This Asian Heritage Month, we must urgently remind ourselves that — in the words of novelist and scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen — Palestine is in Asia. 

As Asians in the settler-colonial nation of Canada, this simple fact has profound implications for our reflections, histories, and collective obligations in this moment. We cannot in good faith discuss anti-Asian racism without reckoning with the ongoing 19-month-long Western-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians — a West Asian people so dehumanized and discriminated against that those supporting their collective rights in Canada have faced unprecedented criminalization, surveillance, expulsion, administrative reprisal, and workplace repercussions. To excise Palestinians from Asian diasporic demands for justice is to betray the principles and struggles that necessitated organizing around the Asian Canadian identity in the first place. This is because, at least in part, anti-Palestinian racism is anti-Asian racism.

Indeed, Asian ethnic studies (and frameworks like Orientalism that we use to make sense of the lived experiences of Asians in the diaspora) would not exist in the way that they do without the intellectual work of scholars and activists who resisted anti-Palestinian racism and colonialism. It is therefore an urgent task to excavate the deep historical, cultural, political, and legal ties between the social construction of anti-Asian racism and anti-Palestinian racism in the Western imagination. Further, we must reckon with the obligations that flow from that knowledge, at a time when the most brutal colonial violence imaginable is being enacted on the Palestinian people in their homelands by the state of Israel, ultimately aimed at their forcible displacement and demographic replacement.

Constructing the Orient as a place and Orientals as a people

Whether of the Asian American or Asian Canadian variety, Asian ethnic studies owes an enormous intellectual debt to Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said and his 1978 magnum opus, Orientalism.

Said wrote that the Orient is not merely something that exists, just as the Occident is not merely something that exists. Rather, like concepts of race, the idea of the Orient is a man-made construction, with a history and tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that give it power. The Orient as a place is portrayed by the West as a region of exoticism, irrationality, backwardness, despotism, and mysticism, in stark contrast to the rational, progressive, democratic, and civilized Occident. The East then becomes a “mirror image,” simultaneously creating ideas of the West. Additionally, the wide scope of the Orient “swallows up disparate realms” from the Middle East to the Spice Route, from South Asia to the Far East — further contributing to the persistent ambiguity of who counts as “Asian.” 

Said argues that these ideas are not innocent but rather endow those in the West with the supposed authority to speak about the Orient and Oriental peoples from a supposedly neutral, impartial observer position, paving the way to advance colonial and imperial projects — ranging from legions of colonial administrators to innumerable Oriental experts and “watchers.” And if the Orient as a place could be symbolically constructed for the purposes of Western control, it follows that “Orientals” as a people could be racially constructed in the same way. It is in this self-granted authority and positionality of power that we see the very origins of anti-Asian racism in Canada.

Historically, Orientalists have reached the very highest echelons of Canadian political power. In 1909, Harvard University granted Canada’s longest serving Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, a PhD for his dissertation on Oriental Immigration to Canada. The substance of his dissertation was collected through his role as deputy minister of labour where, as the resident “specialist” on Asian immigration, he would help coordinate an Anglo-American alliance to consolidate some of the most significant anti-Asian laws and policies. Among these were the Hayashi-Lemieux Agreement to impose quotas on Japanese immigration and the Continuous Journey Regulation targeting South Asian migrants, which would lead to the infamous exclusion of the Komagata Maru in 1914. 

Once King became prime minister in 1921, his administration accelerated the idea of a “white” Canada by passing the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act and Order-In-Council PC 1923-182 which prevented “any immigrant of any Asiatic race” from landing in the country with narrow exemptions. This broadside of racist laws was justified by the view that “Canada should desire to restrict immigration from the Orient [and] that Canada should remain a white man’s country.” These ideologies of racial hierarchy would also influence his administration’s antisemitic views on Jewish immigration to Canada (“none is too many”) as well as his well-documented admiration of Adolf Hitler himself.

Palestinians and other Arabs were targeted by anti-Asian laws

While historical accounts of anti-Asian laws and policies in Canada frequently focus on East Asian and South Asian populations, what is often lost is the fact that Palestinians and other Arabs were also targeted by these very same laws. In other words, Palestinians and other Arabs were constructed as Asian by the Canadian state for the purposes of exclusion and subordination, without regard for their self-identification with the term (as was true with all ethnic communities negatively racialized by the category).

Historian Houda Asal documents how Arabs in Canada were subjected to anti-Asian laws as diverse as the 1908 Continuous Journey Regulation, the 1910 requirement for those of “Asiatic origin” to possess $200 on arrival, and PC 1930-2115 (the successor to PC 1923-182) which prohibited all immigration of peoples of the “Asiatic race” to Canada. 

Like other communities, Arab Canadians organized against these anti-Asian laws, but because groups targeted by anti-Asian legislation rarely built alliances in solidarity against their discrimination at the time, resistance was siloed. As a result, some Arab Canadians argued (without much success) that they should be exempt from the legislation as they were not of the “Asiatic race” by virtue of being closer racially to Europeans than Asians. Similar racial-distinction arguments had also been made at the time by Armenians and South Asians of higher caste.

Palestinians were also excluded by anti-Asian laws in Canada, the first of which took effect during a time of transition from Ottoman rule to British colonial rule and the fateful implementation of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. This declaration promised British support for Jewish national rights in Palestine while simultaneously erasing Arab Palestinians’ right to self-determination, at a time when the Jewish population formed less than a tenth of Palestine’s population. Then, as now, anti-Palestinian racism ran rampant among colonial authorities. In defending British imperial policy in Palestine during the Mandate period, Winston Churchill framed his defence in overtly anti-Palestinian and anti-Indigenous terms:

I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the Black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or at any rate, a more world-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place. I do not admit it. I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, “The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here.” They had not the right nor had they the power.

After partition plans in Palestine were rejected, the disastrous Nakba of 1947 to 48 resulted in the mass displacement and dispossession of approximately half of the entire Palestinian population — some 750,000 people — from their homeland in order to create the new State of Israel. This violent mass expulsion necessitated refugee flows into the area now known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories, neighbouring countries, and elsewhere. Canada, with its blanket anti-Asiatic exclusionary provisions, continued to bar these refugees.

As anti-colonial movements and wars raged on throughout the 1950s, Canada was under significant pressure both domestically and internationally to repeal its racist, white-Canada immigration policies. One area in which it felt acute pressure to reform was in refugee policy, particularly when it came to people from places where Canada had involvement, such as through its active support at nearly every stage of the United Nations’ partition of Palestine. 

In 1955, Canada resettled about 100 Palestinian refugees pursuant to federal Cabinet directives. Still, this paled in comparison to the 37,500 Hungarian refugees who were resettled in Canada following the country’s invasion by the Soviet Union only a year later. 

This Eurocentric colonial rule of difference between Occidental and Oriental refugees continues today in the egregious and unjustifiable double standards between Canada’s responses to Ukrainian refugees and refugees from Gaza. In response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Canada created the Canada-Ukraine Authorization for Emergency Travel, which approved more than 900,000 applications, with nearly 300,000 Ukrainians arriving in Canada by 2024. In contrast, Canada’s special visas for Gaza’s refugees were arbitrarily capped at 5,000 applications, with only several hundred asylum seekers having actually arrived under the program. Further, applications from Gaza have been subjected to unprecedented invasiveness in security screening as well as racist vilification among officials and the news media, further entrenching anti-Palestinian racism.

Weaponization of democracy to justify colonial racism

When, during the recent Canadian election, Prime Minister Mark Carney appeared to briefly acknowledge a genocide in Gaza, noting that’s “why we have an arms embargo,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to social media to vent his frustration.

“Canada has always sided with civilization,” Netanyahu wrote on X. “So should Mr. Carney. But instead of supporting Israel, a democracy fighting a just war with just means against the barbarians of Hamas, he attacks the only Jewish state.”

In those remarks, Netanyahu repeated multiple Orientalist and Occidentalist tropes that have been crucial for justifying Western colonial projects in Asia and the rest of the world. He characterized Canada and Israel as “civilized” societies, as opposed to the uncivilized “barbarians” of Hamas, which Israel has defined to include virtually all Palestinians and even UN agencies. He stated that Israel is engaged in a “just war,” despite being an occupying power in a 57-year belligerent occupation that has been unambiguously deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Finally, Netanyahu argued that this war against barbarians is also required to defend “democracy” from Oriental despotism. This despite the fact that the ICJ has found that Israel’s laws and policies with respect to Palestinians within its administrative control breach the international legal prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid — a system which is definitionally anti-democratic.

The West’s weaponization of its self-image of freedom and democracy has been key to both its advancement of racist policies against Asians as well as its insulation from reparations and accountability, including in Canada. For instance, in 2002 the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled in Mack v Canada that survivors of the Chinese Head Tax and subsequent exclusionary immigration policies had no legal claim for the discrimination and harm they experienced at the hands of the state, in part because these laws were “enacted by a democratic government that were valid at the time.”

Curiously, the appellate justices attached a footnote to the end of that sentence, stating that they were “not here concerned with facially valid laws enacted by a totalitarian or other despotic regime.” The argument here was clear: that “democratic” (Occidental) societies are immune from accountability for racist harm, but that that immunity does not extend to “totalitarian or other despotic” (Oriental) societies. 

In the context of Palestine, this has meant that the appalling racism inherent in apartheid and genocide has been erased by constructs of Israeli “democracy,” while charges of antisemitic racism levelled against Palestinians are normalized and accepted due to their supposedly barbaric, despotic, and hateful nature. Indeed, Canada’s Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism provides Israel with a “democracy” exemption from international law, while constructing Palestinian nationalism as presumptively antisemitic. Through these interpretations, we see the afterlife of old tropes of Oriental Despotism that have long been used to justify Western colonial intervention in Asia.

A call to action

As of this date, the official death toll in Gaza from the Israeli genocide has climbed to well over 61,000, with experts predicting that indirect deaths as a result of missing persons, disease, starvation, and other factors will result in a true death count that greatly exceeds that number. The UN has reported that more than 17,000 Gazan children have been killed thus far. Further, since March 2nd, Israel has reimposed a devastating siege on the occupied Gaza strip where, according to Amnesty International, “starvation and denial of life-saving essentials are being used as weapons of war in flagrant violation of international law,” which “constitutes a genocidal act.” 

In this moment of Western-backed genocidal horror, what do Asian organizers, scholars, and activists owe our Palestinian brethren? I offer three ideas.

For one, we must understand that overseas colonial racism and domestic colonial racism are not separate issues. They are intertwined and must be fought together. As genocide scholar Patrick Wolfe reminds us, “Race is colonialism speaking.” Already, the Trump administration has moved to eliminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives all over the country and censor academic discussions of race and sex-based discrimination, entrenching domestic racial and gender inequalities. Meanwhile, the administration has simultaneously moved to curtail speech that challenges U.S. foreign policy, particularly its support for the ongoing colonization of Palestine and the genocide in Gaza — going as far as kidnapping students off the street and jettisoning them to far-off detention sites for their pro-Palestine speech.

As such — and as Asians in the diaspora striving for freedom, dignity, and liberation for all — we must refuse a domestication of anti-racism at home that does not account for imperialist violence abroad. As Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, we must resist “the lure of a domesticated otherness satiated by belonging” and recognize that “inclusion is crucial but complicated when it means belonging to a settler and imperial country that promotes the colonization and occupation of other lands.”

Second and relatedly, we must repoliticize what Asian diasporic identity means. The pan-ethnic term “Asian American” emerged in the 1960s as part of a political movement to both organize domestically against a long history of racial exclusion and segregation during the civil rights era as well as U.S. imperialist interventions during the Second Indochina War (known in the U.S. as the Vietnam war). It is therefore part of Asian diasporic heritage to remember the violent and fatal suppression of students in 1970 at Kent State and Jackson State in response to protests against the U.S. expansion of the Vietnam War to neutral Cambodia. Ultimately, these fateful decisions would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths and drive the latter country, destabilized and desperate, into the rule of the extremist Khmer Rouge, resulting in the Cambodian genocide. 

The depoliticization of Asian diasporic identity from its roots in anti-racist and anti-imperialist agitation and its co-optation as part of American or Canadian settler colonial nation-building must therefore be resisted. Borrowing from the warnings of Professor Ruha Benjamin on the elite capture of identity politics, our Asianness is not itself trustworthy, should we “allow ourselves to be conscripted into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo” or if we “remain silent about the genocide of oppressed peoples around the world funded by our tax dollars.” Asian diasporic formations must be infused with politically emancipatory meaning, if they are to mean anything at all.

Third, we must work in solidarity and coalition. Our struggles against anti-Asian racism are interlinked with struggles against all forms of subordination and oppression. No one struggle has the power to win without joining in solidarity and coalition with other liberatory struggles. Yet there is power in specificity, identity, and collective organizing as well.

Already we see powerful coordinating efforts within the Asian diaspora, including Asians for Palestine and a diverse range of more focused ethnic-solidarity and support campaigns including within Tamil, Chinese, Filipinx, South Asian, Kashmiri, Vietnamese, Hong Konger and Tibetan, Hawaiian, Korean, and other communities. In these movements, we find the seeds of a principled and internationalist Asian diasporic consciousness that has rejected conditional inclusion based on silence, in favour of collective liberation. It is a consciousness that recognizes that the fight against anti-Asian racism must not only include but indeed centre the fight against anti-Palestinian racism. It is a consciousness that reminds us of the immortal words of Maya Angelou: that “no one of us can be free until everybody is free.” 

That is our collective obligation as Asian diasporic activists. Indeed, that is our heritage.

Vincent Wong is an Assistant Professor at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law where he teaches courses in Access to Justice and Asian Canadians and the Law.