Palestine Tet – 62 – The broader context Part One: Operation Prosperity Guardian: the Biden Administration discovers the Houthis of Yemen

1.

Who would have thunk it possible ?

Yemen’s Ansah Allah, otherwise known as the Houthis, throwing a monkey wrench not only into Israel’s murderous ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza but also tying up global maritime trade. Essentially Yemen has set up a de facto blockade of the Bab el Mandeb Strait, the strait that goes from the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Aden into the Red Sea to the Suez Canal, one of the three most critical shipping routes in the world (along with the Straits of Hormuz, Straits of Malacca).

The Yemeni armed forces are known in the West as the Houthi movement, named after its leader, Abdul Malik al Houthi, but they call themselves Ansar Allah. Yemen has produced a direct response to Israel’s occupation and siege on Gaza. The Yemeni Armed Forces have thrown down the proverbial gauntlet: until the siege of Gaza ends, shipping to Israel through the Red Sea would not happen”.

They have backed that threat up with the seizure of an Israeli-bound ship and numerous missile strikes on Israeli bound ships to show just how serious they are. In so doing, Yemen has shown that the Global South can implement its version of sanctions, minus International Monetary Fund intervention, on the world’s core countries.

Through its blockade of Israeli-bound ships passing northward through the Bab el Mandeb Straits it has essentially opened up a southern front to Palestine’s resistance against Israel to match Hezbollah’s challenging Israel to the north.

This is a major shipping corridor. 12% of the world’s oil, as much as 30% of the world’s shipping containers at any point can be passing through the Red Sea. Ansah Allah has warned ships not to pass. There has been a considerable impact of all this. Although it is only Israeli bound ships that Ansar Allah has targeted, the consequences of closing the Bab al Mandeb Strait and, consequentially, the Suez Canal for international shipping are profound. It has resulted in longer transit time, increased fuel consumption, delivery delays and increased costs.

Instead of taking the shortcut, a ship has to traverse all the way around the southern tip of Africa which can cause delays depending on the shipping from a couple of weeks to a month; the shipping costs of course go through the roof because the costs and logistics of the trip become increased manifolds

2.

The Yemenis have the capability to shut down shipping to Israel which has had a considerable effect.

The Israeli economy is already stretched by 360,000 people called up into the reserves.

 Air traffic has all but stopped into Ben Gurion Airport into Tel Aviv – it’s just a trickle.
 Israel has lost a core part of their economy. The Jews of the world coming to visit family – what would be called tourism at large, but a lot of it is family visits and what not.

That’s been a huge hit to the Israeli economy

 There are no laborers from the West Bank accessing Israel; they’ve been shut out out of Israel so they’ve lost hundreds of thousands of West Bank laborers. They’ve lost hundreds of thousands of Gaza laborers when after the October 7th attack, Israel sealed the border with Gaza
 They’ve lost tens of thousands of Thai workers who were their labor force on their kibbutz farms and what not

There are already those very considerable gauges out of the Israeli economy

 We also know that 500,000 Israelis from the north (near the Lebanese border) and the south (near Gaza) are evacuated from their communities. They are dependant on the state as well. Israel is putting them up in hotels for considerable costs for an indefinite period of time
 Because these communities have been evacuated there is no basic economy happening in those communities. Shops are all closed; unemployment has tripled in the last month.
 More than 50% of Israeli businesses have lost 50% of their revenues; that was from the first week in November. There is an additional month of lost revenues on top of that
 Israel gets significant airlifts from the Americans but basic trade for Israel – its food stuffs, its vehicles – two of the ships hit were vehicle ships with more than 10,000 cars headed to Israel.
 Because ships that are still passing through the Red Sea have to hire security to accompany the vessels shipping insurance rates have spiked; the shipping costs of insurance have gone up considerable; when you have high value shipping – oil, vehicles – the insurance costs become extraordinary, in some cases, eight times what it was originally once armed guards or going all the way around Africa are factored in.
 If you count the number of Israel’s forced to leave their communities, plus the number that has been called up, it adds up to almost a million people removed from their society generating income for their state.
 On top of that they need to be paid out by the government. Netanyahu has talked about setting up a war economy where they’re just dumping $ into anyone who needs it.

As retired Indian diplomat M. K. Bhadrakumar noted, the Yemenis have their how historical and geopolitical reasons for challenging Israel beyond the latter’s genocidal offensive in Gaza:

The Houthis have an old score to settle with Israel on account of the latter’s repeated covert interventions in the civil war in Yemen dating back to the 1960s on account of that country’s great importance in the eyes of Israeli strategists as Israel’s outlet to the Indian Ocean and the Far East, which is today compounded by Houthis’ support for the rights of Palestinians and refusal to normalise with Israel.

In April 2018, the UAE, taking advantage of the instability and the lack of a central government in Yemen, simply occupied that country’s Socotra island, backed by tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery. UAE has since annexed the Socotra island and in a joint project with Israel is trying to build a military base there which would be hosting Israeli soldiers, officers, and other military experts and personnel in a project to exercise military control over maritime routes and intelligence operations against Iran

3.

Besides interfering with Red Sea shipping, Ansar Allah has attacked Eilat in southern Israel as well using ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones, so-called loitering drones. This is something that the Yemeni Armed Forces has a lot of experience with over the past nine years against the Saudi-U.S. coalition which has unsuccessfully attempted to crush their uprising

That a global political “midget” like Yemen could cause Washington and Israel such havoc is a blow to Washington’s claims of unipolar dominance. This de facto blockade has created a situation where the United States feels that it has to actively be involved in. The Yemenis, along with their Axis of Resistance allies are becoming increasingly efficient at what is referred to as asymmetrical hybrid warfare.

Angered and humiliated to the point of apoplexy that an armed contingent of one of the world’s poorest nations could so undermine world shipping – and embarrass Washington in the process – the Biden Administration has responded to this global maritime challenge by assembling one of the world’s greatest armadas, Operation Prosperity Guardian has it has been named; its goal is to bomb Yemen back to the stone age, to use that catchy expression of that great “humanist”, U.S. General Curtis Emerson LeMay.

LeMay argued argued that the best way for the United States to engage in international diplomacy is to drop nuclear weapons on America’s adversaries, be they large or small. While Washington has yet to use LeMay’s advice where it concerns nuclear weapons, it has on numerous occasions shown it has no hesitation in bombing countries back to the stone age using conventional weaponry, or offering 2000 pound bunker buster bombs to Israel to kill as many Palestinian civilians as possible.

But like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, the size and strength of the U.S. led armada Washington is bringing together is proving to more of an impediment to the United States and Israel than an effective weapons. Destroyers, especially aircraft carriers and the dozens of U.S. military bases in the Middle East morph from weapons of war and bases for military operations to targets for Houthi missiles.

A few days ago, the Biden Administration was huffing and puffing that it would blow the Yemeni house down. The Yemenis who have nine years of experience fighting the American-Saudi Coalition just simply say “No” which is a defiance that spreads throughout the Arab World and is a real source of pride for the Palestinians.

Further, the Houthis appear completely unfazed by Washington’s threats; they do not appear to scare easily, a conundrum for Washington neocons. Indeed, Ansar Allah has issued threats of their own to Washington and Tel Aviv, and these, interestingly enough, the Biden Administration appears to take seriously. attack us, and we will respond; it will not only be the Red Sea that bleeds red but also the Persian Gulf (which Houthi missiles can reach).

Perhaps it is not Yemen at present but Washington that has the jitters. It appears to be backing down from attacking the Yemenis as first threatened. After a few days of issuing threats and flexing its naval maritime muscle, in a somewhat more contrite tone, U.S officials told the New York Times  that strikes against the Houthis could provoke a response from Ansar Allah against U.S. naval vessels and could also damage damage the truce achieved between the Saudis and Yemenis (as if this were the Biden Administration’s main concern!).

The Houthis claim they would do just that. Such an attack on oil facilities could cripple more than the Saudis and the Emirates; it would destabilize the entire global economy, based as it is to a high degree on Middle East oil and natural gas. Sinking an aircraft carrier would be an irreparable blow to U.S. prestige. The Biden Administration is well aware that these are not idle threats from the Houthis.

Although the Houthi threat of retaliation is genuine, other factors come into play here. A little less than a year prior to the 2024 U.S. presidential contest, with Biden’s standing in the polls sinking to new lows and plummeting, with its Ukraine venture shaping up to be yet another monumental foreign policy failure, the Biden team is anxious to calm international waters in East Asia with China, in Europe with Russia and Ukraine, until at least after the elections when it can ratchet up extreme violence once again by setting its proxies in motion. A Middle East even more out of control than at present could bode ill.

So the Biden Administration is caught in a trap: damned if they do attack Yemen because of possible consequences but damned also if they don’t for being perceived as to weak to even take on a global pipsqueak like Yemen.

As it is, already, the Biden Administration’s failure to effective confront Yemen is a stunning development and a major public relations and geo-political defeat for the Biden Administration. The U.S. Navy has admitted it doesn’t have enough ships to carry out such a mission. Important partners, France, Spain and Italy have withdrawn their participation to Washington’s embarrassment.

The coalition of the willing has become less of a coalition and less willing. Washington has publicly admitted that it fears that Ansar Allah might sink its ships. This humiliation comes at a time when even hard core Zionists are admitting that Palestinian resistance in Gaza cannot be defeated. Israel’s Netanyahu government might be able to murder Gaza civilians en masse like fish in a barrel, but its war against the Palestinian Resistance there is not going well and geo-politically, it and Washington are finding themselves increasingly frustrated, cornered with the walls of the Axis of Resistance closing in on all sides.

You’d think it’s time for both Washington and Tel Aviv to stop the butchery and call for a ceasefire both for obvious humanitarian and geo-political reasons. But both remain drunk on neo-con Kool-Aid which continues to blind them of their own limitations. An end to the bloodshed and diplomacy are urgently called for. Both seem to have forgotten this lost art. If they don’t rediscover it soon, they’ll likely regret it more than they apparently understand.