to prevent genocide whenever it is happening, either during war or peace. A blockade is indeed a way to act against this crime.
They were for other reasons. Likewise, US were also bombing people and launching missiles before for other reasons and also make economical sieges against other targets in other contexts. I'm confused why this should mean that any future attack and reasoning made by US or Houthis should be dismissed because of this.
THESE particular bombings were because the blockade and sanctions that they did in the region and they justify with the genocide happening in Palestine.
They can justify what they're doing however they'd like, but I don't think anybody serious believes anything they say. There's a backstory with these people.
Well, I do not consider "serious" countries that are not opposing a genocide because they have neocolonialist interests in the region. Fortunately, we have several serious countries that are acting and also supporting the case in the International Court of Justice.
Different means to the same goal. The Houthis have no access to the ICJ, however they have access to disrupt the maritime trade through the Red Sea, so this is how they act. There is also reasons to believe that even if the ICJ rules in favor of South Africa on Friday, and orders Israel to stop any military activity and let in humanitarian aid, that they will simply not follow it, and there is reasons to believe that USA will excuse this behavior. Disrupting maritime traffic in the Red Sea may proof to be an invaluable action in addition to the ICJ case for stopping the horrors in Gaza.
It is categorically false that the Houthis have the same goal as the ICJ case. One way you know that is that if Ansar Allah succeeded in their chartered goal of liberating Jerusalem and Palestine, they would proceed to bomb all the Muslim Brotherhood's mosques; they seek to liberate Palestine not just from the Jewish people, but from the Sunnis as well. And how you know that is: that's exactly what they're doing, right now, in Yemen.
Of course, another way you know they're full of shit is that they were shooting rockets at cargo ships in the Red Sea years before the Gaza war.
I think a pretty mainstream and reasonable way to look at Ansar Allah is:
What they say: meaningless agitprop about Palestinian liberation.
What they intend: A Zaydi Shi'a imamate with racial and bloodline governance.
What they are: A chaos agent managed by Iran in order to keep Saudi Arabia, which operates a military with one of the world's worst ratios of capacity and funding to competence, perpetually on the wrong foot.
Sorry, stated was implied. These are different means to the same stated goals.
The Houthis are not the only one blocking Maritime trade, there are also activist groups in e.g. Oakland and Tacoma which have blocked freight traffic from respective ports with the aim of disrupting shipment to Israel and the stated goal of stopping the genocide.
What the Houthis and these activist groups in America do after they’ve succeeded in stopping the genocide, that is another question which we can tackle at the time. As of now there is an emergency situation in Gaza, and we must treat it as such. Stopping the genocide is at utmost importance.
That's a horrible thing to say about activists in the US. I may think activists in Oakland and Tacoma are ineffective, performative, and largely wrong in the particulars of their case, but I have never claimed they are morally comparable to Ansar Allah, a racial-supremacist monarchist movement that kills civilians in numbers the IDF has never come close to approaching.
You previously gave me a lecture about my rhetoric and I listened. Can you please not make assumptions about my believes beyond what I said. They only thing I said about activists in Oakland and Tacoma is that they employ a (superficially) similar tactics. The rest was your spin.
"What the Houthis and these activist groups in America do after they’ve succeeded in stopping the genocide" is assertion that these groups are acting in concert. They are not, nor do they share the same goal. If you wanted to say they were tactically superficially similar, I'd shoot that down too (activists in Tacoma aren't blowing things up and trying to kill crew) but I wouldn't find the argument offensive, just deeply wrong.
Sorry, that’s not what I meant. There was an implied respectively there. But they do have a common stated goal of an immediate ceasefire. As is the stated goal of South Africa and supportive nations the very same at the ICJ. So same goal via different means.
As for effectiveness, we do know that protests do work if they are disruptive enough. But we also know that rulings by the ICJ have a tendency to be ignored if a powerful enough nation disagrees with them. Both the cities of San Francisco, Oakland and Seattle are among the nations largest cities who are calling for ceasefire. Barbara Lee and Pramila Jayapal are among very few members of congress calling for ceasefire.
We will see in the days after Friday whether the actions at the ICJ were enough, and that actions against international shipping were indeed unnecessary. However, I’m gonna remain pessimistic about that.
The "actions against international shipping" (objectively: indiscriminate and murderous piracy) have done nothing to deter the IDF, but have harmed people throughout the region that depend on the navigability of the Red Sea and supply chains. I object to the claim that the ICJ effort is somehow connected to what Iran and Ansar Allah are doing.
There's a further irony to appealing jointly to the ICJ, an instrument of international law, and piracy, opposition to which is the literal original basis for all international law.
I wasn’t aware of the irony, but yeah, its there, but it is nothing more than a curiosity. But these are indeed separate groups aiming for the same thing, a ceasefire, via different means. That is the only link I’ve claimed.
You seem to take issue with the methods the Houthis are employing, but I would like to point out that blockading international shipping is also a method which the Israelis use against Gaza. This blockade by Israel has manifested it self in direct assaults on cargo vessels and murders of their crew members (see e.g. Gaza Flotilla Raid[1]).
I think the targets of the Houthis is not the IDF directly, but rather the international community, particularly nations which are aiding and enabling Israel in the genocide, such as the USA. That the tactic here is to be disruptive enough that it won’t be worth it for these nations to support Israel in its crimes any longer. However, I’m not a member of the Houthies, so I can be wrong about that.
If you support civilian lives then the very last people in the entire world you want to get behind are Ansar Allah. You have to be careful about campism. It's pernicious.
They cannot uphold article 1 on their own account, without international support and they're not a signatory.
You need to show that the intent of Israel is to destroy the Palestinian people in Gaza, even partially. What I see is the attempt of Israel to prevent more October 7 attacks, which Hamas declared it is going to repeat. The actual goal here is to protect Israel's own citizens from genocide, which Hamas has shown willingness to commit and ability (albeit in a smaller scale currently).
I think it is perfectly valid for a country to protect its own citizen from being burned alive among many other atrocities that were committed, which is also one of the reasons the genocide convention was created in the first place.
As this is war, it's also causing immense suffering in the Palestinian side. Which is why a war to remove Hamas from power was constantly deferred in the past, knowing they are highly entrenched in the civilian population. However, I don't think they left Israel any other way this time.
Wrong. First Yemen IS signatory since 1987 (or 1989 if you consider North Yemen). Second, the convention gives responsibilities beyond borders for members, and explicitly puts responsibility to act upon signatory States. And third, there are plenty previous cases that opened precedence that a country can act even before any approval from UN (US bombed Yugoslavia arguing this), and there is also precedence of blockades enforced by a single country despite the lack of approval (and despite disavowal) from UN (US blocking Cuba and Venezuela).
> I think it is perfectly valid for a country to protect its own citizen from being burned alive among many other atrocities that were committed, which is also one of the reasons the genocide convention was created in the first place.
Also wrong. The genocide convention was created to prevent genocide. There is nothing in the convention mentioning that you should not act if the victims are from other countries. On the contrary, the convention says that you must act to prevent and has an extraterritorial scope (as was established in a previous judgement in UN).
How exactly killing children, reporters, women and people holding white flags, attacking UN shelters, as well as destroying hospitals and universities prevent more October 7 attacks!? In fact, it will create more attacks because of the anger from an oppressed people. Which was the cause of October 7 attacks, by the way. Sorry, declaring war is not a free pass to commit war crimes. If the war crimes are frequent, and they are not opposed (or if they are encouraged), this is a serious evidence of genocide.
A rebel organization is not the yemen government, that’s exactly the reason they are successful at being a proxy. all the benefits of being a state without any responsibility for your actions.
About the common western trope of “you should never fight terror because it will only bring more terror”
that’s false. There is no way the palestinian population would be more radicalized, they are at the end of the spectrum. It wasn’t like there was any type of atrocity known to man on October 7 that was stopped short due to being too extreme.
Also, israel had shown that when fighting palestinians organizations in the second intifada 2001-2004, it succeeded in greatly reducing the amount of terror and achieve deradicalization
There's a moral difference and an international law difference between attacking valid military targets and killing civilians in the process and when your stated goal is attacking uninvolved civilian targets (international shipping passing by). Also, GP saying 'bullying' seemed to me detached from the facts of what was going on.
About being white, as far as I know I am not considered white both in the 19th century scientific racism sense and even in its modern extension of dividing the American population by the extension of that original theory.
But if I am considered white, do you think it undermines my arguments?
I was just trying to make a joke about racism because of the thinly veiled racist viewpoints in pretty much every post here but I guess I picked on the wrong guys. Okay I'm done, sorry.
I am not sure that's the definition of genocide.
The only clear instance of genocide in this war is the October 7 attacks. I'll remind you it included attacking all population centers in a specific geographic area, going house to house and killing whoever was inside, as well as burning the houses in order to prevent the population from returning.
You could argue Israel evacuating the northern of Gaza strip is ethnic cleansing, but that would only be valid if they are not allowed later on to return.
The difference between Palestinians civilian deaths in Gaza is that these were not systematic, not concentrated in a single space (for example all houses in a location) and were done mostly for a military purpose (attacking a defacto non-uniformed military). Choosing to evacuate the population before attacking was done to minimize casualties, although they are still massive even when removing the Hamas members from the statistics and their inflated nature.
You are laughably hilarious or deliberate. Israel is doing an actual genocide - a terrorist attack on 10/7 is not a genocide.
But killing tens of thousands, marketing it as “mowing the lawn” and cutting off power, food, safety, hospitals, religious facilities… is a f-ing genocide.
Stop pretending israel is just “responding” to 10/7 attacks. No response, even if the real “responses” began in 1916/7 and later in the 40’s… no “response” ever deserves a genocide.
1916/17 - Sykes-Picot agreement and Balfour Declaration was pushed by England/the west to split the middle east up. Even though there were already nations there. Thus creating a “home for Zionists”.
The 40’s was the standard “zionists get israel for real this time” after England got its butt kicked by the very same folks it helped in the teens.
But that’s irrelevant to the point that nothing, ever, makes a genocide ok. Stop pretending it’s not just because the fascist and gaslighting zionists claim it’s “not a genocide we promise.”
England did a genocide on the Irish. Zionists are doing on in the Palestinians. There have been plenty of US backed ones over the years too.
Any nation state who says “they’re not doing a genocide” .. totally is.
Sykes-Picot didn't have much to do with Zionism at all, but it does undermine many of the arguments about the artificiality of Israel as a state, because it establishes that (maybe excepting Egypt) all of Israel's neighbors, none of which have been subjected to decades of campaigning and state-level military incursion, have identically European provenance.
Depending on what you mean by the word "nation", there were not in fact "already nations there". Sykes-Picot partitioned the Ottoman Empire in the Levant. What there was, historically, prior to Sykes-Picot, was the administration of provinces under the Ottoman Sultan.
I am sure the people who had lived there were just fine with europeans dividing up land, huh? Doesn’t help oil was discovered recently …
I mean, look at what happened to France in Vietnam. They were “happily” appreciated while pretending they knew what was best for the people that lived there already.
Y’all will do anything to pretend it’s “ok” for white people to tell folks what to do with their land. Ottoman empire or not.
Bottom line is: Zion != Israel. Zionism is making the call in today’s era and that call is to genocide.
I don't know what any of this is trying to say. You brought up Sykes-Picot as if it was a part of Zionism; it is not, and, moreover, it is the reason there is a Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon today. You implied that Sykes-Picot displaced nation states that previously existed; I don't believe that's true, that's not how the Ottoman Empire functioned.
If you're asking me for a long thread about why British, French, and Russian colonialism in MENA was good, sorry, I don't have that for you. But somehow, it only ever seems to be Israel we're talking about when we discuss this stuff. Israel is no less legitimate than its neighbors, some of which have in the last 5-10 years laid a much stronger claim to the word "genocide" as well.
I would suggest maybe you not lead with Sykes-Picot next time you try to formulate this argument.
You conveniently ignored the “Balfour” part of my comments, too. They were contemporary actions by the British who had no business, at all, to do what they did. “Ends and means” and all of that.
You'll note that I responded to your point about Sykes-Picot, and suggested maybe you stop trying to name-drop Sykes-Picot to make the point you're trying to make, and left it at that.
Right. But you’ll notice they happened contemporary to each other by the same actor.
That’s kind of important.
Still doesn’t justify Zionists doing a fucking genocide against people who have been overrun by the same zionists given “power” by … that nation doing the sykes-picot and balfour thing.
> only clear instance of genocide in this war is the October 7 attacks.
That's clearly a military operation with some war crimes thrown in, which is about expected. Then went in and out, there's no systematic intent in the mission to destroy israel for the simple reason that Hamas can't. Hamas is physically incapable of committing genocide despite what the preach.
VS Israel's systematic destruction of Gaza with enough dogwhistles from senior leadership that can credibly push Israeli campaign into genocide territory. Whether that matters under international law is another Q, but the difference when it comes to international opinion (well, global south), is Hamas can't genocide Israel because they don't have the capabilities vs IDF can actually genocide Palestine/Gaza and optic wise, is looking well on their way as mass starvation as systemic blockade settles in. Like if west can delude themselves into thinking Uyghurs are being genocided despite very few systemic killings and leaks from leadership that intent is counterterrorism/deradicalization, then case for Israel doing a genocide is much stronger considering the actual destruction, body count and mask off rhetoric from Israeli politicians.
About your regard of the oct 7 as a military operation with some war crimes thrown in, it was a military operation concentrated almost completely on civilian centers, so the war crimes aspect was pretty central. I do not doubt they would continue if not stopped, but maybe you think otherwise.
Is that a universal thing that what politicians say is being taken in such a high regard? Especially the many Israeli ministers of nothing that have no actual ability to affect the situation. Judging by how the war is going on, I don't see any scenario where the Palestinian population disappears from Gaza, and I don't see any Israeli action that is advancing that.
However, you are right that due to the sheer cruelty of Oct 7 there is a major process of radicalization in Israeli society, and if Hamas dreams of recreating this attack 'again and again' materialize, I do think the Israeli side will begin to level its moral base to that of its enemy, which might end in actual genocide. Which is why I believe removing this organization is in the best interest of both people, even though it is causing much suffering currently, it is not impossible it can turn very much worse yet.
For me, power mismatch = hamas will naturally adopt more terror since they're limited to asymmetric warfare. War crime labelling is lawfare instrument to try to rhetorically constrain actions of less capable adversaries but really doesn't change the fact that Hamas at strategic / geopolitical goals for Oct7, no different than strategic bombing, i.e war is politics by other means. They weren't just doing a random terror operation. And Israel isn't just randomly levelling Gaza looking for Hamas.
IMO they're trying to make situation so dire that other parties capituate to resettling Gaza. The intention is expulsion not nessicarily genocide, but that doesn't mean current actions and rhetoric, even if flippant, can't be used against Israel in international court / opinion. I'm not saying what Israel is doing IS genocide, but there's probably enough bits and pieces for interested parties to weave genocide narrative, especially the longer war drags out and more dire Gaza situation becomes.
> removing this organization is in the best interest of both people
I don't disagree, for short term. But without Israel expressing interest or some effort at making 2 state solution work, it's kicking can down the road. The fundmental problem, as seen with Hamas, and Houthis is technology proliferation of not garbage tier weapons is making Israel's lack of strategic depth less and less defendable by the day. General arab acrimony is not going to go away after this, and US+Israel can only maintain their military advantage for so long before rest of region catches up or surpasses due to sheer scale. Each generation is more capable than the last and ultimately there's 400 muslims in MENA vs 10m jews in Israel on sacred lands. And this war is just setting up for blowback down the road, especially as US FP will likely change as new gens are much more sympathetic to palestine.
As for Palestinians, they will not forget this. Hamas/resistance will come back in one way or another. The other reality, which makes this problem intractable is poor Gaza with 90% literacy rate and limited access to modern tech / resources was enough to overwhelm Israel on Oct 7th. Israel can barely live with a semi capable Gaza, and definitely can't live with a capable (free) one. Given how weapons are proliferating, Hamas rockets likely a few iterations from taking out existential Israeli strategic targets like desalination plants. There isn't isn't enough geographic buffer for both people to exist on the same land, not without one permenantly keeping other down. Hence IMO Israel will try to make Palestinians disappear from Gaza, one way or another.
I think it is completely within Israel's ability to dismantle most of Hamas fighting force, and then manage the Gaza Strip similarly to the West Bank. Failing to do so might bring about the scenarios you are talking about, which is the tragedy of those that scream genocide too prematurely. As done in all previous wars with Hamas, the international crowd has called what was happening genocide although it clearly wasn't, thereby pressuring Israel to stop, enabling worse and worse wars in the future and more civilian deaths.
I completely agree though that a lack of a two state solution will lead to catastrophe for either people or both eventually.
However, I do not share your pessimism about US/Israel regional prospects. Remember that this is mainly due to self-inflicted restraints, which is how asymmetric warfare really works. As seen in September 11 in the US and October 7 in Israel this can change rapidly when faced with an external threat
They can manage Gaza like Westbank, but that's settling for two powderkegs. Same with comparison to US post 911 actions. It's buying time, which currently is best of bad options, but IMO blowback will come. Pessimism personally warranted in medium/long term time frames. US been trying to draw down from CENTOM for years, and newer gen who will take over politics are expessing less alignment with Israel. I don't think it's self-inflicted restraints as much as geopolitically inflicted - there's upper limit to what Israel can do before it fucks up things irrevocably for US geopolitical interests with others in the region. Long term, Israel is still a small country without sufficient human capita to maintain high end asymmetric war fighting across domains alone (i.e. aviation). Long term I think US constitutents and politicians will attach more and more strings to Israeli behaviour.
