Parallax Fall 2024 Issue Part 2

“Doljanchi” Acrylic on Canvas, 24" by 18" A first birthday celebration.

“Tiger Mom” Acrylic on Canvas, 18” by 24” The stereotype of the Asian “Tiger Mom,” in a literal sense.

“KoreanAmerican” Oil on Canvas, 9” by 12” The rose, the United States national flower, and the Korean rose, South Korea’s national flower.

Fall 2024 Issue

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Rejecting Cold War Mentality and Orientalism:

Rethinking the Liberation of Palestine from the Perspective of an Asian Diaspora

By Iunius In early May 2024, in Gayogo̱ hó꞉nǫʼ (Ithaca), I put on my keffiyeh, as I usually do, and headed toward the encampment in the liberated zone. I sat for a while in the tent area, where the Palestinian flag flies, and checked in with the comrades stationed there to see if they needed any help. This routine had been going on for about two weeks. After leaving the liberated zone that day, letting them know I’d be attending the teach-in later that afternoon, I ran into a friend on campus.

After some small talk, this friend, aware of my support for Palestine, expressed his understanding but shared his concern. As an ethnically Chinese student, he wondered whether, with the growing geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China, voicing support for the Palestinian cause might put me at some potential risk. “Given the U.S.-China standoff, you’re ethnically Chinese, but you’re supporting protests against the U.S. government. Does that make you a target for American nationalists as well?” he asked.

I replied, “Thank you for raising an important question, which is whether one’s stance on the Palestinian issue can be reduced to choosing sides between the two empires, the U.S. and China.

My answer is, clearly, it cannot.”

Reducing the Palestinian struggle to a binary choice between empires strips away and appropriates the identity of the Palestinian people, just as binding me to the geopolitical concept of the PRC (People’s Republic of China), simply through a stack of papers called a passport and my Asian face, is a form of appropriation, deprivation, and alienation. In the eyes of the American far-right, I don’t even need a PRC passport—my Asian face alone is enough to be seen as an original sin. So, my choice is to “sin” further: not only will I refuse to sidestep the Palestinian issue in my daily life, but I will also articulate a conclusion that makes both U.S. and Chinese nationalists uncomfortable.

The essence of the Palestinian issue is not about allegiance to any geopolitical power; it is a call for decolonization, anti-imperialism, and mutual liberation. This struggle is not just about the Palestinian people; it concerns the liberation of Taiwanese, Hongkongers, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Pamiris, Ainu, Native Hawaiians, Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and all oppressed classes and people of color.

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Courtesy of @activistnyc

The Palestinian issue, as a social movement bearing the weight of a radical agenda, is often interpreted in mainstream media as a geopolitical tension between the U.S. and China/Russia, or as part of a supposed conflict between democratic and non-democratic systems. This rhetoric diminishes the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle by framing it through the lens of the evil of China, Russia, and other authoritarian regimes. Not only is this narrative factually flawed, but it is also deeply colonial in nature, as it robs the Palestinian people of their agency.

The underlying assumption of this narrative is that the Palestinian people lack the capacity to establish their own political agenda and cannot be the protagonists of their own story; instead, they are merely tools serving the political agendas of “big powers,” whether Western or Eastern.

Therefore, the larger and more accurate tension behind the Palestinian issue is not one between global superpowers but one between Cold War mentalities and the drive for decolonization. This is not just about Palestine—it is about how we understand the world we live in, and particularly how we, as Asians, understand the U.S., Asia, and the Pacific, as well as the fluidity and multiplicity of our identities within this transnational context.

The Cold War mentality did not end with the conclusion of the Cold War in the early 1990s.

Instead, it has continued to loom like a dark cloud over the post-Cold War intellectual world, fueled by the cultural hegemony of U.S. imperialism and the rise of a new imperialism in the East, represented by the PRC. Today, as the iron curtain of a new Cold War slowly descends, this mentality still casts its shadow. Under the Cold War mentality, the world is reduced to binary oppositions between different camps, and relations between these camps are simplified into a zero-sum game. The heterogeneity within each camp is erased. In other words, within the framework of Cold War mentality, complex and nuanced realities are reduced to simplistic and flattened narratives of good versus evil, defined solely by whether something is labeled “Occidental/Oriental” or “pro-U.S./anti-U.S.,” disregarding the intricate relationships that exist between them.

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During the same period, an event in Lenapehoking (New York City) made me viscerally experience the absurdity and terror of pushing this binary Cold War mentality to its extreme. On April 30th, in Lenapehoking, at the request of Minouche Shafik, the heavily armed NYPD, equipped with heavy weapons including ladder trucks, brutally suppressed proPalestine student protesters at Columbia University, arresting over 300 people and stationing large numbers of police on campus.

Apr. 30, 2024 marked the 56th anniversary of the 1968 student movement, and after half a century of turbulence, it seemed as though the world had come full circle in a tragically absurd way.

I witnessed this horrific scene through social media while at the encampment in Gayogo̱ hó꞉nǫ, and in my tears of anger and helplessness, I thought of the political trauma memory that belongs to East Asians on the other side of the Pacific. As the NYPD beat unarmed students with batons and shields and handcuffed them, forcing them into police cars, more students joined hands, using their bodies to block the vehicles. Images flashed through my mind: how, in November 2022, during the A4 Revolution in Shanghai, citizens protesting China’s brutal lockdowns stood in front of police cars; how, in June 1989 in Beijing, an unnamed man fearlessly stood alone in front of PLA tanks during the Tiananmen Massacre; and how, in May 1980 in Seoul, a brave young Korean stood atop an occupied armored vehicle, waving the national flag in the face of Chun Doo-hwan’s military, even as guns were pointed at him.

However, such connections and comparisons are not tolerated under the Cold War mentality.

When the A4 Revolution broke out in China in 2022, many student leaders from the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement, now exiled in North America and Europe, expressed strong support and solidarity. They also celebrated the Korean people’s resistance during the Gwangju 22

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Uprising. But when it came to the protests at Columbia University, even though many of these self-proclaimed supporters of China’s democratization live in Lenapehoking—some of whom have even opened a museum commemorating the Tiananmen movement on 33rd Street in the heart of the city—there was little to no support from these groups for the Palestinian protesters. Silence, or even defense of police violence and settler colonialism, has been the norm for them.

At the core, many of these individuals place all legitimacy of grassroots resistance under the label of “anti-communism,” which, in their abstract ideology, is then embodied by the tangible symbol of the U.S. empire. Thus, a narrow and absurd equation emerges: U.S. empire, capitalism, and the West equal “good,” while any criticism of these entities equals “evil.” From this perspective, it becomes almost inevitable that they turn a blind eye to the U.S. government’s severe human rights violations and its inhumane foreign policy of exporting wars.

To distort the struggles of Asian peoples against authoritarian governments and colonial rule into an allegiance to U.S. political agendas and values is undoubtedly another form of plundering and exploiting Asia’s collective memory. It also inflicts secondary trauma on those who have already suffered under political violence.

Meanwhile, just a short distance away on 37th Street in Lenapehoking, a social movement organization that presents itself as left-wing and progressive has played a significant role in supporting the pro-Palestine movement, facing immense pressure and backlash as a result. Yet, when it comes to discussing imperialism and colonialism in the non-Western world, this group reveals a completely different face. In their narrative, China, under the leadership of the Communist Party, is purely seen as a revolutionary force resisting U.S. global hegemony, while China’s own colonialism and oppression in East and Central Asia are entirely ignored. In fact, just earlier this October, this organization held a series of events to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Beijing regime, portraying it as a model of socialism.

This type of narrative is not unique to this group but is prevalent across many so-called leftist circles in the Western world. In such narratives, power imbalances and inequalities within the non-Western world are disregarded, and the entire non-Western world is categorized as a unified bloc of resistance and revolution against the West. Non-Western societies are not defined based on their own conditions but are instead portrayed as the antithesis of Western society—an image shaped entirely by Western perspectives. This is, at its core, still a form of Eurocentrism, where the West remains the central reference point, and

the non-Western world is defined in opposition to it, based on wishful thinking.

This represents a form of Orientalism, though a less recognized variant—one emerging from the left, akin to the "radical orientalism" concept introduced by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu in Radicals on the Road.

Little do people realize that while empires may have conflicting interests, they often cooperate and conspire when it comes to dealing with the wretched of the earth. After the 9/11 attacks, when the U.S. empire legitimized Islamophobia and xenophobia under the guise of the “War on Terror,” launching imperialist wars of aggression in SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) and establishing the unjust ICE (​​ Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention system at home, China quickly adopted this rhetoric. In the name of “counterterrorism,” China has increasingly escalated its brutal repression, assimilation, forced displacement, and forced labor of Uyghurs, Tibetans, Kazakhs, Pamiris, and other ethnic groups in its imperial border regions, to the point of genocide.

In a 2002 paper, Pan Yue, the current head of China’s State Ethnic Affairs Commission, explicitly advocated learning from the settlercolonialism of the U.S. and Israel. He proposed sending 50 million Han Chinese as political migrants into Tibet and East Turkestan to assimilate the local non-Chinese groups until they are completely eradicated. Twenty years later, this horrifying vision is gradually becoming a blood-soaked reality. Currently, the Beijing regime offers insincere claims of support for Palestine. Simultaneously, it systematically stigmatizes and even engages in cultural extermination of Islam within its governed territories under the pretext of counter-terrorism and anti-extremism. At the same time, it endorses the so-called two-state solution, entirely disregarding the demands and political agenda based on the Thawabit articulated by the Palestinian people Fall 2024 Issue

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This is why we must embrace cross-movement solidarity and support both the resistance movements in East Asia and the Palestinian struggle. In the framework of the Cold War mentality, these two are seen as mutually exclusive, forcing a binary choice between proU.S. or pro-China. But from a more fundamental decolonial perspective that calls for mutual liberation, they are intrinsically united. While these movements may directly attack different heads of the hydra, all of these heads belong to the same beast. Simply cutting off one or a few heads will only allow new ones to grow. Until we overthrow the beast of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and extreme nationalism—until we achieve freedom for all—none of us is truly free.

As diasporic Asians, we find ourselves on the

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margins of two empires: the U.S. and China.

On one hand, the U.S. empire casts us as the docile, non-resistant model minority within its capitalist system, using this to deradicalize our communities and sow division between us and other minority groups. At the same time, it perpetually treats us as aliens, never fully accepted. The Chinese empire, meanwhile, views our communities through the lens of genealogy and ultranationalism, trying to frame us as an extension of its power beyond its geographic borders, demanding political loyalty, while within its own territories, it casts us as untrustworthy and disloyal barbarians.

For this reason, resisting the dual oppression of imperialism and ultranationalism from both sides of the Pacific and standing in solidarity with all oppressed peoples is our only path forward. The most urgent issue right now is to fully support the Palestinian people’s struggle.

Nobody is free until everyone is free.

Nobody is free until we see a FREE PALESTINE FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA.

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...resisting the dual oppression of imperialism and ultranationalism from both sides of the Pacific and standing in solidarity with all oppressed peoples is our only path forward.

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themselves. This situation exemplifies a strategic maneuver between two empires, with the Chinese Empire attempting to instrumentalize the Palestinian struggle as a geopolitical pawn. Through anti-Western rhetoric, it seeks to incite ultra-nationalistic sentiments domestically, rather than genuinely addressing or aiding the Palestinian people's decolonization efforts. As Ghassan Kanafani once said, “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.”

But it is important to note that imperialism is a hydra, with many heads that may appear to be in opposition, and indeed, they often fight over spoils. However, this does not prevent them from fundamentally belonging to the same shared interest—the foundation of this shared interest being patriarchy and capitalism (whether free-market capitalism or state capitalism masquerading under the banner of socialism).

Why I Speak Up

By Milay Haskin

During World War II, approximately 13,000 people of Japanese ancestry were forced into internment camps in my home state of Washington alone. Growing up in Washington, I met many people who remembered what life was like living in internment camps and the ways that their lives were forever changed because of a war that they had no say in. As a Japanese-American myself, I found myself wondering what my experience would have been like had I been born 60 years earlier. I wondered what it would have been like to see hateful caricatures of people like me in propagandized news outlets, to be shunned by people I once trusted as part of my community, and the trauma of being uprooted from your home without warning or knowledge of when you could return.

While I am privileged not to have experienced this for myself, I know that the people of Palestine have been living these experiences since even before the Nakba of 1948. In the face of adversity and injustice it is easy to feel overwhelmed and insignificant, but I know that my predecessors would have wanted for their peers, even just one person, to speak up against the injustices they were facing and show up in support of them. I do my best to emulate this in my day to day actions, especially when I see the pain of my predecessors still being experienced today by people around the world.

I see all of my Japanese-American predecessors in the Palestinian people and I know that in our ability to have similar experiences and feel similar pain, from decades and countries apart, in our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.

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By Audrey Lockett This is a reflection about what I learned during my participation in the Free Palestine movement on Cornell’s campus about participating in activism from a space of privilege, solidarity, and allyship. Teach-ins and education about the shared struggles against settler colonialism and imperialism across the world helped me understand the importance of community and solidarity in creating meaningful change. My journey was also shaped by Buddhist values, especially as The Buddhist Sangha at Cornell joined the Coalition for Mutual Liberation. I apologize for any mistakes or misrepresentations I may have made in my writing, and would be grateful to hear any feedback at audreylockett923@gmail.com.

Before last year, I was honestly very ignorant about the history of Palestine, the rise of Zionism, and the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation. Teach-ins around campus guided my education not only on Palestine, but the connection between 26

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liberation movements around the world. One of the first teach-ins that helped me understand these connections was called “Green Colonialism and Climate Apartheid: From Palestine to the US”, hosted by Climate Justice Cornell. We learned about terms like green colonialism, misleading sustainability solutions that perpetuate unequal exposure to environmental burdens. For example, Zionist rhetoric of “turning the desert green” by planting non-Native European trees justifies expansion of Israeli territory and Palestinian dispossession of land under the guise of reducing CO2 emissions. The beneficiaries of these greenhouse gas reductions notably exclude Palestinians.

This form of “environmentalism” enforces a white supremacist hierarchy over indigenous land use, erasing Palestinians’ rich connection to the land and history of crop cultivation.

Instagram post from @climate_cornell_cornell

Lessons from the Free Palestine Movement on Mutual Liberation, Buddhism, and My Family History

On Turtle Island, the construction of Cop City in Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest—Muscogee (Creek) land that was stolen in the 1800s and later exploited for slave labor—illustrates the same patterns of eco-colonialism. This police training facility is designed to support U.S.Israeli police exchanges focused on racial profiling, mass surveillance, and protest suppression. This global pattern extends to institutions like Cornell University, granted