Anti-War Activist Schools LBC Host On Israel Gaza War

The West is providing cover for the Israelis while they attempt genocide and bombing one of the few governments trying to stop them. It poses this question, are we really the good guys? Well, on LBC, John Rees from Stop the War Coalition debated that with Tom Swarbrick. Do you believe that the Houthis are right to be doing what they're doing in the name of preventing what you say is a genocide in Gaza? Well, I don't think it's really the British state's business to lecture the Houthis. Yemen, as perhaps your listeners will know, was a British colony. The British had to be driven out of there. The British have been backing an eight-year war by the Saudis against Yemen, which has just now resulted in a truce. I really don't think that it's the business of this country to go back to bomb a former colony after it's already been paying for a war against it for eight years. Nobody in the Middle East thinks that that is a remotely justifiable situation. Done to protect ships, done to protect international trade. No, what the Houthis have said is that they aren't targeting international trade, they're targeting ships that are going to Israel because they want to put pressure on them. They haven't targeted just ships that have been... Well, how do you know, Tom? Because you can see the ships that they've been targeting. They haven't just targeted ships that are just going to Israel. They've been targeting a wide range of ships, actually, the flags of countries that they believe are supportive of Israel. I have to ask you again. Yes, so what they're doing is... Hang on a second, Mr Rees-Less. Let me ask the question. Do you think what the Houthis are doing is right? In trying to employ economic sanctions of the kind that this country employs against Iran or Russia when it wants to alter that state's behaviour, yes, I do believe that they're justified in doing that because they're trying to stop a genocide. You keep avoiding this question. You keep avoiding the fact that there are 23,000 dead people in Gaza and that that is at the centre of this and all this business about trade. If people were as concerned about the loss of life as they are about the loss of trade, perhaps we'd be further forward in this debate. I thought that was quite a brave line that John Rees took there because the Houthis, when they talked about in the UK media, they're just this crazy band of terrorists who are sort of arbitrarily lashing out at international shipping. How dare they? But, I mean, he's quite right really. When you look at sort of the ethics of this, they're basically applying economic sanctions on Israel. As far as I understand, they haven't killed any civilians. They haven't killed anyone. What they're doing is incurring costs on shipping companies. Now, Tom Swarbrick is correct. It's not just affecting the Israeli economy. It's having huge ramifications on a worldwide level. But actually, so did sanctions on Russia. That massively increased grain prices for certain countries in the global south. So, the fact that there are sort of externalities doesn't seem to me to separate this situation from the sanctions that we put on Russia. Now, of course, it's more chaotic, threatening shipping in the Red Sea. It's probably very scary for the people on those ships. I'm not saying that what the Houthis are doing doesn't have bad consequences, but the Houthis don't really have enough leverage to try and organize sanctions on Israel, a very small country. So, it seems to me they are kind of doing what they can to apply some pressure to Israel. Again, as we always say, this doesn't mean that the Houthis are these great guys. I'm sure I have very little in common with them politically. But if you're looking at this in terms of one particular action, now sanctions on Russia, lots of people in our audience disagree with me. I thought it was legitimate to put sanctions on Russia when they invaded Ukraine because that was a war of aggression. They haven't killed as many civilians as the Israelis did, but they were killing a lot of civilians. And regardless of that, I think starting a war of aggression, however you conduct it, is a terrible thing to do. I think sanctions on Russia, making them face economic consequences, had bad consequences. We have to accept that. There were innocent people that would have suffered, but I think on the balance of things, that was a legitimate thing to do. I also think sanctioning Israel is a moral obligation. I think the West should be sanctioning Israel now. I think if Israel weren't an ally of ours, then what they have done would be far and away, way beyond what it would take for us to say that sanctions were justified, because they're our allies. We don't. Now the Houthis, it's not the conventional way of doing sanctions, but morally it's very, very similar. I think John Rhys was right there. Thomas Forber said, this is crazy. You can't say this is economic sanctions. Well, it's really not that different. I imagine many of the audience would have agreed. So an interesting point, very well made.