OPINION:
On June 18, North Korea expressed its support for Iran in the latter’s conflict with Israel, triggered by Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, its instigation of proxy Hamas’ mass murder, rape and hostage taking of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023 and its subsequent barrages from Hezbollah that forced the evacuation of most of Israel’s northern population.
All the while, it and its Houthi lackeys targeted Israeli population centers. A spokesperson for the Kim regime called Israel a “cancer-like entity for the peace in the Middle East.”
This should surprise no one.
Antisemitism is deeply embedded in the ideology of North Korea. In its official yearbooks, its “political dictionary” and other publications, North Korea completely ignores Israel’s pre-1948 multi-millennial history. Instead, since the days of Kim Il-sung, Kim regime propaganda has claimed that “Israel was created in May 1948 by American and British imperialists through the partition of Palestine.” 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, founder of North Korea, referred to Israel as “a Middle Eastern outpost of Anglo-American aggression, which opposes the Arab people, obstructs their progress, and threatens their safety.”
He further wrote that “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.”
In 1967, North Koreans flew alongside Syrian pilots during the Six-Day War against Israel. In an Oct.16, 1986, interview with Egyptian newspaper Al Massa, Kim Il-sung said: “During the [Yom Kippur] war in October 1973, our airmen fought shoulder to shoulder with the Egyptian brothers on the same front.” In 2007, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) destroyed a nuclear reactor North Koreans were building for the Assad regime in Syria.
For several years, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un has been keeping the cauldrons of conflict at boiling point by threatening Israel and Ukraine through the exportation of tools of death. Why? The unquenchable need for hard cash.
In their 2025 book “Rogue Allies: The Strategic Partnership between Iran and North Korea,” Dr. Bruce E. Bechtol Jr. and Dr. Anthony N. Celso detailed the strategic partnership between Iran and North Korea, including ideological and financial forces leading to the North Korea–Iran alliance, North Korean support for Iran’s proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, and the criminal financial networks that support this partnership.
Iran needs North Korean ballistic missiles, other weapons and tunneling know-how to achieve its fundamental strategic objectives: regional hegemony and the extinction of the state of Israel. North Korea needs Iranian money to achieve its fundamental strategic objective: survival through the ultimate establishment of hegemony over the entire Korean peninsula. To achieve that goal, it needs money to keep its core elites happy and to continue developing its ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, despite sanctions by the United Nations, the U.S. and others.
Today, amidst the wars and crises rampant in Ukraine, the Middle East and East Asia, we are witnessing an evil flock of “birds of a feather” wreaking havoc. The dictatorial, genocidal regimes of Iran, Russia, China and North Korea constitute an “axis of tyranny.”
Through terrorist proxies, Iran commits crimes against humanity in Israel and threatens others. More than three years into the war, Russia continues its brutal aggression against Ukraine. China perpetrates egregious human rights violations against Uyghurs, Falun Gong, Christians and Tibetans and has unleashed — in clear violation of the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention — forcible repatriation of North Korean refugees, despite a credible fear of persecution and worse.
North Korea has become a major exporter of instability and violence to troubled regions, including through proliferation to terrorist groups bent on destroying Israel, and actively abets Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through the exportation of millions of artillery shells, ballistic missiles and the deployment of more than 11,000 special forces from its Army 11th Corps.
On April 14, 2024, Iran launched the largest guided projectile attack in history — against Israel. The EMAD ballistic missile was an Iranian-designed liquid fuel medium-range ballistic missile and a derivative of Shahab-3, based on North Korea’s Hwasong-7. It was also deployed in Iran’s recent launches against Israel, together with the Ghadr ballistic missile, developed based on the North Korean No Dong missile, with North Korean technical assistance.
According to a recent National Security Journal article by Dr. Bechtol, North Korean engineers and technicians helped build underground tunnels at Iran’s Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites.
China’s President Xi claims the “old order” is dead. Perhaps, but this new world order — with Vladimir Putin and the Ayatollah Khamenei in the lead — has increasingly been turning to the North Korean arsenal of tyranny to continue to proliferate aggression and violence to Kyiv, Tel Aviv and beyond.
Eliminating North Korea’s exportation of instability and violence will be a prerequisite for any hopes of lasting peace in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia.
• Abraham Cooper is chair emeritus of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and associate dean and director of global social action at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
• Greg Scarlatoiu is president and CEO of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
