Lessons from the Hamas attack

KIM PIL-GYU
The author is a Washington correspondent of the JoongAng Ilbo.

Living near Washington, D.C., there are many expats in the neighborhood. Last week, I had a chance to meet the fathers of my child’s classmates. One of them was an employee of the embassy of Pakistan and the other a Turkish government official.

As Israel began a full-fledged ground battle against Hamas, we naturally talked about the Middle East conflict. The Pakistani father criticized Israel for pressuring Palestinians, and the Turkish father was worried about the impact on the Turkish economy. He also relayed the Turkish public’s displeasure with the United States bringing two aircraft carriers to the sea off Turkey.

As the discussion was heating up, they lowered the intensity and said, “Oh, you are from Korea.” As both of them are from Islamic countries, I could hear different views on the issue. The Turkish father said that although Korea and Turkey have unfriendly neighbors, Korea is not experiencing the kind of bloody conflicts that occur frequently in the mid-East. He said he was envious of how the discord was managed and turned into competition and used as a driving force for development. But he added the condition, “so far.”

Last month, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik suddenly brought up the idea of scrapping the Sept. 19 inter-Korean military agreement. He said it was a lesson he learned from the Hamas attack. He insisted that this agreement, reached at the 2018 inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang, has weakened our ability to monitor and spy on North Korea in the areas along the border.

It is inevitable that different administrations have different policies on North Korea. But it is questionable whether the defense minister brought up the discussion to manage conflict or encourage it.

Last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed a coalition with a far-right political party to extend his rule. He made the leader of that party the Minister of National Security. The new security minister demonstrated his spirit by visiting the Islamic holy site of Al-Aqsa in East Jerusalem with soldiers, provoking the Arab world.

Netanyahu, who had been politically cornered, actually found relief in the Hamas attack — at least until the war is over. In the meantime, Israel has suffered a loss of innocent lives. As a large number of citizens was called to the military, the thriving Israeli economy has seen a downturn in the second half.

I hope the lesson the defense minister claims to have learned is not the kind of breakthrough that Netanyahu found. Otherwise, the peace so far on the Korean Peninsula can turn into a thing of the past.