Palestine, Korea and the battle for a new world
Jeremiah Kim The Electronic Intifada 27 June 2024
Protesters in Seoul demand an end to the genocide in Gaza on 18 March during a visit by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken
Yonhap NewsI write to bear witness to a new world, challenged though it is from Palestine to Korea and beyond.
For the past several months, many have been transfixed and horrified by images and stories of the genocide being waged by Israel against the Palestinian people. As a Korean American, I am compelled to think about Korea in this context because although the situations may differ, they are ultimately part of the same fabric.
It should be clear to all that the Western world order is dying. Humanity stands on the threshold of a new epoch. The US ruling elite has decided to drag the American people – and the world – to war, to defend what’s left of Western civilization and crush the rise of Asia.
Israel and America’s crusade to exterminate Palestine must be viewed, then, in this context: as an attack upon western Asia.
Likewise, heightened prospects of war in the Korean peninsula cannot be treated as an isolated phenomenon. America’s warmakers see Korea as one battleground in a much wider strategy to wage open war with China in the pending future. This, despite failing US and European efforts to destroy Russia through Ukraine.
Questions to ponder
How did we arrive here?
What are the true lessons of our history?
And out of this, what must our path forward be?
Today, there are two Koreas, North and South. This is a relatively new phenomenon. As a small peninsula sandwiched between China, Russia and Japan, Korea has long engaged in frequent cultural exchange with its neighbors. At the same time, Korea developed into a distinct civilization with its own language over several thousand years.
Then came Japanese occupation – Korea’s painful entrance into modernity. Japan at the beginning of the 20th century envied the Western powers and wanted to become like them. So it industrialized and started to swallow up its neighbors. Korea became a colony, and the Korean language was for a time forbidden in major areas of public life and learning. My grandparents grew up having to speak Japanese. This led to the birth of the Korean independence movement.
Decades passed, and Korea continued to be struck by misfortune. Right on the verge of achieving national liberation, the peninsula was caught in the whirlwind of the first major conflict after the Second World War. On 10 August 1945, right after the atomic bombing of Japan, two American colonels were tasked with finding a place to divide Korea to create a zone for American occupation.
Looking at a map, they decided on the 38th parallel.
Several decades earlier in 1917, in the throes of World War I, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour had sent a letter to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild.
Balfour promised that Britain would seek to establish a “national home for the Jewish people” in historic Palestine. Initially, the British facilitated the emigration of European Jews to Palestine. According to the journal Nature, citing the Statistics Department of the Jewish Agency Executive, the Jewish population in Palestine more than doubled over a decade from 1931-1940.
History is strange and viciously cruel that way. A single stroke of a pen can decide the fate of a people. It can condemn them to a century of war, of division, of humiliation, of exile. And in the modern epoch, these decisions are even more heinous. They are made without any semblance of democratic control.
In 1948, Zionist groups armed and trained by the British, forcibly expelled between 750,000 - 850,000 Palestinians from their homeland. This was the Nakba, or catastrophe, bringing dispossession, displacement and the state of Israel.
Distant feuds
Just two years later, in 1950, Korea was thrust by the United States into a conflict that took the appearance of a civil war but was actually a war for the freedom and survival of the Korean people. It was brutal and genocidal. Air Force General Curtis LeMay, head of the strategic air command during the Korean War, estimated in 1984 that the American campaign killed 20 percent of the population in the north.
Carpet bombing and napalm devastated major Korean cities; today, Israel uses similar tactics against Gaza. These are attempts to destroy a people’s civilization.
All Koreans living today are connected to the Korean War in the same way that Palestinians today carry with them the memory of the Nakba. The Korean War, which never actually ended, and Israel’s war on the Palestinians have produced two of the longest-running occupations in the world today.
Both of these wars are presented to US citizens as distant feuds between two neighbors who just can’t seem to get along. The reality is that both wars are bankrolled, armed and sustained by the US. In America, we hear awful things about North Korea – that it’s a police state whose citizens are all brainwashed. We are now hearing awful things about the Palestinian resistance – that Hamas is holding its own civilians hostage in Gaza and using them as human shields.
Growing up as part of the diaspora, you hear these kinds of messages about your people all the time; the effect is to make you hate a part of yourself and to condition you to meekly conform to the status quo of American society. You are forced to take a cowering, defensive posture, to distance yourself from the very freedom fighters who are your blood.
At the same time, a great sea change is now taking place among many Americans, especially the young: The people do not trust the ruling elite’s narrative about the Palestinians, much less about the state of their own country and the wider world. Many of us are now realizing that the Palestinian resistance is fighting to defend its people’s civilization and that such a defense is of incalculable value for humanity as a whole.
Consequently, the extreme accusations of Western media obscure something very important, not simply the reality of the situation, but a deeper, more existential and spiritual question. Who is really free? What does it mean to be free?
The US constantly tells the world that Israel and South Korea are bastions of “democracy, surrounded by a sea of autocrats and enemies. And for years, the Israelis have lulled themselves into the belief that they could build a cosmopolitan utopia and supposed Jewish homeland atop the brutalized, starved and dispossessed children of Gaza and the West Bank – and somehow avoid any repercussions because they had armed themselves to the teeth with American backing.
South Korea was empowered to become a high-tech, pop-culture juggernaut, on the condition that its military remained under the control of the US – its land and waters crawling with, according to the Congressional Research Service, 28,500 American troops and nuclear submarines.
Both Israel and South Korea are prisoners of their own internalized fear and dehumanization of their brothers and sisters or neighbors, which leads them into the arms of the United States. The main difference between them is that Israel occupies Palestine and operates in a more symbiotic relationship with the US, whereas South Korea is subordinate to and occupied by America.
The glaring realities
On the other hand, the Palestinians and the people of North Korea have been disciplined by years of hardship. Every day, they face the threat of their own extermination. They choose to stand straight and fight back regardless.
Perhaps we in America have forgotten the voices of our own prophets, but today it is the Palestinians, the North Koreans and others who remind us of the same truth: that fighting for your people is the only way to be free. Freedom is the recognition of this very necessity.
Let us face the reality that a child of Palestine or North Korea – and not only them: a child of China, Yemen, Iran or Cuba as well — already knows more about life than we do, trapped as we are in our decadent Western adolescence. In truth, it is precisely these people, ridiculed and spat on by the West, who are messengers of a future world to come.
The past few months since 7 October have exposed the weaknesses, hypocrisy and swift decline of “American leadership” in the eyes of the world. The signs today are clear: Humanity is moving beyond the age of Western hegemony. The so-called American century, which began with the Korean War, is ending. The overwhelming majority of the world stands with Palestine and opposes the US and Israel as they commit a genocide in Gaza in flagrant violation of basic morality and international law.
What then holds the tattered shreds of the Western world order together? Only the willingness of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines or other countries to continue being used by the US against China and North Korea. The same goes in western Asia, where the US and Israel gladly wield their “allies” in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar or the UAE as launchpads against Palestine, Yemen and Iran.
Likewise, the extent to which the American people now hesitate to confront their own ruling class is the same extent to which world war continues to loom as a possibility. I speak then about Korea, Palestine and wider Asia not only as a Korean, but perhaps more importantly as an American.
The American people today, in many ways, are embarking on a long quest toward peace. This quest must be a quest for democracy. Wars are decided by a small circle of ruling elites; yet they are carried out in our name. We must make the choice to see ourselves as responsible for our country and the role it plays around the world. If we abdicate this responsibility, if we see ourselves as helpless, then we abdicate our own freedom.
In the end, I am faced with this truth: The people of Korea have endured and given so much; the Palestinians have sacrificed more than we can imagine. How can I afford to do anything less than to give every inch of my life and fight for the future?
Reasons for hope
In spite of all the turmoil in the world, I am optimistic.
If the Palestinians gain their freedom, the world will not be the same. If Israeli society and the Jewish diaspora are forced to come to terms with who they have become under the racist ideology of Zionism, this too will be positive.
If South Korea is able to reckon with its history and if the Korean people are able to overcome multiple generations of division and reconcile with each other again, I believe there will be an outpouring of a new spirit and new energy from Korea that will reach us here in America.
For we, too, are in desperate need of a new appraisal of our history and the tasks of our present. The protests in America against Israel’s genocide and for Palestinian freedom must develop into a broader peace movement – not simply for Palestine or Korea, or Asia, but for the sake of America’s future and the future of humankind.
If we are to have a place in the new world emerging, we must have the courage to hear the testimony of those we are told to hate and fear. That is where love and truth and freedom can begin. And that is where I believe our human future ultimately lies.
Jeremiah Kim is an organizer in Philadelphia with the Saturday Free School for Philosophy and Black Liberation and an editor for Avant-Garde, A Journal of Peace, Democracy, and Science.