Excerpt
Fighting for Palestinian liberation is not just a matter of empathy. Solidarity with the cause is vital to the survival of all those living in the long shadow of global empire.
In my home country Korea, when movements reach out to people for actions – anything from people power at protests to signatures on petitions or direct actions – we ‘request solidarity’ (yeondae-yochung). It’s a call not just to action, but to understanding and empathy for the past and future of a cause.
In May 2021, one such request for solidarity caught my eye – an open letter to the Israeli government entitled ‘Israel, Stop invasion of the Gaza Strip immediately.’ Around 160 Korean civil society organisations signed it, and the range of causes that the signatories represented was strikingly broad: Climate Justice Forum; Friends of “Comfort Women” in Sydney; Korean Deaf LGBT; Korean Solidarity against Precarious Work; People Making Jeju a Demilitarized Peace Island; Book Club, Hyanglin Church.
Elsewhere in the world, we were seeing one of the largest ever international uprisings in solidarity with Palestine. Hundreds of thousands of people across Europe and the Americas took to the streets, as Israeli forces launched intense military strikes across Gaza, the West Bank and historic Palestine in response to Palestinian resistance against ethnic cleansing and evictions in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.