Slippery slope of occupation

• Published date: 09 March 2023
• Publication title: The Korea Times

The only thing to celebrate on the first anniversary of Russia's war is the scale and courage of the Ukrainian resistance, which has surprised everyone, including Ukraine's allies and maybe even the Ukrainians themselves. Through self-defense, Ukraine is achieving self-transformation.

"People's desire for justice at home has not diminished," the Ukrainian journalist Kateryna Semchuk observes. "If anything, it has got stronger ? and rightly so, since most citizens are risking their lives to fight the genocidal threat posed by Russia. People have such a personal stake in Ukraine's future, they are more sensitive than ever about what kind of country we are becoming, and how things should be after the war."

Apropos of this new mood, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently fired several top officials who were suspected of graft and other offenses. But it remains to be seen if Ukraine's anti-corruption campaign will grow into a more radical questioning about "how things should be after the war."

Will Ukraine simply play catch up with the West's liberal democracies and allow itself to be economically colonized by big Western corporations? Will it join the populist backlash to globalization and free markets, as Poland did? Or will it take a long shot and try to resuscitate old-style social democracy?

These questions are bound up with the mixed international response to Russian aggression. To condemn Russian colonialism properly, one must be consistent and also condemn other examples of colonial subjugation, not least Israel's oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

True, Israel's occupation of the West Bank is not the result of a military offensive or invasion. Rather, it is a legacy of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, which Arab states lost. Moreover, one always must tread carefully in discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, given how commonly it is used to foment anti-Semitism ? a growing problem in the West. Tremendous care is even more necessary now, when violence by Israelis and Palestinians is surging once more.

Still, it is an undeniable fact that most West Bank Palestinians today were born under occupation, and after almost six decades have no clear prospect of ever gaining real statehood. On the contrary, they are forced to watch helplessly as their land is gradually appropriated by Israeli settlers. The Western media is full of praise for Ukraine's "heroic resistance," but mute on the issue of West Bank Palestinians who resist a...