Stopping Asian Hate Must Include Standing with Palestine
By: Justin Pacquing
Tags: Stopasianhate, Asian American, Palestine, Settler Colonialism, Solidarity

In response to rising violence after COVID-19, young Asian and Pacific Islander Americans are being activated, in many cases for the first time, in social justice and liberation for their own communities and in solidarity with others. The latest example of Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine demands not only our solidarity, but an understanding of how standing for Palestinian people, history and collective experiences.

As an AP article recently read, “Just as BLM is forcing a reckoning with systemic racism, there is new attention being paid to the origins of the Palestinians’ struggles: settler-colonialism, asymmetric power relations and racial discrimination.” For the Asian diaspora, particularly as Asian Americans, the fight for Palestinian liberation is intertwined with our own.

The first is in the construction of the “Asian” identity. Palestine is in Asia, a fact that might surprise plenty of Asian Americans. In America, the idea of “Asia” is rooted in the binary between East and West, equating Asianness with the so-called Far East. With the evolution of the social construction of race, “Asian” (previously categorized under groupings like “Mongoloid”, “Malay” or “Oriental”), now also includes Southeast and South Asia.

But what about the other parts of Asia, like Central Asia, North Asia, West Asia, where Palestine is situated? Americans are already incredibly aware of West Asia, just via another invention of Said’s West: the Middle East. Instead of “Asian,” persons of the Middle East are formally recognized as “white,” as exemplified by this passage from Pew Research Center’s “Demographic portrait of Muslim Americans:”

“A plurality (41%) [of Muslim American adults] are white, a category that includes those who describe their race as Arab, Middle Eastern, Persian/Iranian or in a variety of other ways (see sidebar on white racial classifications). About three-in-ten are Asian (28%), including those from South Asia.”

The seeming arbitrariness of racial categories has been continually reconstructed over time, and to this day are inconsistent even across different European and U.S. contexts (check out my article detailing Orientalism). When I was applying to study in the UK, I found it curious that my Filipino heritage was characterized as “Other Asian.” British Asianess is centered in South Asia, owed to British Colonialism centered in the Indian Subcontinent. Interestingly enough, the UK also held colonial control of Mandatory Palestine and enabled the colonial aspirations of Israel, including the issuance of the Balfour Declaration. Yet, the idea of the “Middle East,” coined by British Imperialism, was and continues to be emphasized over the notion of “Western Asia.”

Notions of Asianess, frequently dictated by the West, are why we don’t readily see Palestinians as Asian. These notions are a form of divide-and-conquer. They break solidarity across identities to prevent marginalized groups from seeing solutions to their linked struggles as shared fights for liberation. Processes such as Orientalism prevent Asian Americans from seeing themselves linked to Palestinian liberation via identity. But the links between Asian America and Palestine are not in identity alone.

The Nakba: Framing and (Lack Thereof) Colonial History

I have written about issues with the framing of #StopAsianHate, in particular in its centering of unproductive, even damaging, narratives. I proposed history as a lens to glean truth and solidarity for the marginalized.

These framing issues are also very much apparent in coverage of the latest saga in the fight for Palestinian liberation. We can start with the narrative of these events as being “just another conflict in the Middle East.”

The first issue with the narrative is that it takes away agency from Palestinians. It flattens the Palestinian struggle into the struggles of other peoples in the regions. There are essential distinctions in contexts, histories, aspirations between the struggles of Iraqis, Iranians, Palestinian, among many other peoples. These are all lost in the familiar European and American construct of a homogenous, monolithic region: the “Middle East.”

The Palestinian experience of U.S.-backed Israeli Apartheid is not the same as the Iraqi experience of American militarism is not the same as the Iranian experience of American sanctions.

The narrative removes urgency from the situation. Why do we need to care about this when it happens all the time? Part of the “Middle East” narrative is that it already comes with a set of assumptions that don’t encourage fact-finding and undercuts history’s importance in understanding these situations.

The colonial history of Palestine is long and complex. But one event that has been understated, perhaps not even understood, and reveals the need for solidarity with Palestine is The Nakba, the 1948 mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Mandatory Palestine as it transitioned from British to Israeli control. The exodus is named after the Arabic word for “catastrophe” and has come to embody the collective violence and trauma experienced by Palestinians under the Israeli colonial project. One of the hallmarks of the Nakba was the forced dispossession of property. The Palestinian right of return is often symbolized by the keys of the homes Palestinians were made to vacate.

The Nakba echoes today under the guise of settler colonialism, when an external colonial force, the state of Israel, attempts to displace and replace an already established people, Palestinians. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s what is happening in Palestine right now. The dispossession of homes in Sheikh Jarrah set off the recent wave of conflict disproportionately harming Palestinians.

Centering the experience of colonialism also makes it clear that antisemitism has no place in support for Palestinians. The political ideology of Zionism, not Judaism, is at the root of settler colonialism enabling Israel to oppress Palestine. Jewish Solidarity with Palestine, throughout history to today, only further underscores that point.

Settler colonialism is not a foreign concept for any American — we are a result of so-called Manifest Destiny and the mythmaking required for the total dispossession of indigenous land. For some Asian Americans, other familiar forms of colonialism and militarization are built on the same formula used in American lands, places like former British colonies in South Asia; France in Vietnam; Japan and the U.S. in Korea; the Philippines by Spain and later the U.S., the inheritor of Europe’s legacy across Asia and the Pacific.

These histories of America, the West are all histories that the West would rather not be centered on. Dismantling settler-colonial logic and changing narratives to center Palestinians’ demands requires that we recognize the histories of oppression that created the so-called “Palestinian conflict.”

Islamophobia and #StopAsianHate

There is one more dimension to the framing of the Palestinian struggle relevant to #StopAsianHate: Islamophobia.

Mainstream narratives about Palestinians and people from the Middle East as a whole are Islamophobic, playing off Orientalist narratives of a morally deficient and barbaric people, justifying dehumanizing coverage, including coverage that frames Palestinian deaths ambiguously as if Israel and Palestine share equal power. In reality, most are Palestinian, including a significant amount of children. Instead, two-side-isms focus on Hamas, who more readily fit the Islamophobic narrative of “Middle Eastern terrorism” and than Palestinian civilian casualties do.

“Middle Eastern terrorism” is a compelling narrative powerful enough to displace entire histories of settler colonialism, of Palestine acting in self-defense to regain their former homeland. Instead, it is powerful enough to allow a colonizing force to continually portray themselves as acting in self-defense when they violate international law. And it is powerful enough to disappear from the overall narrative of the conflict provoked by Israel.

Look beyond outcomes besides casualties, and the disproportion of the conflict’s consequences only becomes starker. Israel’s U.S.-funded “Iron Dome” defense system allows any damage from Hamas’ rockets to be mitigated, if not altogether avoided. Palestinian, in stark contrast, have no means to prevent the war crimes of leveling their civilian apartments, media outlets, medical infrastructure, humanitarian infrastructure. Not to mention the continuing trauma of war on Palestinians that recent events just compound on. The de-emphasizing the threat and fear present in the Palestinian experience history and to this today is Islamophobia.

It should be clear the place of these Orientalist narratives, of Islamophobia in America. For my generation, who barely, if at all, remember a time before 9/11, Islamophobia has been an ever-present reality. With how brazen hateful rhetoric and policy have become within the last couple of presidential election cycles, it seemingly will not go away anytime soon.

Islamophobia is Asian Hate

The general media framing of COVID-19 hate incidents becomes problematic whenever it paints the uptick as “unprecedented” for Asian Americans. Not just because of its deep history in America, but because you do not need to go far back to find anti-Asian violence.

South and Southeast Asians, communities with large numbers of practicing Muslims, are often marginalized as a result of ideologies about who is “Asian” in the U.S., and non-Muslim people that are perceived to be, like Sikh Americans, are victims of Islamophobia.

Islamophobia is an issue for all Asian Americans. The Orientalist processes that motivate Islamophobia are symbiotic with the processes that underlie recent Asian hate incidents against those perceived to be of Far Eastern descent. There is no stopping one without stopping another. And there is no stopping all without the efforts, the solidarity of all.

The Palestinian struggle is just one reminder that Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, especially those mobilizing around the current moment, can build a deeper solidarity among our own communities. We need to be continually learning more about injustices, recognizing them and fighting them collectively, taking and amplifying the leadership of the most marginalized as we continue to contend with being Asian American.