I believe most readers at first glance do not see the commonalities between the words in the article's title. This fact does not surprise me as North Korea is geographically, politically, and realistically far from us in the East, and its concerns appear to the vast majority of Eastern people as different from those dominating our minds.
Most political enthusiasts and scholars in our East unfortunately adopted blatant arrogance towards North Korea, its people, leadership, society, and governance system. But despite this prevailing negative sarcastic impression, I am certain that generally in the Arab East and especially in occupied Palestine, we can learn much from North Korea and its experience with the United States and its allies and its steadfastness over more than seven decades.
A quick return to the history of the Korean crisis and the history of the Middle East shows us the similarities between what happened in our Middle Eastern East in the mid-20th century and what happened on the Korean Peninsula.
Since the 1920s, the Korean Peninsula was occupied by Imperial Japan and remained a Japanese colony until the end of World War II. After Japan's defeat by the United States in the war, American forces stationed in the southern part of the peninsula and arbitrarily divided the country along the 38th parallel between south and north.
The south became a playground for colonial Western powers, and a South Korean regime cooperating with the American occupiers emerged there, while in the north, the socialist state-building experiment began with support from China and the Soviet Union. At the same time, European colonialism led by Britain and France tampered with the Ottoman legacy in our Arab East and began arbitrarily dividing the East into small states and provinces to extend its control and increase its influence. It also began supporting the Zionist project to steal Palestinian land from its original inhabitants and forcibly displace them to build Israel on its ruins.
This colonial project ended with the rape of Palestine in 1948 and the division of the Arab world into kingdoms and states as drawn by the Sykes-Picot Agreement after World War I. Some Arab regimes that took power became tools to impose and implement the European colonial project and later the American-European one, as happened on the Korean Peninsula. After the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, which cemented the division of the Korean Peninsula and caused about three million Korean deaths, the United States imposed economic, military, and diplomatic sanctions on North Korea.
These sanctions continue to this day, and the suffering of the North Korean people increases day by day while the Americans try to subjugate them. The sanctions imposed on North Korea are unprecedented in history. There is no comparison between these sanctions and those imposed on some Arab countries that stood against colonialism and raised the banner of nationalism, nor those imposed on Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, nor those imposed by America on Cuba.
American sanctions on North Korea affect every aspect of life; there is no significant foreign trade for North Korea, which exchanges goods with China in a limited manner and without banking intervention due to fear of American sanctions on Chinese banks inevitably linked to global banks in New York. North Korea barely has embassies in Western countries, its currency is not traded, and it faces media, scientific, and cultural blockade, in addition to military siege and surveillance unprecedented in history.
Since that time, the North Korean people have resisted to survive. This was not the Korean people's choice but imposed on them from outside, just as the Palestinian people were forced to lose their homeland externally, with some Arabs cooperating with Western colonialism to fragment the Arab East and plant Israel among it, just as the South Korean regime cooperated with American colonialism to besiege North Korea. American sanctions were imposed on North Korea to subdue the Korean people and break their resilience. Starving the North Korean people and the death of hundreds of thousands was never a humanitarian issue for Americans or the West. America's concern was and remains to break the will of the North Korean regime and people. While the West succeeded in breaking the will of many Arab regimes and incorporating them into its colonial project in the East and taming parts of the Arab people and some Palestinian leadership to accept the imposed reality, North Korea remained a steadfast regime and people facing all sanctions, defying America and all its allies worldwide.
Since the beginning of the so-called Korean crisis, the leadership in North Korea has followed a clear strategy centered on strengthening itself militarily and steadfastly to threaten American interests and those of its allies in East Asia to force the United States to start a dialogue of equals among the conflict parties, away from American dictates and the chance of its dominance over North Korea's leadership and people.
Despite the comprehensive siege, North Korea managed not only to develop its army, military arsenal, and ballistic missiles but also built nuclear weapons, becoming a nuclear and military power that the world reckons with, and it is no longer easy to attack it without dragging the world into a nuclear war whose destructive extent is unknown.
North Korea established itself globally not only as a military power but as an outstanding military and intelligence school rivaling American, Russian, and Chinese military and intelligence academies.
North Korea is a pioneer worldwide in what is called tunnel warfare—its construction and fortification—and everyone, especially in our Middle Eastern East, learned this military art from Korea. North Korea was also a pioneer in building rocket launchers, and its experiences were later copied in most global military industries. I do not mean to promote such a military strategy personally, as I believe that developing weapons and military capabilities, despite their importance for protecting national interests, comes at the expense of society's welfare, living standards, prosperity, knowledge, and culture. Wars, as history taught us, destroy not only the enemy but also the self first.
The North Korean people fully understand that their leadership's focus since the mid-20th century on developing military capabilities comes at the expense of important matters for the people, such as food, education, infrastructure, and joining modernity and its derivatives. They hold their leadership responsible for this deficiency and for depriving them of goods, life's pleasures, and freedoms, just as the Syrian, Egyptian, Tunisian, and other peoples held their leaderships responsible for depriving them of various life necessities. Yet despite all this, the North Korean people still stand behind their leadership and endure all challenges.
The claim often promoted that the Korean dictatorship strikes with an iron fist every popular attempt to stand against the leadership's decisions and institutions is not entirely true... Yes, a dictatorship can intimidate an entire people and silence them for years, and history attests to that, but no dictatorship, regardless of its nature, can silence the ambitions of an entire people and oppress them over four generations as is the case in North Korea.
Despite the suffering of the North Korean people and their leadership's excessive spending on the military arsenal and neglect of all other life aspects, all attempts by American intelligence and its allies to infiltrate the Korean people and incite them to overthrow their leadership have failed over the past seventy years. Conversely, American and Western intelligence succeeded in infiltrating the Soviet Union with its greatness and dismantling it, succeeded in infiltrating East Germany and erasing it from the global map, dismantled the socialist bloc known as the Warsaw Pact, and also succeeded in infiltrating Chinese society and turning it into a semi-capitalist society. Yet they remain incapable and puzzled before the Korean case... So where is the magic? The answer lies in an equation known to political sociology and social psychology of groups: the fundamental cohesion of a society lies not in economic prosperity and unlimited access to consumer goods but in the leadership's ability to give its people dignity and honor above all. This is what the North Korean leadership realized and what it gave its people over seventy years, and this is what thwarted all attempts to infiltrate and tamper with the cohesion of the North Korean entity.
The Palestinian people lived under occupation, and before the first Intifada erupted, they experienced economic prosperity unknown since, with unemployment, despite harsh working conditions in Israel, very low, and their ability to move freely within the homeland and abroad was almost unrestricted. Despite this relative prosperity, the people rose up and resisted the occupation that wounded their dignity by occupying their land and wounded their pride by oppressing them. The Palestinian people refused to give up defending their dignity and honor.
The Palestinian people, with all their political colors, stood united behind their leadership and its liberation project. The dignity and honor given by the Syrian leadership to its people are the backbone on which Syria's steadfastness against the global aggression on its entity and existence is built. It is the dignity and honor that the Yemeni revolutionaries and army offer their people to withstand the Saudi aggression supported by America and Israel.
This dignity and honor are lacking in most other Arab peoples, which is why we see ruling leaders in these countries fear their peoples and work day and night with a 'stick and carrot' strategy, sometimes by enticing with money and buying loyalties, and sometimes by security repression to cling to the throne.
The Palestinian people, still besieged by the occupying state and suffering daily oppression in all its forms, do not stand united behind their political leaderships because these leaderships, in their various colors, have failed to give them in the past quarter-century the feeling that they defend their dignity and honor. They have not fortified them internally to withstand the occupation's siege and oppression for long.
The North Korean people give us an example that peoples are generous and loyal to their leaderships and are ready to sacrifice if they feel their dignity and honor are priorities in the leadership's strategies.
This is an example for us in the Arab East, peoples and leaderships, to emulate.
