Standing Alone? Solidarity with Palestine in Seoul, Korea

There are few in Britain who can say that Palestine has not come to their doorsteps since last October. Protests attracting hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have rarely if ever attended other political events, have occurred nearly weekly in London. Smaller demonstrations and events from Brighton to Inverness have publicised the genocide in every community. Hundreds of activists have put their bodies and liberty on the line in blockades, lock-ons, sit-ins, and arms factory raids. Regular demonstrations for Palestine, while unlikely to again attain the record-breaking numbers of the November 11th march last year, have continued well past the normal half-life of most British protest cycles.

The scale and longevity of this movement owes a great deal to decades of work carried out by many thousands of activists. The trade union movement, progressive organisations, and in many cases entire communities can be relied upon to protest in force against each new injustice thrust upon the Palestinians by Israel. The UK Palestinian solidarity movement’s foundations were firmly planted well before last October, and it shows in the ubiquity of Palestine in everyday politics.

I had the great privilege of taking part in several pro-Palestinian protests in Seoul this June and of speaking with organisers there. The solidarity movement in Korea does not have the same deep foundations which we have in the UK – instead, activists and organisers are working to build these foundations from the ground up. The Korean activists I spoke with greatly admired the achievements of the British Palestinian movement, but there is arguably just as much that we in Britain can learn from them. South Korea’s Palestine solidarity movement thus offers an important point of comparison with the UK’s.

Palestine in South Korean Politics

South Korea’s attitude to Palestine has traditionally been one of relative ambivalence. As a cause it has not yet mobilised great masses of the public, neither vis-à-vis the UK nor in comparison to other domestic protest movements, although polling from last year indicates a steep drop in Israel’s net favourability. The South Korean state, like the UK, does not formally recognise a Palestinian state, despite recently voting in favour of its admission at the UN level. Successive governments have traditionally toed the American line on most foreign policy matters, especially under right-wing administrations like the current Yoon Seok-Yeol presidency. North Korea’s diplomatic support for Palestine further complicates matters. South Korea’s intelligence services have alleged material connections between Hamas and the DPRK, although this is difficult to verify and denied by both the Palestinian Authority and North Korea.

The Korean right almost invariably supports Israel’s side of the issue to some degree. Christian right groups, often motivated by the philosemitism endemic in Korean society, are among Israel’s most vocal advocates domestically. Megachurch pastors such as Lee Young-Hoon, leader of the largest Pentecostal church in Korea at over 450,000 congregants, encourage their followers to pray directly for the security of the State of Israel. Christian non-profits like Love 153 International attempt to spread Zionism in Protestant churches across Korea. Zionism has a particular cache in Evangelical communities, where Judaism can be projected simply as an extension of Christianity in a country where there are very few Jews to speak for themselves. Christopher Schilling’s 2023 book The Japanese Talmud includes a more detailed exploration of this phenomenon of Christian Zionism in Korea.

Right wing parties, like the governing Gugminui Him (People Power), view Israel through an islamophobic lens as a civilised bastion in a tumultuous region. Pro-Israel rallies, while small, have close connections with both the Israeli and US embassies. The main liberal opposition, the Minjudang (Democratic Party), has not raised major objections to the Yoon administration’s policy on Palestine, and activists informed me that they have not been officially present at pro-Palestine demonstrations.

South Korea’s main progressive opposition parties – the Justice Party, Progressive Party, Labour Party, and Green Party – have committed to supporting the Palestinian cause, although they have not formally joined the growing street protest coalition according to organisers of the latter. The Greens received a legally dubious cease-and-desist letter (written in English) from the Israeli embassy last November after a pro-Palestinian banner was installed outside the embassy building. (I confirmed that pro-Palestinian Green Party banners were still up in the same place this June). Labour groups have been active in the protest coalition, and speakers from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions have lent their support on demonstrations. A civil society lawsuit against Netanyahu and other key Israeli officials has been filed in South Korea, spearheaded by the People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy and Asian Dignity Initiatives NGOs. This lawsuit was erroneously reported by several outlets as having been filed by the South Korean government.

The Protest Coalition

Like the UK, South Korea has experienced weekly pro-Palestinian street demonstrations since last October. These protests have largely coalesced around a formal coalition known as People in Solidarity with Palestinians (Palyeonsa). In Seoul, where much pro-Palestinian activism is concentrated, this coalition brings together several key groupings. First, the student presence at these demonstrations is hard to miss. Several independent student groups take part, such as the Seoul National University Subak (“Watermelon”) group who have organised a campus encampment over this past academic term since May. Also key to this coalition are a large number of long-term foreign residents, particularly from Korea’s small but growing Muslim communities. The third core element of this coalition is Nodongja Yeondae (Worker’s Solidarity), a Trotskyist organisation which has thrown itself almost exclusively into pro-Palestine organising over the past year. Nodongja Yeondae is part of the International Socialist Tendency, which readers may know as being centred around the UK’s Socialist Workers’ Party.

The coalition’s political points of unity will be familiar to many Palestine advocates worldwide. An immediate end to the Israeli attacks on Gaza, prosecution of Israeli government officials for war crimes, support for the Palestinian resistance, and the total withdrawal of all Israeli settlement from the West Bank and Golan Heights, to pave the way for an eventual one-state Palestine. In the South Korean context, they support the breaking of diplomatic ties with Israel and the dissolution of partnerships between Israeli and Korean institutions, such as universities. They also advocate the cessation of Korean arms exports to Israel – South Korea is among the world’s most prolific exporters of artillery systems. Support for Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions on Israel (BDS) is included in this, although Israeli-produced goods are less common in South Korea’s everyday consumer market than in Britain.

I was struck by the diversity of the coalition and how actively they sought to welcome and incorporate foreign communities. Palestinians themselves were front and centre in giving speeches: many Palestinian participants were international students who had entered the coalition via student organising. All written material produced by Palyeonsa is in both Korean and English, and often with Arabic translation as well. Speeches at the national demonstration on June 23^rd were accompanied by five separate translators – Korean, English, Arabic, Bengali, and Indonesian.

This explicit commitment to inclusivity is particularly noteworthy in the Korean context. Foreign communities are rarely actively included in Korean politics of any description. As Kim Jinju, professor at Myongji University’s Centre for Future Policy Studies notes in a recent book, political representation and tolerance of foreigners in Korea remains minimal despite an exponential growth of “multicultural” voters. Even on other progressive protests I attended in Seoul, I was often the only visible non-Korean present. The protests by Palyeonsa have evidently started to bridge this divide long thought unassailable in Korean politics.

Locating the Protests

Protests organised by Palyeonsa in Seoul tend to be held at a few main sites, each of which reflects an element of their coalition. Campuses such as Seoul National University and student-heavy neighbourhoods such as Sinchon or Hongdae are targeted frequently. Areas with large numbers of long-term foreign residents are also regular demonstration sites. Itaewon, famous for its foreign communities and its centrality for Muslims in Korea, has seen several pro-Palestinian marches.

The other key sites chosen by the organisers are areas of central Seoul with symbolic political importance. Seoul Plaza and Gwanghwamun Square are popular with demonstrators of all kinds, as any visit to either on a Saturday will make obvious. Gwanghwamun resembles a Korean version of Whitehall, being adjacent to the American and Israeli embassies, several government offices, the Chosun & Dong-A Ilbo newspapers, and the tourist-swarmed Gyeongbokgung Palace. The square also embodies the legacy of nationally significant protests in the progressive imagination, from the Democratisation Movement of the 1980s to the Candlelit Protests of 2017 which ousted the corrupt President Park Geun-Hye.

Choosing Tactics

If the locations of the protests are chosen to reflect the strengths of the coalition, then their tactics are centred on building wider public support. The A to B march, ever familiar to us in Britain, is employed albeit with a twist. Rather than simply being an opportunity to march between two symbolic points (I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve schlepped from some park to Parliament Square), these marches are designed for maximum coverage by area, not just by route length. As such, the Palyeonsa protests I attended would double-back on themselves, take unusual detours, and pass down busy pedestrianised alleys. The purpose of this soon became clear – designated flyerers flanked the marches, eager to talk to passers-by and distributing leaflets explaining the ongoing genocide to anyone who would stop and listen.

One demonstration I attended near the Yonsei University campus, composed of only seventy people, had at least a dozen people distributing flyers this way along our route. We seemed to go in every direction on the compass from the start point. An organiser explained to me that the timing and location were chosen carefully – 6pm on a Friday, in a student-heavy area – to maximise the attention received by what was a relatively small protest.

Alongside flyers, passers-by and protest attendees were given paper fans emblazoned with the Palestine flag. This was most welcome in the 36-degree heat, and it ensured that the Palestinian colours would be flown across Seoul for the rest of the day. The fans also had the social media details of the Palyeonsa coalition on their back. This is perhaps something we can emulate in Britain as our summers become more unbearable.

As the purpose of the A to B marches was to maximise engagement with the public and to bring public attention to Palestine, one method of achieving this was sheer volume. Even the larger pro-Palestine demonstrations in Seoul had only a few thousand attendees, so this volume could only be attained with amplification. Large sound systems were mounted on open-topped trucks which led the march, making the protest both unmissable and distinctly livelier. I posit that this can massively improve the general mood of any A to B march. Clearly this is an established tactic in South Korea, as I also saw it used by a progressive anti-Yoon Seok-Yeol protest and by striking medical workers.

Responses to the protests

The pro-Palestinian protests in Korea have experienced a somewhat mixed response from the state. They have not yet experienced police repression on the scale of, say, trade unions under the current administration, and the police presence I witnessed on their demonstrations was no larger or more aggressive than the ‘norm’ for Korean progressivism.

That said, the state has deployed silencing tactics of a style all too familiar under the Yoon administration. Three Palyeonsa activists received court summons this April after a press conference held outside the Israeli embassy was deemed to violate South Korea’s remarkably illiberal protest laws. I suspect that, at least initially, the double-edged sword of being perceived as a ‘foreign’ issue was at play, as both the public and the state have generally engaged far more actively with more obviously ‘domestic’ movements and issues. As the movement continues it risks further unwanted attention from the state, particularly under the present right-wing administration.

Most of the negative attention towards the Palyeonsa coalition has come, somewhat predictably, from right-wing outlets like the Chosun Ilbo. Much of this has focused on the participation of Nodongja Yeondae (red-baiting is commonplace on the Korean right), alongside the more familiar accusations of Hamas sympathies and antisemitism. Nonetheless, the protest movement is growing, with both strong local bases and connections with the global struggle for Palestine pushing it forward.

Palestine Solidarity in Korea and Britain

Solidarity with Palestine is nothing if not internationalist, and in South Korea there is the same fervour, selflessness, and dedication to a shared humanity that we see every week in the UK. I argue that the movement in both the UK and Korea share the same basic coalition building blocks; that is, student organisations, ethnic and religious minority communities (especially Muslim and Arab communities), and the trade union movement. The precise shape of the protest coalitions is somewhat different, as in the UK the trade union movement takes more of a leading role in organising mass, peaceful demonstrations, whereas student groups and Muslim community organisations take more of a lead in Korea.

Smaller further-left organisations are present in both cases, albeit less visibly in Korea due to the historic marginalisation of the far left. I found myself wondering how far Nodongja Yeondae were influenced by their connection with the UK’s SWP in terms of how they approach protest organising. South Korea does not have an equivalent of Palestine Action, despite the outsized role the state plays in global weapons manufacturing. The legal risks for such a group, should it be formed, would likely exceed even those faced in the UK given the critical importance of the defence industry vis-à-vis North Korea.

For us in these islands, some key organisational lessons can be drawn from the Palestine solidarity movement in Korea. If one’s movement is fighting an uphill struggle to engage an apathetic public, staging sustained, small-to-medium scale, attention-grabbing protests is a strong strategy. These protests should not just be held in central locations in front of national political buildings but should also be held in residential areas where key constituencies to one’s coalition live. Large, mass A-to-B marches in city centres are a good way of gauging the level of interest in the movement among the public, but rarely grow the movement itself without unusually generous press coverage.

Second, coalition member organisations should lead on an equal basis, and minority communities involved in the coalition should be actively included in this. In Korea this inclusion was primarily linguistic, as English rather than Korean is the lingua franca for most ethnic minorities. Specifically committing to complete Arabic translation of all protest media and speeches also enables Palestinians themselves – not all of whom can speak English! – to take a more active leadership role. Measures such as these, while small, can have a positive effect on a protest coalition.

Building the Foundation for a Mass Movement

The movement for Palestine and against the ongoing genocide in Gaza has touched every part of the globe and will be an historic litmus test for decades to come, much like past struggles against Apartheid and European colonialism. Palestine solidarity is particularly strong in Britain, but we can still take valuable lessons from countries where the movement is comparatively smaller. These lessons also apply to our attempts to build movements beyond Palestine in the UK, especially under less favourable circumstances.

Pro-Palestine activism in South Korea is evidently split between an electoral and a street protest wing, with crossover between the two happening at an individual rather than an organisational level. Despite this hindrance, the protest coalition groups are working with clear goals of building public awareness and support for Palestine. Each demonstration is centred on these goals, and familiar tactics are modified creatively for this purpose. The coalition has made an impressive commitment to bringing minority communities on board, allowing politically excluded groups (including Palestinians themselves) to participate actively. This has led to a genuine reciprocity where members of minority communities are bringing their own valuable experiences and skills to help build and lead the movement.

Palestine solidarity in Korea is now in an interesting position. Despite a sometimes-apathetic public, a pro-US government, and other pressing domestic issues for Korean progressives, the movement has arguably attained its largest ever heights. Unlike many ‘domestic’ protests, the truly global nature of the movement provides an anchor of support. The internationalism of the movement, as in Britain, has almost certainly insulated it from pressures to demobilise. This is to say nothing of the utterly repulsive acts stacking up daily on television and social media, and the public’s growing disapproval of Israel’s genocidal behaviour. The weekly protests will continue, and more and more Koreans will stand up with the international community in solidarity with Palestine.