North Korea’s support of Hamas transcends a purely transactional relationship - opinion

The October 7 savage Hamas invasion and genocidal attack on Israeli civilians has spawned revulsion from President Biden and top European leaders. Their crimes against humanity have also earned accolades and support from Hamas’ puppet master Iran, Tehran’s lackeys in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, as well as calls for declarations of war against Israel from as far away as Algeria.

As pundits and media dig deeper, they discover another distant player: North Korea.

It was hard not to notice North Korea’s supply of rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons deployed by Hamas. Quoting South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the Korea Broadcasting System reported:

“North Korean leader Kim Jong Un instructed various agencies to find ways to comprehensively support Palestine in the war between Israel and Hamas.”

US-based and self-declared “pacifist” or “feminist” organizations sympathetic to the Kim regime were quick to react. Hyun-sook Cho, Cathi Choi, and Kathleen Richards, senior operatives for Women Cross DMZ/Korea Peace Now, co-signed a statement by Nodutdol condemning Israel and legitimizing Hamas.

Pro-North Korea, pro-Hamas

Nodutdol is a US-based pro-North Korean organization that is also rabidly antisemitic, having condemned US and South Korean support of Israel while calling for “an end to the Zionist occupation of Palestine, once and for all.”

North Korea’s relationship with Hamas is long-established. In his 2018 book, North Korea’s Military Proliferation in the Middle East and Africa, Dr. Bruce Bechtol provided a thorough record of North Korea’s proliferation to Iran, Syria, and terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah.

Bechtol identifies four categories of North Korean assistance to Iran: weapons of mass destruction and the platforms that carry them, conventional weapons sales, refurbishment of Soviet-era weapons, and military advising. Hamas has been the destination of proliferation across all categories, primarily through Iranian facilitation.

North Korea’s support of Hamas is not a purely transactional matter. There are strong ideological overtones behind North Korea’s assistance to anti-Israel, antisemitic groups.

Kim Jong Un’s criminal rule is grounded in grandfather Kim Il Sung’s fundamental ideological tenets. Kimilsungism is essential to Kim regime preservation.

In “Under the Banner of Marxist-Leninist Proletarian Internationalism, While Holding High the Standard of the Anti-Imperialist, Anti-American Struggle, Let Us Accelerate World Revolution,” Kim Il Sung states:

“Israel is a Middle Eastern outpost of Anglo-American aggression, which opposes the Arab people, obstructs their progress, and threatens their safety.”

In Answers to the Questions Raised by Foreign Journalists, Kim Il Sung affirms:

“The Middle East crisis is the result of aggressive machinations by imperialists and their American masterminds, who have set up Jewish restorationists as shock troops to crush the rising Arab people’s liberation struggle.” Kim Il Sung blames tensions in the region on “Israeli aggression” and Israel’s “American imperialist manipulators.”

In 1967, North Koreans flew alongside Syrian pilots during the Six-Day War against Israel. North Korea trained Egyptian and Syrian pilots to fight against Israel. In an October 16, 1986, interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al Massa, Kim Il Sung states:

“Whenever the imperialists and the Zionists provoked an aggressive war in the Middle East, the [North] Korean people stood firmly on the side of justice. […] During the [Yom Kippur] war in October 1973, our airmen fought shoulder to shoulder with the Egyptian brothers on the same front.”

Through Iran’s abetment, North Korean weapons are in the hands of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iran’s “indigenous” weapons systems are engineered and produced by over 1,000 Iran-based North Korean personnel. According to a May 24, 1984 declassified CIA document, North Korean “training officers” were delivering military training to “foreign nationals” in Iran alongside “Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen, previously trained foreigners, [and] Palestinians.”

North Korea proliferates instability and violence. None of the profits go to its people. The regime runs five gulags. Around 120,000 men, women, and children face forced labor, malnutrition, and brutality. To dare be a Christian is to declare yourself an enemy of the State.

Besides proliferation, the Kim regime oppresses and exploits its people at home and abroad to procure the funds needed to build its arsenal of terror. Pre-COVID, 100,000 workers were dispatched to 40 countries, one-third as construction workers in Qatar and the UAE. Most of their wages were confiscated by the regime.

Embedded in Kim Il Sung thought, North Korean support of Hamas, Hezbollah, and regimes determined to extinguish Israel transcends a purely transactional relationship.

Tunnel construction, the transfer of North Korean weapons and tactical training to Hamas is, in the worldview of the Kim regime, a way of bringing its anti-American, “anti-imperialist struggle” to the greatest US ally in the Middle East. Anti-Semitism is not merely a side effect of North Korea’s proliferation. Anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel and its people lie at the core of North Korea’s ideology.

Just as antisemitic hate crimes and invective soar to unprecedented heights in the US, the Kim regime, through its loyal followers, is adding their hatred online and on American streets.

Abraham Cooper is associate dean and director of global social action at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Greg Scarlatoiu is executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.