If Palestine is in Asia, so is Israel
A review and a proposal
One of my recent regrets is to miss the Zoom talk between Hadley Freeman and Tanya Gold on 2 May 2024 to discuss and promote Freeman’s 20,000-word essay, “Blindness: October 7 and the Left” on Australia’s Jewish Quarterly. Happily, I could watch the recorded talk a month later (thanks to Twitter friend Becky Aizen) and was touched by Freeman’s emotions throughout the talk.
The title of this essay comes from one essay published by The Nation in January, written by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen starts with a familiar premise: Asia, in the American context, should not be limited to East Asia, the biggest contributor of Asian migrants to the United States. Edward Said himself, objectively, is an Asian American figure.
Nguyen then moves to the short story “The Chinese in Haifa”, written by Jeffry Paul Chan in 1974. The recent divorcee Bill Wong talks with his friend Herb Greenberg. Herb is angry that “the Japs just bombed an Israeli airline in Rome” and asked, “What in the hell do the Japs have against us?”. It is a reference to the Japanese Red Army attack on the Lod Airport in 1972.
Like in the short story, the news shocked the world: The Japanese wore suits while taking their rifles from cello cases, instead of wearing ski masks and bulletproof vests. And what was their problem with Jews? Many of the victims were Puerto Rican pilgrims. The answer is, that the Japanese Red Army and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine were communist groups, who believed that Israel was a neo-imperialist entity. The surviving terrorist, Kozo Okamoto, identified himself as a ‘soldier of the revolution’.
Herb’s wife Ethel suggests her mother, who is going to Haifa, finds a new bride for Bill. Jews or Chinese? They are the same, said Ethel’s mother. If there are Jews in China (from the medieval Kaifeng Jews to, well, Henry Kissinger), there must be Chinese in Haifa. Unknown to the characters, Bill has been cheating with Ethel and holds his Davidian fantasy of Herb dying in a terrorist attack.
When I heard about Orientalism in university, I thought it covered East Asia, the conventional scope of ‘Oriental’ in the United States, Australia, and even at that time, in Indonesia; when it was the accepted politically correct term for ‘Chinese’. An American in Indonesia in the early 2000s would have been surprised to find “Oriental look”, “Oriental hairstyle”, and “Oriental beef” printed and spoken, but they meant positive, desirable, even.
Edward Said, certainly, focuses on what is called Southwest Asia or the Middle East, which he argues has been continuously invaded by Asia (certainly he got his history of Achaemenid Persia upside down). But he wrote for the 1970s, when Palestine and other Arab entities were trading blows with Israel, and NATO members stood for Israel.
Said might have also introduced the viewpoint that Israel is a neocolonial project of the West (which can mean anything from France to the United States), overturning the earlier notion that Israel, being a Jewish collective, controlled Western leaders.
Nguyen isn’t the first to suggest that Asian activists in the late 1960s named themselves Asian Americans, to overwrite the racist notion of “Oriental” as an exotic, devious, and foreign place. Of course, no one made the term “Oriental Americans” before, while Chinese and Filipino Americans had been referred to as either Chinese, Asian, or Oriental before in polite companies. Asian American Left often says that the term began as a form of solidarity with black or African Americans before both continental origins were adopted for bureaucracy. In the name of fairness, Canada even classifies white Canadians as European Canadians, which is a good and fair idea for me.
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The problem is the relations between Asians and Jews. I and others like to keep them close, and not just because the Jews like Asian foods (not just Chinese but also Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, and maybe even Indian in Britain) and the common intermarriage among Jewish American men and Asian American women, but because I want everyone to get along together.
Leftists like Nguyen, meanwhile, want the Asians and the Jews apart. The Left maintains the myth that the only harm to Asian Americans is white conservatives. Asian Americans, and even Asians in Asia, are aware that the violence also comes from black Americans and even too often, from fellow Asians. Your robber and stabber don’t care about your politics.
As many people, like Freeman in the mentioned conversation, have pointed out, the Left tries too hard to put it all into black American nationalist/separatist ideas. They hate white people and so we must follow. They fear white people and so we must follow. We must search our history of suffering, and the oppressors must be white people. Never mind in America, this narrative must be followed in Britain, France, Australia, and even in Asian countries like India, Singapore, and South Korea. The history of European colonialism helps. At its worst, the narrative follows the black catastrophizing that “white people will shed our blood”, even if the actual blood were shed by black Americans.
I am glad that like many other Asian American writers, Nguyen despaired in January that the majority of Asian Americans didn’t care about Palestine. Younger activists on Twitter complained the same in the springtime. Again, he made the common mistake of saying that Asians were diverse, and yet saying that uniting themselves as Asian Americans didn’t make things better. They were complicit in the colonization and dispossession in America, and their solidarities to other Asians were testy at times. Once more, this is supposed to be white people’s fault, from the settlement to American cities to the plight of current migrants and refugees and the confusion of Asian American teens.
At least naming is not a problem for the common Asian American. In my knowledge of Asian Australians, they are free to describe themselves as Asians, Chinese people, Malaysians, or Australians dynamically, according to context and situation.
Now we get to the title of his article, and my rebuttal. Nguyen admits that Israel is in Southwest Asia. Can Palestinian and Israeli Americans identify as Asian Americans? Why not? Egyptian and Algerian Americans wouldn’t be wrong to identify as African Americans. Charlize Theron, after all, names her Instagram account charlizeafrica, and she is right.
Some American government bureaus and NGOs also use the AAPI classification, grouping Asian Americans with Pacific Islanders, from Hawaiians to American Samoans. For most people this is artificial, but others find it useful. Statisticians and policymakers don’t want to exclude the Pacific Islanders without making too many folders. Hawaiians and Guamnians (not all Guam people are Chamorros, a Spanish term) see themselves as Asians and Pacific Islanders. Activists who want to unite both groups, with a more compact term like Asian Pacific Americans – let’s see if the Indians are satisfied with it.
If Hawaiians, Arabs, and East Timorese are Asians, why can’t Israel be Asians? Nguyen, of course, didn’t ponder this question. The answer was a big no, and that’s because Israel is a ‘settler colony’ just like Australia, Canada, and the United States. More disappointingly, despite the title, the article never explores what makes Palestine Asian. It concludes with two anti-Israel Jewish writers, Nadine Gordimer, and Amos Oz, before returning to himself as an Asian American who’s compelled to defend “the cockroach, the monster”.
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I’ll take over the discussion. Palestine is Asian, and Israel is Asian. That’s the geographical fact. One doesn’t question what makes Iraqi culture Asian or Turkish European (what about Kurdish?), so why can’t Israeli culture be Asian?
Israel joined Asian sporting events and participated in the AFC Asian Cup football tournament until 1968 and the Asian Games until 1974. It is clear why it left Asia in sports – the petty Arabs couldn’t stand its existence.
Hadley Freeman and Tanya Gold concluded that the global protests aren’t about supporting Palestine, but about hating Israel, and by extension, hating Jews. Arab countries have spent decades harming Israel instead of helping Palestine and helping Palestinians flourish. The Islamic Republic of Iran emerges as Israel’s most rabid foe to secure its reign, internally and externally.
Even if Israel is indeed a settler colony, other Asian nations never had problems with Hong Kong or with Australia, which is a member of Asian sporting confederations in football and volleyball. The real issue isn’t about culture or political status. The real problem is Arab countries, who honestly hardly care about the welfare of Palestinians, see Israel as a piece of the puzzle that doesn’t fit into the Arab and Islamic world. For all the talk about diversities, the 21st century isn’t a good time for Christians and non-Arabs in Arab states. For all the talk about the exclusive nature of Israel, nobody questions the Arab exclusivity of Syria and Egypt.
This post will not change anything. No one will take Israel as an Asian country and Israelis as Asians. Perhaps Israelis have grown comfortable taking themselves as Europeans, like Kazakhstanis, Armenians, and Cypriots do. The same goes with Jewish Americans and Jewish Australians, who acknowledge that they are white people and are taken as white people, compared to say, Arab Americans and Assyrian Australians.
But if we use solely geography, then it is a simple fact that just like Palestine is in Asia, Israel is also in Asia.