[News] Moral imperative: Recognise Yemen and Palestine

[Anti-Imperialist News]

english.almayadeen.net
<https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/moral-imperative--recognise-yemen-and-palestine>
Moral imperative: Recognise Yemen and Palestine
Tim Anderson
March 16, 2025
------------------------------

Tim Anderson argues that recognizing the struggles of the Yemeni and
Palestinian peoples is a moral obligation for independent nations, calling
for international support against Western-backed oppression.
[image: 85a2f6e4-a288-412d-9fbe-5f1f297f27f3.jpg]

   - The world sat back and watched Gaza in horror, but few did anything,
   except for the Yemeni people and the Hezbollah-led resistance in Lebanon.
   (Al Mayadeen English; Illustrated by Zeinab el-Hajj)

Just shedding tears for those undergoing tremendous humanitarian crises is
meaningless unless we also recognize and support those peoples. For this
reason, there is a moral imperative to recognize the Yemeni and Palestinian
people, closely linked Arab and Muslim peoples who have struggled for
decades against outside plans to divide, exterminate and steal their lands
and resources.

This moral imperative is an obligation on the free peoples of the world,
those with a conscience, and particularly on large independent nations –
like Russia, China, Venezuela and Iran – to recognize and support the
struggles of the Yemeni and Palestinian peoples, abandoned and oppressed
for decades, and whom the imperial powers claim do not exist, are
illegitimate people or “terrorists”, even as they defend their lands and
communities from imperial terrorism.

The Yemeni people launched a war of independence against the US and its
proxies, mainly Arab monarchies from the Persian Gulf, in a dirty war which
persisted for many years, but which the Yemeni people won, only to be
abused as “Houthi rebels” by the UN Security Council, and held under an
extensive UN backed blockade, leading to what was called, before the Gaza
genocide, “the largest humanitarian crisis in the world
<https://news.un.org/en/focus/yemen>.”

These Yemenis are not simply “rebels” they constitute the only legitimate
government in Yemen for the past decade. This Ansar Allah-led coalition
government, based in Sanaa, has been managing a state since 2015 for more
than 70% of the population <https://counter-hegemonic-studies.site/yemen-w/>,
while the “recognized” regime is a comprador exile group based in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia
<https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/yemen/yemens-troubled-presidential-leadership-council>
.

Just as the people of Venezuela cannot tolerate an outside appointed,
self-proclaimed “president” like Juan Guaido or Edmundo Gonzalez
<https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-calls-venezuelan-opposition-candidate-edmundo-gonzalez-president-elect/3398422>
so the Yemeni people cannot be expected to accept an exile regime based in
Saudi Arabia
<https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/saudi-rallies-around-exiled-yemen-leader-after-uae-backed-separatists-n1041321>as
their government.

The international community knows little of the Yemeni people. Better known
are the Palestinian people, who have waged an eight-decade struggle against
the Israeli settler colonial regime, have been subject to ethnic cleansing,
periodic massacres and, over the past two years, to a genocidal onslaught
in Gaza <https://www.icj-cij.org/node/203447>.

The world sat back and watched Gaza in horror, but few did anything, except
for the Yemeni people and the Hezbollah-led resistance in Lebanon. The
Yemeni people confronted the Israeli criminals directly, blocking shipping
to prevent supply to the genocidal regime, in accordance with their
obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide. Which other state complied with its obligations under
the Genocide Convention?

The free peoples of the world should join with the Yemeni and the
Palestinian people and not side with the US and Israeli criminals. We
should also expose the Israeli crimes against the people of Yemen and
Palestine, as well as the Anglo-American providers of bombs and other
weapons used to slaughter those peoples.

We are not powerless, we can do something by recognizing the Sanaa
government in Yemen and recognizing a Single Democratic State in Palestine,
not the ridiculous “two-state” illusion that has been held out for so many
years. Apartheid in Palestine must be dismantled, that is an obligation
under international law, as lawyers Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley
pointed out in a report for the UN,
<https://counter-hegemonic-studies.site/pal-apartheid-ft/> years ago.

Just as the South Africans rejected a backwards “homeland” proposal in the
1980s, so we should reject this outdated “two state” myth for Apartheid
"Israel"-Palestine. The South African apartheid regime tried to present
“Bantustan” enclaves as some form of ‘self-determination’, but this was
rejected both by black South Africans and the United Nations. Archbishop
Desmond Tutu said tribal enclaves had nothing to do with the South African
reality. The Bantustan policy and practice aimed at reinforcing apartheid
by forcing the majority black African population into 13% of the country’s
land, with few resources and basic services
<https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/rejecting-the-bantustan--two-state-solution---mandla-mandela>
.

The first Trump administration tried to sell a very similar idea in 2020;
seeking to preserve the land theft by 140 settlements and 600,000 Israeli
settlers across the West Bank and East Jerusalem
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/world/middleeast/peace-plan.html>. This
plan was rejected by all Palestinian factions
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51292865>.

Just as Russia says it cannot live alongside a Neo-Nazi Ukraine which aims
at the destruction of the Russian people and their culture
<https://russkiymir.ru/en/news/222522/>, so the Palestinian people can’t be
expected to live alongside a colonial regime committed to their
extermination
<https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-extermination-acts-genocide-gaza>.
The colonizers should be made to accept equal citizenship for all, or leave.

We must break the blockade imposed on the peoples of Yemen and Palestine, a
blockade of information, of culture – including attempts to ban
communications with and support for these people – and then also the
economic and military blockades.

Back in 2014-2015, as the Yemeni revolution was taking place, Washington
managed to convince the UN Security Council to designate Ansar Allah
(“Houthi rebels”) as a destabilizing terrorist force, despite the fact that
they were fighting US- and Saudi-backed Al Qaeda groups in the Arabian
Peninsula
<https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.500.11850/118212/eth-49383-01.pdf>.
The independent states at the UNSC seem to have been asleep. This gave
apparent UN legitimacy to the terrible war and siege on Yemen
<https://counter-hegemonic-studies.site/yemen-w/>.

Ansar Allah is the only Arab and Muslim resistance group to be proscribed
by the UNSC; neither the Lebanese Resistance party Hezbollah (part of the
Lebanese government for most of the past two decades) nor any of the
Palestinian factions (Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the others) are so listed at
the UN. They are just unilaterally branded as “terrorist” by Washington
<https://www.odni.gov/nctc/terrorist_groups/hamas.html> and its allies. We
should pay more attention to the distinction between international and
unilateral designations.

Yet even Washington accepts UNSC designated terrorist groups as a new
government, when it suits, as we have seen with the HTS/Al-Qaeda takeover
of Damascus in late 2024
<https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/washington-returns-damascus-high-stakes-syrias-transition>.
HTS has no revolutionary or democratic mandate, it simply took over when
the besieged Syrian Arab Army collapsed; yet Western and comprador Arab
regimes rushed to normalize with new “interim president” Jolani aka Ahmed
al Sharaa
<https://www.jordantimes.com/news/region/syria-leader-invited-arab-league-summit-gaza>,
because HTS forces had deposed the independent Assad government, which was
allied to Iran and had been providing material support to the Lebanese and
Palestinian resistance.

If Washington can do this with designated terrorists, why should not the
independent nations of the world recognize the decent and long-suffering
Yemeni and Palestinian peoples?

An additional reason the Anglo-Americans give for not recognizing Ansar
Allah and listing it as “terrorist” is its operations against Red Sea
shipping supply to the Israeli regime
<https://www.state.gov/designation-of-ansarallah-as-a-foreign-terrorist-organization/>
since the outbreak of the Gaza Genocide in October 2023.  However, the
Ansar Allah-led Sanaa government responded that its operations are not only
justified against the Israeli criminals and its accomplices, but an
obligation under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide, which indeed cites the need to move against those
engaged in “complicity in genocide” (Article III
<https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-and-punishment-crime-genocide>
).

In all these circumstances, not least the poorly considered and punitive
UNSC resolutions against Yemen and attempts to prohibit all support for the
Palestinian Resistance, it is important that a civil society dialogue opens
up with the people of Yemen and Palestine, despite the attempts to ban such
links; and that large, independent and counter-weight nations like Russia,
China, Venezuela and Iran move to recognize these peoples at a national
level.
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