Statement of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (jointly adopted by the International Bureau and the Section in Occupied Palestine), 14 December 2023, www.thecommunists.net
1. The Gaza War has provoked an unprecedented global movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Every week millions are joining demonstrations on all continents, there has been a general strike in Westbank, Jordan and Lebanon, trade unionists in North America and Western Europe refuse to handle weapons deliveries to Israel and have blocked arms factories, and a global boycott movement against Israel and corporations supporting it is expanding rapidly. This is by far the largest international anti-war and anti-colonial movement since the times of the Vietnam or the Iraq War.
2. Usurpingly, the solidarity movement is strongest in the Arab and Muslim world respectively among migrants in Western countries. These people identify strongly with the Palestinian cause not only for political and religious reasons but also because they themselves suffer from imperialist domination and racist oppression.
3. Yemen is one of the countries with the largest pro-Palestine solidarity movements. Every week hundreds of thousands if not millions are marching on the streets of Sana’a, Sa’dah, Taiz, Sanaa, Aden, Ma’rib, and other cities. The majority of the heavily populated regions of the country are controlled by the Houthis, a petty-bourgeois Islamist movement. It played an important role in the popular uprising in 2014 and has been the key force in defending Yemen in the war which followed the invasion by Saudi Arabia and the UAE – supported by the U.S., the UK as well as Israel – in March 2015. This war has paused with the onset of a fragile truce nearly two years ago. While these were progressive actions, it should not go unmentioned that the Houthis are allied with Iran which is ruled by a reactionary Mullah regime.
4. The Houthis have a long tradition of support for the Palestinian liberation struggle. Hence, soon after the beginning of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, they started to launch missiles and drones against the Zionist state. Later, they began to attack ships related with Israel and – in a spectacular operation – hijacked the Galaxy Leader, an Israeli-owned cargo ship. This helped them to massively increase their popular support which had dropped after the beginning of the truce in face of the remaining economic misery in the country. This is in stark contrast to the corrupted Arab regimes and also to Hizballah that so far have stood on the sidelines and have seen their popularity decline and their credentials as defenders of the Palestinian people severely hurt.
5. As Israel’s war has already killed nearly 20,000 people, 70% of them children and women, and is about to provoke a new Nakba, i.e. the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland, the Houthis are also escalating their solidarity activities. They are threatening to stop all ships which are either related to Israeli companies or which transport goods to the Zionist state or to countries which support Israel. As a result, there are now incidents in the Red Sea nearly every day. Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said in a statement a few weeks ago that the seizure of the ship was in response to the “heinous acts against our Palestinian brothers in Gaza and the West Bank. (…) If the international community is concerned about regional security and stability, rather than expanding the conflict, it should put an end to Israel’s aggression against Gaza. (…) We confirm our continuation of military operations against [Israel] until the aggression and ugly crimes against our Palestinian brothers in Gaza and the West Bank stop.”
6. Such solidarity actions are potentially a major threat to Israel as well as Western imperialist countries. Through their control of Yemen’s west coast, the Houthis can effectively obstruct shipping through the strategic Bab el-Mandeb between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean – a narrow passage that is the world’s third-largest choke point for oil shipments after the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca. More than six million barrels pass through it every day, mainly on their way to Europe. The Bab el-Mandeb connects with the Suez Canal – through the Red Sea – and is therefore one of the most important routes for world trade. Of course, the Houthis are not capable to literally stop shipping in this choke point. But their actions could massively raise the costs for shipping as well as for key commodities like oil. Hence, such actions could seriously hurt the economies of Israel and its Western allies. Duncan Potts, a former vice admiral with Britain’s Royal Navy, warned: “These attacks have the potential to become far more of a global strategic economic threat than simply a regional geopolitical one.”
7. Unsurprisingly, both Israel as well as their Western allies are highly alarmed about these developments. The U.S. and France have already stationed warships in the region. Israel has also already deployed one of its most advanced warships, a Sa’ar 6 class corvette, to the Red Sea. And officials are warning that if the Western powers do not take action to stop the Houthi attacks, Israel will do so. Washington currently tries to win its allies for an international maritime task force which would be deployed in the Red Sea in order to protect container ships and, most likely, to attack the Houthis.
8. The deployment of Western and Israeli naval forces to the Red Sea are a major threat for the Palestinian liberation struggle and for the peoples in Yemen and all other Arab countries. Because imperialist attacks on the Houthis would help the Zionist state to carry out its genocide in Gaza and, at the same time, would increase the grip of U.S. and European imperialism on the Middle East.
9. The Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) – including our comrades in Israel / Occupied Palestine – considers the Houthis’ attacks as legitimate actions in solidarity with the Palestinian people whose armed forces are heroically resisting the Israeli invasion. We have always sided with the Palestinian liberation struggle and therefore advocate in the current Gaza War – like in the past ones – the military victory of the resistance led by Hamas without lending political support to the program or all tactics of its leadership.
10. We call for a comprehensive boycott of the Israeli Apartheid state. Actions, which economically weaken Israel or its Western imperialist allies and therefore put pressure on them to stop their genocide, are completely legitimate in this war for life and death. It should be noted that Arab countries did also close the Suez Canal twice in the past in protest against Western support for Israel (in 1956-57 and 1967-75). The current actions of the Houthis are a form of popular sanctions against the Zionist state and its Western allies. In any confrontation between the Houthis and Western resp. Israel, we stand for the military victory of the Yemeni forces and the defeat of the imperialists. The RCIT calls socialists and all pro-Palestine solidarity activists to join forces and to redouble their efforts to support the heroic struggle of the Palestinian people and their resistance factions!
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We refer readers to a special page on our website where more a number of RCIT documents on the 2023 Gaza War are compiled, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/compilation-of-articles-on-the-gaza-uprising-2023/.