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Palestine and the Asian American Question

Recalling the promise of anticolonial internationalism

Essays | Palestine, anticolonialism, empire
February 3, 2025

Authors’ note: This essay was mostly written in early summer of 2024 for another media platform, but its publication was stalled due to their internal struggles with Zionist pressure, reinforcing the essay’s very critique. At the same time, multiple Asian American media producers, writers, and scholars supported this essay. We thank each of them. 


Asian American politics are often defined by an existential dialectic: On the one hand, the anticolonial internationalism that generated pan-Asian coalitionism within the incubator of Global South movements in the 1960s and 70s. On the other, a cultural nationalism that would incorporate Asian Americans within U.S. rights and markets. The latter signaled the political death of the former, while the former still intellectually inspires critiques of the latter. In other words, “Asian America’s” revolutionary internationalism perpetually struggles as a question. 

Since October 2023, Asian Americans’ existential question continues to be rehearsed anew within the context of this generation’s global solidarity movements with Palestine. At the time of publishing this article, Israel has committed a genocidal campaign in Palestine, waged a devastating war in Lebanon, invaded and seized (additional) Syrian territory, and expanded aggression against multiple states in the region. A ceasefire was announced days ago, which may slow the rate of death yet does not overturn its violent structure: colonial occupation. Even as Israel and its officials face investigation by both the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court for genocide and war crimes, repression against pro-Palestine speech in academic, cultural, and media institutions escalates. Meanwhile, the recent presidential reelection of Donald Trump represents not the dawn of U.S. fascism but rather its most recent inflection, producing both possibility and peril for internationalist resistance work from U.S. empire’s core.  

In the last year, we have witnessed unprecedented numbers of Asian American feminists, organizers, creatives, and broader communities tether their causes to Palestinian liberation. At the same time, the normalization of Zionism and the policing of pro-Palestinian expression within Asian American organizations has again questioned the viability of Asian America’s once anticolonial, transnational project against its expanding institutionalization. That is, as Asian American institutions amass increasing social power and capital, an overinvestment in using the category of race (“Asian American”) for state inclusion has superseded collective organizing against the historical basis for Asian racialization: colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. 

While Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim thought have played foundational roles in Asian American politics and culture, the intersections of American Zionism and Asian America are not new to this moment but rather one part of the broader history of Asian American institutionalization within the U.S. state, empire, and capital. These ongoing contentions suggest that resuscitating the anticolonial promise of Asian internationalism and any meaningful praxis of solidarity with Palestine requires reckoning with modern Zionism, as a political narrative and structure deeply embedded within U.S. empire.

One such contention played out in May 2024, when more than six hundred people signed a petition demanding that the then-board of Kundiman, a nonprofit Asian American literary organization, resign and pursue community-centered restorative practices. The petition came after the board and cofounders replaced a staff-produced solidarity statement with Palestine with their own. According to petitioners, these new statements “conflated Jewish lives with Israel while also erasing Gazans entirely”—a colonial narrative that defers to Israel’s worldview and denies Palestinians’, which scholar Umayyah Cable calls “compulsory Zionism” due to its enforced naturalization across the political spectrum. A broader dispute within Kundiman followed, including staff resignations. By late October 2024, the five board members who were called on to resign in the petition had departed, while new board members stepped in and announced a commitment “to enact meaningful and transparent change and repair.” Given that Kundiman has long nurtured anticolonial literature, including that of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, this series of events urges broader structural analyses of the relationships between compulsory Zionism, the nonprofit industry, and Asian American arts.  

Earlier in May 2024, dozens of Asian American political and creative organizations demanded that The Asian American Foundation (TAAF)—a philanthropic nonprofit with a stated mission of the “pursuit of belonging and prosperity that is free from discrimination, slander, and violence”—end all partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and drop its Zionist CEO Jonathan Greenblatt from its board. While founded in 1913 with a social justice platform against anti-Semitism rampant in the U.S., the ADL’s ongoing legacy includes years of challenging ethnic studies curricula in U.S. schools, spying on students and youth organizers, collaborating with the FBI to suppress leftist and antiracist movements (particularly Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Black), promoting U.S. terrorism laws, and leading the criminalization of today’s pro-Palestine student protesters. 

After October 7, 2023, the ADL expanded its anti-Semitism tracker to include critiques of Israel as “anti-Semitic,” thereby not only casting pro-Palestinian speech as discrimination but also undermining the crucial fight against actual anti-Semitism. Scholar Dylan Rodríguez argues that TAAF’s bond with the ADL reflects some Asian American organizations’ adoption of liberal social justice reforms, which individualize structural racism into interpersonal hate and carceral forms of “anti-hate” policing, thereby contributing to the inflation of historically racist, and particularly anti-Black, law enforcement. Rodríguez asserts that the recent Stop Asian Hate movement’s emphasis in law and policing converged the work of Asian American organizations like TAAF with the ADL’s agenda to influence U.S. discrimination policies in order to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

Meanwhile, the Association for Asian American Studies, the largest professional organization in its field and the first U.S. academic association to adopt, in 2013, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), declined a TAAF-awarded $50,000 grant after internal movement led by its membership. Other Asian American organizations have also publicly or quietly cut ties with TAAF. While Greenblatt’s term on TAAF’s board concluded this fall, TAAF reaffirmed what they called a “strategic partnership” with the ADL in July while welcoming a new Asian American board member who is also an ADL affiliate. 

The influence of philanthropic capitalism on Asian American organizing and creative labor is not a new or even uncommon phenomenon, nor is the elite capture of identity politics: TAAF board and advisory council members include billionaires, former state department operatives, and other powerful figures while at once funding Asian American projects ranging liberal, abolitionist, creative, and academic. The root problems include relationships between multicultural capitalism, policing, and the absorption of movement work into state or market visibility—within which an organization like TAAF is symptomatic, not exceptional. Still, the popular campaign to drop the ADL from TAAF’s board during an active genocide and as the ADL propels the suppression of one of the largest internationalist movements in U.S. history reveals the normalization of Zionism in Asian American organizations as well as the doomed insularity of any movement that secures its own “free[dom] from discrimination, slander, and violence” through the state’s violence against others

Several more instances of regulating pro-Palestinian expression within Asian American institutions persist. For instance, just this past September, the Noguchi Museum—which honors and houses artworks by Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi, a critic of the U.S.’s nuclear violence in Japan and internment of Japanese Americans—fired three workers for wearing the keffiyeh, a garment Indigenous to Southwest Asia and associated with Palestinian nationalism and resistance. Museum leadership argued that the employees violated a recently amended, presumably “neutral” policy banning “political dress” that may make visitors feel “unsafe.” Protests followed, including by writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, who declined a Noguchi Museum award in response to the policy. Once again, we may ask how the institutionalization of Asian American culture is shaped by the nonprofit industry and, in this case, the colonial legacies of and donor influences within museums, which historically sanitize the politics of art. The insidiousness of political repression within museums that preserve (and, indeed, monetize) anti-imperial arts lies less in its staggering irony and more in its banal wielding of proceduralism toward defining and managing “neutrality,” and thus politics itself. So, while anti-Palestinianism becomes disguised as “neutral,” proceduralism within cultural institutions cleaves boundaries between politics and art. 

Each of these recent incidents was met with resistance, suggesting that “Asian America” continues to wrestle between a racialized identity borne of U.S. empire on the one hand and a social critique of race, nation, and empire on the other—and continues to acknowledge the historical role of Palestine and Southwest Asia in Asian American politics. Indeed, a plethora of Asian American prose reminds us that Palestine is not just in Asia but part of the colonial histories of Asian displacement in the U.S. Palestine was an allied cause in the twentieth-century anticolonial, antiracist, and student movements that bore the “Asian American” concept as a coalitional, transnational form of organizing. The place of Palestine—not to mention Asia’s Wests, Souths, Muslims, Arabs, and other brown peripheries—within Asian American study, culture, and organizing has even been rehashed many times before. Scholars including Nadine Naber, Sunaina Maira, Magid Shihade, Junaid Rana, Amira Jarmakani, David Palumbo-Liu, Rajini Srikanth, Diane C. Fujino, Umayyah Cable, Carol W.N. Fadda, Dana M. Olwan, Lila Sharif, Loubna Qutami, and many others among us, as well as formations like the SWANA Diaspora Studies section of the Association for Asian American Studies (of which we are both members), have long noted this through scholarship or institutional work. 

Further, Asian American writers and scholars cite Palestinian American cultural theorist Edward Said’s groundbreaking 1978 book, Orientalism—which traced the “West’s” ideological invention of the “East” (in this case, the “Middle East”) within European, and later American, discourse—as one of our earliest languages for Asian racialization and anti-imperial critique. That is, from Palestine and Southwest Asia’s colonization emerged theoretical foundations for Asian Americanist critique and study.

It is popularly observed that while Asian Americans cite Said’s Orientalism, they often neglect the conditions of its production by a displaced Palestinian author. Less observed is a monumental nuance: Zionism motivated Said’s quest to study colonial Europe’s racial knowledge production about Asia, a point indicated in the text yet often sublimated within citations. 

Reflecting on his career, Said marked the June War of 1967 as a critical juncture in his intellectual and political development, and a catalyst to Orientalism. The war expanded the colonization of Palestine and established Israel’s regional authority and partnership with the U.S. Arabs like Said watched in disbelief as U.S. media and politicians celebratorily re-narrated the war as a David and Goliath story in which the Zionist David beat the unruly, bestial Arab Goliath, a caricature that enmeshed Christian Evangelical and Jewish Zionist investments in the Holy Land. As American, Zionist, and European colonial tropes about Arab and Muslim “incivility” converged, Said accepted an invitation to write about the June war for the Arab League’s magazine. As scholar Keith P. Feldman chronicles, the essay that Said penned, “The Arab Portrayed”—a concise but biting critique of the U.S.-Israel bond, Zionism, and their depiction of Arabs—was the origin of Orientalism

As Asian Americans mobilized in this moment revisit Palestinian political thought, these genealogies of Orientalism in the June 1967 war bear reflection: it is not only “the Palestine question” that lurks within the foundations of what would become Asian American anticolonial theory, but a grounded and urgent critique of Zionism. 


Zionism begins with a story. Like other modern colonial projects, its violence is preceded by narrative. For most of his career and until his death in 2003, Edward Said soberly analyzed Zionism’s story—retelling it “from the standpoint of its victims”; tracing its relationships with other European colonial ideas like Orientalism; scrutinizing its disseminations across transnational circuits of media and discourse, empowered by western states that grant only Israel the “permission to narrate” historic Palestine; and critiquing it through its unwavering resistances, encapsulating the common Indigenous analysis that, within a settler colonial economy of erasure, Palestinian life and creation are, too, resistance. 

Although often criticized for emphasizing culture over capital, Said’s body of thought on Zionism did also map imperial economies of censure. While studying political Zionism’s narrative architecture—how, where, and why it circulates—and concomitantly its untelling of Palestinians, the scholar of literature gravely cautioned against our deferral of material condition for metaphor: “This is not an aesthetic judgment,” Said wrote in a 1984 analysis of Zionism’s entrenchment within western state, media, and cultural institutions. “Like Zionism itself, post-1948 Palestinian nationalism has had to achieve formal and ideological prominence well before any actual land has been gained … [T]he ‘idea’ of a Palestinian homeland would have to be enabled by the prior acceptance of a narrative entailing a homeland. And this has been resisted as strenuously on the imaginative and ideological level as it has been politically.” 

In the aftermath of Israel’s most recent iteration of genocide in Palestine, a global social movement is catapulting Zionism’s story into crisis, including within the domestic core of Israel’s greatest foreign benefactor and storyteller: the United States. 

As a story to promote a Jewish state in Southwest Asia that was born within the anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century Europe, political Zionism’s secular founder, Theodor Herzl, and militant leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky recounted it as a defensive nationalist movement even as they expressly detailed its colonialist arc. Their tale mimics the racial discourses of modern European empires, portraying the bloodied occupation and displacement of Palestinians via liberal ideals, manifest destiny, and the civilizational uplift of Arabs. Its presumed heroic subjects, Zionists, emerge simultaneously as exceptional conquerors and the exceptionally disfranchised. Palestinians in this story are vanishing actors—culminating in the Nakba of 1948 and enshrined by settler colonialism’s form: destroy to replace

The U.S.’s special investment in this chronicle signaled a settler state bulwark for its own regional interests across Southwest Asia and North Africa. Within the U.S.’s domestic core, Zionism achieved narrative hegemony in the mid-late twentieth century through American empire’s transnational political economy, including U.S. foreign policy and economic interests in the region, a powerful Israel lobby in the U.S., and oft-successful private and state repression against pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist Jewish movements. Despite Israel’s continuous violence in Palestine, which even neocolonial institutions of international law and human rights eventually recognized as apartheid and occupation by Israel, Zionism’s normalization in global politics has persisted through the language of liberalism and what literary theorist Saree Makdisi calls a culture of denial.  

From the late twentieth century onward, in the wake of the Holocaust’s atrocities and the simultaneous expansions of multiracial democracy and U.S. empire, American Zionism’s storyline mobilized the harrowing problem of anti-Semitism into unconditional U.S. support for Israeli settler statehood (and Palestinian dispossession). During the post-Civil Rights era, multiracial liberalism suffocated the transformative demands of the Black, Indigenous, Asian American, and Latinx social movements of the sixties and seventies—for everything from land back to wealth redistribution—into a formal, but non-reparative, lexicon of rights administered unequally by the state. American Zionist organizations (among others) weaponized the lexicon. As scholar Emmaia Gelman historicizes, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) protected Zionism through new languages, pedagogies, and laws of antidiscrimination, which embraced the state’s disciplinary power. 

Today, the ADL is leading lawfare and media campaigns to criminalize nearly any anti-Zionist critique as an anti-Semitic offense. For instance, mobilizing War on Terror policing paradigms, ADL director Greenblatt unfoundedly called on university administrators in October 2023 to investigate Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) for “materially supporting” terrorism; in the past he has described Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and SJP as “extremist.” He has pledged the ADL’s legal, lobbying, and private efforts to quell anti-Zionist critique and analysis, despite pushback by some of its own staffers and in the face of a historical and growing anti-Zionist Jewish movement. 

To further institutionalize Zionism’s story within the pedagogies of race critique, in recent years, the ADL turned Zionism’s plotline toward reshaping ethnic studies curricula, at the K-12 and university levels, as well as antiracist organizations. The ADL’s concerted efforts to censor Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim pedagogies within U.S. ethnic studies may reflect another side effect of the liberal institutionalization of revolutionary theory and of the language of race itself. Yet, American Zionist investments in ethnic studies also extend a logic similar to the ADL’s Cold War-era collaborations with the FBI to surveil Black, Arab, and Muslim political groups. That is, they fear the premise and promise of ethnic studies, particularly critical ethnic studies: a collective analytical pedagogy in anticolonial internationalism. 

An internationalist analysis of political Zionism across Asia(n)/America is also a story of U.S. empire. It, thus, necessitates located critiques of multipolar structures of power—requiring interdisciplinary approaches to the critical study of Zionism. For instance: 

Internationally, Israel’s various political relations within Asia—which are particularly buttressed by its partnership with the U.S., a tense competitor to China in the region—may produce Zionist and anti-Zionist discourses internally and in diasporas. In some Asian countries Zionism finds affinity with local fascisms, like the partnership between India’s Hindu nationalist movement and Israel. Other states like Singapore have held long military relationships with Israel, resulting in a repressive stance toward their populations’ support for Palestine. An entrenched Islamophobia in some East Asian countries, often against regional Muslim populations, may also contribute to cases of anti-Palestinianism or simply ambivalence. (There are, however, movements across East Asian states that signal internationalist solidarities.) While Zionism is certainly not the only colonial ideology tied to security politics across Asia and the world, it is difficult to deny U.S. empire’s exceptional relationship with Israel nor how far this partnership extends beyond territorial Palestine, from the Israeli security products tested on Palestinians and shipped globally, to the American tax dollars that pay for them. 

Meanwhile, within the U.S., decades of Zionist repression against pro-Palestine speech have produced chilling effects on anticolonial organizing, while generally setting the terms for public language on Palestine. Academics and creatives were muzzled or fired. During his tenure at Columbia in the eighties, Edward Said’s office was firebombed. He received so many death threats that he required bulletproof windows; meanwhile, the FBI surveilled him. Recent cases of academic suppression like that of Steve Salaita, whose position at the University of Illinois was terminated in 2014 after he posted tweets criticizing Israel, demonstrate that U.S. labor protection traditions, like tenure and academic freedom, do not apply to Palestine scholarship and anti-Zionist critique. Since October 2023, the Palestine exception to speech has resulted in job losses across professions. 

The enshrinement of a Zionist framework of Palestine and Israel within U.S. culture and discourse also makes politically desirable participation within it. For example, Muslim Zionists, under the gaze of an Islamophobic security state, may reproduce Israel’s myth of “interfaith” conflict—which recasts a modern colonial project into a primordial religious dispute—to perform western racialized tropes of secular “civility.” Relatedly, Israel has used its collaborations with Asian American politicians like Daniel Inouye, the former senator of Hawai’i, in order to, in the words of Candace Fujikane, “yellowwash” its violence against Palestinians while leveraging settler intimacies between the U.S. and Israel—in this case, via the figure of a Japanese American settler. In 2014, Israel named a missile facility after Inouye, memorializing a strategic mythos of Asian American Zionism. 

Thus, contemporary instances of compulsory Zionism within Asian American and other racialized professional classes is not altogether unexpected, but the result of several years of state assimilation by Asian American political, social, and creative organizations or individual actors, which eventually aligned their interests with U.S. empire work and pro-Israel organizations. Capitalism and a nonprofit industrial complex may also leave radical Asian American organizers and culture workers dependent upon the funds (and terms) of an elite Asian American philanthropy, which often includes particular relations to state power. In other words, Asian American Zionism is a bipartisan product of multicultural U.S. empire.

In 1979, Said wrote that Palestine was made a “question” in global politics when western empires’ reproduction of a Zionist imagination of the region rendered Palestinians as subjects of doubt and debate. Ultimately, Zionism and other stories are subject to narrative’s political economy—that is, the interplay of narrative, power, and resources within and across societies—stratified by a variety of governing, market, policing, and social institutions. Un-structuring this narrative economy upheld by the U.S., the most powerful yet waning empire in the contemporary world, requires cultural praxes like critique, study, and Palestinian stories as well as materialist ones like boycott, divestment, and refusal. 

The relationship between narrative and materialism is never more urgent than under conditions of colonialism and genocide, which Global South peoples know well. Currently, generations of Palestinian storytellers are vulnerable to slow extinction. Israel is not only under international investigation for genocide but also accused of sophicide, intentionally targeting any person or building that embodies Palestinian cultural and knowledge production. Israel has murdered hundreds of intellectuals and journalists since October 2023. Israel has destroyed places that teach craft, including decimating every university in Gaza and nearly all schools. Israel killed more artists than we can possibly name, including the brilliant Heba Zagout, who painted portraits and structures of Palestinian life, along with two of her children in Gaza last year. In October 2024, Gaza-based illustrator Mahasen al-Khateeb posted her last artwork on social media, a visual commemoration of nineteen-year-old Shaban al-Dalu, who burned to death during Israel’s attacks on al-Aqsa Hospital. Hours later, al-Khateeb and her family were killed by an Israeli air strike. Al-Khateeb’s final artwork was widely viewed after her death, while she was largely unknown in life. Similarly, after poet and scholar Refaat al-Areer and six of his family members were murdered in December 2023 by Israeli Defense Forces in an apparently deliberate strike, the last poem he shared, the prophetic “If I Must Die,” was spontaneously read and translated across the world. Modeled on the Claude McKay poem “If We Must Die,” about the white attacks on Black Americans in the Red Summer of 1919, al-Areer implicitly draws internationalist relation and responsibility between material death and the stories that produce, disguise, or refuse it. “If I must die,” writes al-Areer, “you must live / to tell my story.”


Writing about storytelling, survival, and the Nakba within other ongoing catastrophes bred by the modern colonial-industrial age, historian Sherene Seikaly asserts, “In the age of catastrophe, Palestine is a paradigm … Palestine is a place of abundance, an abundance of lessons about persisting in the looped and looping time of the present.” This is not an invitation to abstract Palestine into an analogy through which we reflect on our own lessons while displacing the Palestinian condition. Rather, Seikaly’s invocation places Palestine within a common present and collective history—bound not by identity but by shared condition, experience, politics, and ethics. In other words, Palestine is not a test for, say, a once-again revolutionary Asian American politics but rather, as Seikaly puts it, a “shared possibility across difference.” 

Edward Said similarly conceived Orientalism, a text largely about eighteenth-to-nineteenth-century literature, through his commitment to a shared possibility—which at the time was the peak of Third World decolonization campaigns. From the imperative of anti-Zionist critique and Palestinian liberation he sought to “use humanistic critique to open up the fields of struggle … in the long and often interrupted road to human freedom.” While Said’s work would be expanded by others—particularly through important criticisms of his oversights concerning gender, race, Islam, secularism, capitalism, and western humanism—his theory transpired through transnational intellectual community and political engagement. 

After the June 1967 war that would inspire his first public writing on Palestine, West Asian politics, and later Orientalism, Said joined the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG). He was part of a cohort of other Arab American scholars like Fauzi Najjar, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Michael Wadie Suleiman, and Suad Joseph invested in developing alternative political writings about Arabs, supporting the resistance of Palestinians against their occupiers, and allying with other anticolonial, anti-imperial, and left internationalist movements. They saw their scholarship as one arm of revolution. The AAUG interconnected pan-Arabism and Arab American political formation with not only Palestine but the Vietnam antiwar movement; anticolonial struggles across Asia, Africa, and Latin America; the Civil Rights and Black power movements in the U.S.; Indigenous sovereignty across the Americas; as well as global socialist organizing. 

In the U.S., young carriers of these late-twentieth-century Global South, antiwar, and left movements protested from imperial universities—occupying buildings, actively resisting administrative and police violence, and shutting down campuses. Asian, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students also demanded their educations reflect nonwestern epistemes and their own lived realities as colonized peoples. Much like the recent Gaza solidarity encampments across campuses, where students are interconnecting political histories from Palestine to Congo, Sudan, and Kashmir, Palestine emerged then too as a paradigm within a shared possibility. For instance, scholar Manijeh Moradian documents how the Iranian Students Association (ISA) co-sponsored an event on political prisoners, including those in Palestine, with the Union of the Vietnamese in the United States and the Union of Democratic Filipinos at UC Berkeley in 1973. That same year, when Israel shot down a Libyan commercial plane and raided Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the ISA coalesced with several other organizations, including the Chicano political group Venceremos, the Ethiopian Students Association, and the Organization of Arab Students, to protest outside the Israeli consulate in San Francisco. These movements would engender academic fields like African American, Asian American, and ethnic studies. Yet, as the late Asian American Studies scholar Gary Y. Okihiro argued, what the students really demanded were pedagogies for Third World liberation, interconnecting their differentiated struggles not towards some shared identity or racialized disciplines of study but rather towards anticolonial, anti-imperial, and antiracist worldmaking.  

Across Asian American community organizing, too, Palestine and anti-Zionist critique circulated as relational pedagogies for decades. For instance, in the 1970s, radical community projects like the women-led, New York-based Asian Americans for Action and the San Francisco-based Wei Min She disseminated reports on Palestinian self-determination to their constituencies. In the same era, legendary Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama and Black Power organizers met privately with members of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Queens. In her memoir, Kochiyama encapsulates the political and vital interconnectedness of Global South liberation movements: “The realization of self-determination is electrifying. Thus, the cause of Palestine is that of Vietnam’s; the liberation struggles of Mozambique and Angola are related to the guerrillas’ involvement in Uruguay and Bolivia. The Philippines’ sentiment against military colonialism is mutual with that of Puerto Rico’s.” 

​Innumerable examples of South-to-South internationalist organizing and thought across the twentieth century also tethered revolutionary politics from West to South to East Asia, while influencing U.S.-based movements. In the 1971 documentary Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War, filmmakers Wakamatsu Koji and Adachi Masao followed a Japanese Red Army (JRA) faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Lebanon as they trained for liberation. In the film, PFLP and JRA members enter conversations about the interdependence of their revolutions, with one member noting “our struggles and the lessons belong to the brothers and comrades of the world as common property.” 

At a July 1966 emergency meeting of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Beijing, a North Vietnamese writer concluded his speech by sharing shrapnel from an American plane, shot down a week before. In the audience Palestinian writer and PFLP leading spokesperson Ghassan Kanafani was so moved, he “burst into tears.” When called to speak, Kanafani said he could not contribute anything that equaled his Vietnamese comrade, but promised he would by next year’s meeting. At the 1967 Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Beirut, Kanafani delivered a conceptual strategy for Palestinian “resistance literature” in relation to his close readings of Zionist narrative-making as “cultural siege.” Kanafani’s theories of insurrectionary arts and anti-Zionist critique would help locate Palestine within the greater Afro-Asian movement—a global anti-imperial struggle and intellectual tradition, which scholars like Maha Nassar document. Memorialized as the “commando who never fired a gun,” in 1972 Kanafani and his niece were assassinated in Beirut by the Mossad, Israel’s secret service.

Today, Palestine’s paradigm and Kanafani’s collective summons—that “imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the world revolution”—are nurturing grounded analyses of anticolonial internationalism from the Palestinian resistance to its solidarity protests around the world. A new age of shared possibility is born. With it, whither, or wither the Asian American question.