As of May 1, 2024, the first day of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM), the death toll in Gaza is at least 34,488, with more than 14,500 children killed and more than 8,000 missing. Israel “vows” to invade Rafah, where most of Gaza’s displaced population – around 1.4 million, including 610,000 children – is sheltering. Last week, Biden secured a $95 billion aid package to Israel.

This is the context and crisis we must center when we talk about APAHM.

Since October 7, public opinion on Israel and Palestine has definitively shifted. In part because of Palestinian journalists risking – and often losing – their lives to document this genocide in real time, the veil is lifted. We can’t unsee the carnage of Zionism and the West’s unwavering defense of it. The people are with Palestine, and AAPIs are with Palestine.

Earlier this year, AAPI Data published results from a survey assessing Asian American and Pacific Islander perceptions of Palestine. They found:

• 49% of AAPI adults believe that the US is not supportive enough of Palestinians. This is 18 percentage points higher than the national average.
• 45% of AAPI adults believe that the US is not supportive enough of Muslim communities in the US. This is also higher than the national average. (Palestine is in West Asia and many AAPIs are Muslims, so scholars argue that these findings aren’t necessarily a surprise.)

And yet, this APAHM, we have much to confront, reckon with, and divest from. With utmost urgency, we must not only get these numbers of support for Palestine higher, but strategically mobilize our communities to fight for a free Palestine with our voices, bodies, and dollars.

Now is not the time to waver. Now is not the time to lose steam. Now is definitely not the time to capitulate to Zionist interests, funding, and egos.

Now is the time to refuse the U.S. war machine, and to collectively answer the Palestinian-led call to divest from people and institutions who profit off the genocide of Palestinians.

I invite us to revisit Asian America’s deep and robust roots in anti-imperialist politics, and to consider how this history can inform our attitudes, activism, and collaborations today. When the Asian American movement emerged in the late 1960s, Asian American youth wrestled with Asian American political identity in the context of the anti-war movement. Much like today, student activists were the vanguard.

As the country witnessed the atrocities and bloodshed of intervention throughout the Global South during the Cold War, anti-colonial indignation became central to the formation of Asian American identity and politics. The war in Vietnam in particular was a “brutal and urgent politicization.” To identify as Asian American at the time was to be unapologetically critical of the U.S. empire and to fight for liberation and self-determination in solidarity with Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples at home and abroad.

In 1968, UC Berkeley graduate students Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka coined the term “Asian American” with the Asian American Political Alliance as a rejection of the label “oriental,” imposed on by outsiders. Edward Said, Palestinian-American academic and political activist, coined the term “orientalism” in 1978 to explain how the West constructed Southwest Asia and North Africa as primitive, static, despotic, perpetually foreign, and objectified. These orientalist representations depended on and upheld Western colonial regimes in the region, and was soon adopted by East and South Asians in the U.S. to describe their experiences domestically and internationally as well. The Asian American student activists at the time argued that to reject “oriental” and assert Asian Americanness on one’s own terms also demanded a rejection of the U.S. imperialist system that laid the foundations for orientalism, anti-Asian racism, and white supremacy domestically and internationally.

However, as scholars like Dr. Najwa Mayer called out in the most recent Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) conference, many Asian American scholars and activists benefit from Said’s work without confronting the brutality of colonization that contextualizes his scholarship. Similarly, at this moment, I worry Asian America perceives itself to be exempt from – or even on the “right side” – of the Palestinian liberation movement, without seriously considering our own complicity in our silence, ambivalence, and funding streams that fortify the U.S. war machine.

When I was at the AAAS conference this past weekend, debate lingered in the air around the association receiving funding from The Asian American Foundation, which maintains disturbingly close ties to Zionist funding and interests (Anti-Defamation League (ADL) National Director and CEO Jonathan Greenblatt sits on TAAF’s board of directors). The controversy comes just over a decade after AAAS made history as the first academic association to endorse the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions Movement through an academic boycott of Israel in 2013. Many conference attendees expressed confusion and outrage at the prospect of AAAS partnering with TAAF, viewing it as a betrayal of the organization’s previous stance.

While AAAS consensus ultimately moved toward refusing the funding, TAAF unfortunately remains salient in the Asian American community. They fund Asian American Studies departments, scholars, and books, as well as Asian American direct service, advocacy and youth work across the nation. I’ve heard Asian Americans (while wearing keffiyehs) express sentiments along the lines of, “How will we do the good work in our communities if we reject TAAF funding?,” “All institutions are problematic, but we have to figure out how to engage with them,” and “There’s no clean way to operate under capitalism.”

To these sentiments, I reiterate the Palestinian demand to divest from people, organizations, and institutions that profit off of Zionist interests and the bloodshed of Palestinians. While these institutions and our relationships to the people in them may feel complicated, the call to action at this moment is straightforward. Now is the time to denounce Zionist partnerships, to refuse any association with Zionism, and to demand the removal of Zionist board members. And if this moment exposes all the other ways our funding sources are bloody, then let us give thanks to this movement for leading us to interrogate and deconstruct our funding structures altogether.

The Asian American movement emerged in tandem with forthright calls for internationalist, interracial solidarity against imperialism. This APAHM, the call remains the same: dismember the tentacles of Western imperialism, because this is the fundamental spirit and ethic of Asian American political identity.

From the belly of the beast, Asian Americans are strategically positioned to tell the truth about this genocide; to protest with our voices, bodies, and dollars; and to antagonize the U.S. empire and all who collude with it until Palestine is free.

Let us not waver; let us refuse. Let us deepen our commitments to decolonial struggle, solidarity, and futures. Let us be principled in our politics and solidarity. Let us do it together.

Resources and Action Items:

Bianca Mabute-Louie, MA is a keynote speaker, award-winning sociologist, and educator currently completing her PhD at Rice University in Houston, TX.