The Houthi Alternative for Lebanon

Asharq Al-Awsat

06-06-2025

The Houthis resemble a boxer who, whenever he thinks he is about to strike his opponent, finds himself on the receiving end of devastating blows. However, despite his broken nose, gouged-out eye, and the blood pouring from his face, he refuses to leave the ring.
Such behavior is met with glorification and veneration by the Resistance Axis. Per the Axis's worldview, the Houthis' determination to remain in the ring under such conditions brings them honor and dignity while standing up for and in solidarity with Gaza.
As for the actual achievements that reward the Houthis for sacrificing their country and people, they amount to little more than launching a missile that is usually intercepted, instigating air raid sirens in Israel, sending people to shelters for an hour, or at most, threatening maritime shipping routes... all "for Palestine's sake" of course! Results, in any case, are unimportant; what matters is their effort, initiative, and intent.
Every day, a different spokesperson for Hezbollah or its friends in the Axis rears his head to denounce the Lebanese state's failure to fulfill its duties and its capitulation to occupation. This slander is usually paired with smears against any bet on confronting Israel in the political or diplomatic arenas. With the party itself reeling from a painful military setback, the Lebanese army unequipped for such conflicts, and the overwhelming majority of the Lebanese people opposed to a war they believe is futile, the Houthi alternative is precisely what these slanderers are proposing.
That is, the only appropriate course of action is to show little regard for the lives of our own people as we perform "solidarity" with Gaza and Palestine without actually doing anything to alleviate the suffering of Gazans or any Palestinians. On top of that, it would entail Lebanon would be reinvented into a pariah in its region and the world, just like the enclave in Yemen that Houthis govern in strange ways.
Houthiism means, among other things, salvaging a pretense of heroic glory from the failure and fragmentation engendered by national division, civil war, and starvation. Thus, it is the attempt to derive strength - or something that resembles it - from weakness that cannot be hidden or denied.
This belligerent disposition with a suicidal dimension was born of the wretched phenomenon of regimes that can only survive through war. If the war eventually wipes them out, they die martyrs in a death that is choreographed as heroic.
There might be another implicit dimension: defending a world of the past that cannot be revived - in this case, the Mutawakkilite Kingdom that many Houthis died defending when it was overthrown by a military coup in 1962.
Also in defense of a dead world and past, the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima ended his life in 1970, with a heroic ritual suicide driven by his loyalty to the old Japan that had been "polluted" by modernization and Westernization. Leading four others in a suicide mission, he launched a failed coup he had deludedly believed could restore his country's divine past. When he failed in this attempt that had always been bound to fail, he launched into a tirade and disemboweled himself.
There was also collective suicide at the "People's Temple" in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. There was a desire to abide by a religious cult's doctrines, and that desire was pushed to its extreme conclusion. More than 900 people perished, many of them children who were poisoned in order "to please God."
These mythological visions of the world diminish the importance of clinging to life and pursuing a better model. The monster or evil is lying in wait, undeterred by politics, diplomacy, or anything else we can do. Thus, the only thing left to do is to scream "Death is sweet," exactly as the Houthis have done and continue to do.
As they count down to a death presented as heroic, the Houthis are turning the territory they control into a sacrifice at the altar of the Iranian regime, the supreme totem whose interests one should die defending. As such, advocating the Houthi alternative for Lebanon amounts to calling on its people to die for the Iranian state's interests and several other crazy considerations. Hezbollah, when it was powerful, founded this school of thought that the Houthis subscribed to, so much so that they are now leading the race of the Resistance Axis' Arab factions toward gratuitous death.
The fact remains that advocating for the Houthi alternative - with all the violence, poverty, and sacrifice that comes with it - also entails spreading an alarmist consciousness that convinces us that we must confront an imminent and unavoidable existential threat. That is how causality and the notion that every occurrence happens for some reason, are replaced with belief in an essentialized enemy that will inevitably attack and invade us, be it after a "support war" or without one.
The fact is that this form of mythological thinking has deep roots. The latest war has only pushed it to a more acute, dramatic, and dangerous place. The Lebanese have been offered several models to follow over the decades. The Baathists suggested models they had set up in Syria and Iraq. The models proposed by the communists ranged from South Yemen to Bulgaria to North Korea. Of course, the Khomeinist model in Iran remains the ideal one championed by the Khomeninists.
The difference between the Houthi alternative and those of the past might be that this time, death is incomparably more certain and faster.