Korea, Palestine, and the Price of Freedom

We are publishing remarks by Jeremiah Kim given on October 22, 2023.

I come here today to speak of a new world emerging; but I also come to speak about war.

Many of us have seen images and stories of the war raging between Israel and the Palestinian people. I want to talk about Korea in this context. Because they are part of the same fabric.

You probably know that there are two Koreas, North and South. Korea wasn’t always this way. Korea is a small peninsula sandwiched between China, Russia, and Japan. While it engaged in frequent cultural exchange with these peoples, 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; the Korean language was forbidden. My grandparents grew up having to speak Japanese. This was the birth of the Korean independence movement.

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. In the dead of night of August 10, 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 after about 30 minutes.

Several decades earlier in 1917, in the throes of the First World War, the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour sent a letter to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a figurehead in Britain’s Jewish community. Balfour promised that Britain would seek to establish a “national home for the Jewish people” in historic Palestine. This was known as the Balfour Declaration. So over the next few decades, the British began importing European Jews into Palestine. They went from 3% of the population of Palestine to 33%.

History is strange and almost viciously funny 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. They become horrifyingly abstract. This is why W.E.B. Du Bois said that imperialism is the true enemy of democracy.

In 1948, armed Zionist groups, who had been trained by the British, forcibly expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. This was the Nakba, or the catastrophe; this was the creation of the state of Israel. 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. American warplanes killed 20-30% of Korea’s population in the north. Whole cities were wiped off the map by carpet bombing and napalm; today, Israel uses the same tactics against Gaza. These are attempts to destroy a people’s civilization.

All Koreans living today are children of the Korean War, in the same way that all Palestinians today carry the memory of the Nakba in their blood. The Korean War, which never actually ended, and Israel’s war on the Palestinians are likely the two longest running conflicts in the world today.

Both of these wars appear to us 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 United States. 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.

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 U.S. constantly whispers to both Israel and South Korea: “You 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, poisoned 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 should remain controlled by the U.S. and its land and waters crawling with 30,000 American troops and nuclear submarines. Both societies are prisoners of their own internalized fear and dehumanization of their brothers and sisters, which leads them into the arms of the United States.

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 up straight and fight back regardless. James Baldwin insisted that people are only as free as they choose to be. Perhaps we 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. Recently, North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un said that “Palestine is an issue not only for the Arabs and Muslims, it is an issue of freedom itself.”

Is it possible that the North Koreans and Palestinians know something about life which we have yet to catch up to? Is it possible that these people, ridiculed and spat on by the West, could be messengers of a future world to come?

President Joe Biden went on a tour of the Middle East this past week. The leaders of three different countries canceled their meetings with him. Humanity is moving beyond the age of Europe. The so-called American century, which began with the Korean War, is ending. I speak about Korea and its significance not only as a Korean, but perhaps more importantly as an American.

The American people today, in many different ways, are embarking on a long quest toward peace. This quest for peace 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 the 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?

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 the Israelis and Jewish diaspora are able to come to terms with who they have become under the corrupting influence of Zionism, this too will be enormously positive. And if the Korean people are able to overcome two 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.

If we are to have a place in the new world emerging, we must have the courage to hear the testimony of those whom we are told to hate and fear. That is where love and truth and freedom can begin. And that is where I think America’s future ultimately lies.