“In Yemen there is wisdom,” says a medieval Arabic saying.
Keep this in mind if you’re trying to understand how the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation in Gaza is shaking the Middle East – as ongoing Yemeni attacks on Israel-linked ships in the Red Sea clarify one of the most important political dynamics. most important in the region in recent times.
Rocket and drone attacks on ships belonging to or bound for Israel in recent weeks are a show of support for Palestinians besieged in Gaza by Ansar Allah (Houthis), which controls most of northern Yemen. Ansar Allah says they will only stop these attacks when Israel ends its genocidal siege and bombing of the Palestinian enclave.
These attacks are part of a coordinated military response by the three main Arab members of the anti-Israeli (and anti-West) “Axis of Resistance” led by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and Ansar Allah, to the latest Israeli attack against Palestinians.
At one point last week, Israel and the United States simultaneously exchanged direct fire with Axis of Resistance forces in both Gaza and the West Bank in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and also in Yemen – which can also be considered a special low-level situation. intensity, indirect military engagement with Iran.
Any assessment of how the region has evolved since October 7 and what likely lies ahead must recognize three critical points related to the regional network, military capabilities, and the trajectory of the Axis of Resistance.
The American mainstream media and political elite tend to ignore these three points, namely:
Groups within the Axis can coordinate across the region and face Israel as a united front
Widespread fears in the West that this latest confrontation between Israel and Hamas could trigger a full-fledged regional war between the United States, Israel and a half-dozen Arab-Iranian forces have not materialized. However, the confrontation did not remain confined to Gaza either: it triggered the first serious and coordinated battlefield action of the Axis of Resistance in the entire region. This reflects Hezbollah’s year-round talk of “unity of fronts”, that is, Axis members now coordinate and help each other in combat, or between battles, in periods of preparation.
Ansar Allah can militarily challenge Israel and the United States to deter them or obtain concessions from them, just like Hezbollah and Hamas.
For decades, Hezbollah and Hamas were the only two Arab powers to confront Israel militarily and force it into ceasefires, prisoner swaps and other concessions. Ansar Allah’s continued drone and missile attacks on Red Sea shipping routes will likely pose a similar challenge for Israel. These attacks could ultimately provide the Yemeni group with important leverage against its Western adversaries, especially if, as expected, the United States and Israel do not send ground troops to Yemen, but rely solely on air power in their efforts to protect trade routes.
The three main Arab members of the Axis of Resistance have significantly improved their military capabilities over the past two decades.
Hezbollah was the first Axis member to demonstrate its military prowess against Israel. The standoff between the Lebanon-based group and Israel during the 2006 war led to an informal truce based on mutual deterrence. Both sides realized that a full-fledged war would inflict serious damage to national assets and result in an unacceptable number of civilian casualties on both sides; Since then, they have limited their clashes to limited attacks, resulting in limited casualties. On October 7, by attacking Israel on an unprecedented scale and then managing to defend its assets thus far, Hamas also demonstrated that it had built significant military prowess. Ansar Allah’s capabilities are also improving: after forcing Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to end their war against Yemen, last month it attacked at least 100 ships in the Red Sea with a great efficiency. A senior US military official called these “attacks of a very significant scale”, not seen in at least “two generations”.
We cannot yet predict what this means for the future, but one thing is clear: Hamas’s new prowess in attacking Israel and defending its own assets brings it closer to the qualitative capabilities of Hezbollah; and Ansar Allah’s proven proficiency in drone and missile attacks against Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Red Sea shipping reinforces its military competence.
The emerging reality is that the Axis of Resistance that unites Iran with a half-dozen Arab armed and non-state actors, large and small, is growing stronger and will likely continue to do so if the issues that drive the partnership remain unresolved – particularly Palestine. conflict and Israeli-US aggression, threats or sanctions against Arab parties. Former US diplomat in Yemen Dr. Nabeel Khoury, now a senior fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, also explained to me in an interview that after the end of the war in Yemen, Ansar Allah now appears ready to act at the regional level.
Yet you wouldn’t know it if your knowledge of the region came from mainstream American media. Because the American media largely follows the American political elite, and both tend to ignore Middle Eastern realities that do not conform to Western preconceptions that “weak” Arabs only respond to the use of force. by the “righteous” Israeli-American armies – despite recent events in Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen that have shattered these racist views for good.
The growing power, integration and influence of the Axis of Resistance are among the most significant geostrategic developments in the Middle East over the past half century.
The combination of the state-anchored Arab militancy of Hezbollah (Lebanon), Hamas (Palestine) and Ansar Allah (Yemen) and Iran’s resistance to American and Israeli provocations is best understood through their values under -common underlying themes of “resistance” and “challenge”. The American media and political class, as well as most of the West, still refuse to see or acknowledge this, because Israel, the United States and their Arab allies are the ones being resisted and challenged. They prefer to assess developments in the region through the imaginary prism of blindly anti-American and anti-Israeli Islamist extremism. And they assume they can meet any challenge from the Middle East through military attacks, sanctions, or Israeli-US threats.
It is not surprising, scholars regularly confirm, that American and Western media mainly cover Gaza through distorted frames, generally reflecting Israeli and American policies. We should therefore expect them to also talk about Yemen and the expanding Axis of Resistance, primarily through Western and Israeli fears of growing Iranian influence. This includes the recently taken steps of sending a US armada to the region and creating a 10-nation task force to conduct joint patrols in the Red Sea, the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the Gulf of Aden, and to provide information. The aim is to maintain the fluidity of maritime traffic, even if the world’s largest shippers such as the Danish AP Moller-Maersk and the German Hapag-Lloyd have already diverted their ships to other routes.
Washington is also actively considering military strikes against Ansar Allah, although the Axis of Resistance and Yemen’s history – consistent with their defiant attitude – suggest that this would not deter future attacks on shipping.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.