What will happen to the Houthis as tensions continue? - opinion

Having died two years earlier, the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) didn’t get to enjoy the excitement with which his last work, Mohammed and Charlemagne, was received when published posthumously.

Recognized to this day as one of the greatest historians of medieval Europe, Pirenne’s imaginative thesis argued that the Middle Ages began not with the decline of Rome, as previously agreed, but with the rise of Islam.

The new faith, Pirenne claimed, was hostile to trade.

The urge to subdue Christendom inspired an anti-commercial strategy that sought to stifle the Mediterranean’s vibrant commerce by driving a wedge between its Christian north and Muslim south.

That, argued Pirenne, is what shuttered Europe’s horizons, choked its economy, and condemned it to epochal stagnation.

The thesis was bold but, as noted here in the past in a different context (“Europe talks Turkey,” January 9, 1998), it was later proven baseless.

The historian of Europe was not a scholar of Islam and did not know Arabic, and was thus unaware that Mohammed was a merchant, that medieval Arabia bustled with trade routes, that Islam’s emergence gave rise to a class of tradesmen, and that Muslim empires actually encouraged foreign trade through low tariffs, which is part of what made Abbasid Baghdad and Ottoman Istanbul the great cities they were.

Now, as Yemen’s Islamist regime wages war on international trade, the question arises: What’s going on, what does it mean, and how will it end?

WHAT’S GOING on, many say, is piracy; vessels attacked in broad daylight while sailing innocently in the open sea. Well that’s wrong.

Piracy is an economic act; plundering ships in order to rob what’s on them. For centuries it was a common, legitimate, and at times even an honorable profession, the way Queen Elizabeth I awarded a knighthood to Sir Francis Drake for robbing ships and raiding towns while circumnavigating the world.

That is not what Yemen’s Houthis are up to. Unlike pirates, these people are not seafarers, and their attacks on the Red Sea’s traffic are not about loot.

What they are out to do is exactly what Pirenne wrongly claimed Islam is all about: choke trade.

Some 40 attacks on commercial ships last fall has made major container liners like Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd, Denmark’s Maersk, and France’s CMA CGM suspend their vessels’ passage through the Red Sea, where 30% of global container traffic previously sailed, along with 12% of all international trade, according to The Economist.

Why are the Houthis doing this, if not for booty? Is this really about some theology, as Pirenne suspected, a refusal to accept mankind’s rejection of their faith?

This writer does not know, and will not fall into Pirenne’s trap by suggesting explanations for a culture and mindset of which he knows hardly a thing. Two things, however, are nonetheless clear.

First, the Houthis’s damage has been first and foremost to fellow Muslims, whether the Yemeni people on whom they wrought civil war, disease, and famine; the Saudis whose cities they rocketed and whose oil fields they torched; or the Egyptians, whose economy they suffocate by halting the Suez Canal’s traffic.

The canal is an Egyptian lifeline, facilitating until last year the annual passage of 24,000 vessels, when transit fees added up to an annual $9.4 billion, about one-tenth of Egypt’s annual revenues.

The second thing that can be said of the Red Sea crisis is that the Houthis’s motivation, while intriguing, really doesn’t matter.

The Houthis take on the world 

What matters is that these obscure people have taken on the world, brazenly and effectively.

Since the Houthi attacks began last fall, freight rates through the Red Sea soared 150%, as tankers and containers – not to mention holiday cruises – sailing between Asia and Europe were forced to circle Africa, and thus reverse maritime history by more than 150 years.

What this means to the billions of earthlings who buy what those containers carry is that shipment schedules lag, shortages abound, the vessels’ gas consumption multiplies, and consumer prices soar.

This is the meaning of the Houthi attacks on global trade, and this is why their motivation, whether religious, strategic, tribal, or somehow economic, is beside the point.

What matters is that the Houthi assault is as intolerable as it is unprovoked, and that the world which can, and should, bring this menace to an end has so far failed in its task.

THE WORLD, to be sure, did respond. The American-led Operation Prosperity Guardian sent to the Red Sea aircraft carrier USS Dwight Eisenhower, surrounded by an armada of destroyers and frigates involving 13 countries, and unleashing aerial attacks on Houthi targets for more than half a year.

As has so often been the case when the sane were attacked by the mad, this response has been hesitant.

Some of the flotilla’s participants have only contributed nominally; most of the world – including Saudi Arabia and Egypt – shunned it.

The armada’s attacks have been waged from afar, and even then avoided the kind of large-scale target that Israeli jets attacked last week in the port of Hodeidah.

Still, like the fascist scourge in its time, the challenge the Houthis and their Iranian operators pose will gradually be taken for what it is – an attack on the rest of the world – and will be quashed, on the ground, to death; not because the rest of the world is so brave and resolute – it is neither – but because the fanatic, like Hitler on his way from Warsaw and Paris to Stalingrad, can’t help continuously upping the ante, and will not stop until everything blows up in his face.

That is why what makes the Houthis tick doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are violent and effective, that they demand war, and will get it.

www.MiddleIsrael.net

The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.