Our project is supported by the USA’s National Science Foundation and Luminate.
Asian Americans, composed of roughly 15 million eligible voters, are poised to play a pivotal role in the upcoming 2024 U.S. elections. At the national level, the Asian American electorate is getting increased attention; Asian Americans are now the fastest-growing group of eligible voters in the country. At the local level, important state elections in California, Iowa, New York, and Texas feature Asian American political candidates.
As host of the Asian American Digital Politics project, the GloTech Lab at UMass Amherst is launching a blog series titled Asian American Digital Politics Monitor to discuss national issues, local electoral races, and campaign controversies relevant to Asian American communities. We will also report on specific misinformation narratives and wedge issues targeting diverse segments of Asian American voters. This project is a part of GloTech’s mission to seek resilience and healing, and aims to identify harmful narratives in order to understand how we can mend the Asian American community.
Our project is supported by the USA’s National Science Foundation and Luminate.
Contributor: Yelim Lee, GloTech Graduate Fellow
A recent nationwide survey uncovered that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are more likely to think that the United States is being too supportive of Israel and not supportive enough of Palestine. Asian American solidarity for Palestinian victims of war and genocide is informed by shared historical trauma, as many Asian American communities have direct or extended family experiences with forced migration, political persecution, and scars of imperialism. As Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen said in his essay calling for Asian American solidarity with Palestine, “Palestine is in Asia.” Nevertheless, the Palestine-Israel conflict has emerged as a contentious issue among Asian American voters in the US 2024 elections. Asian Americans are not a monolith, and this multiplicity is reflected in the varying stances of Asian American NGOs and activists.
This post breaks down the diverse Asian American positions on this wedge issue by examining Asian American community organizations and activists on social media. We focus on three demographic or geopolitical factors influencing Asian American opinion on the Palestine-Israel conflict: sympathy arising from shared histories of refugeeism and exile, experiences of marginalization and displacement as a result of settler imperialism, and diasporic extensions of the Hindu-Islam conflict in Asia that has been reconstituted in America.
Multifaceted and complicated Asian American support for Palestine
Asian American organizations have taken their pro-Gaza demonstrations to the streets and to digital forums. For example, Stop AAPIHate is a national coalition whose goal is to fight discrimination and racial injustices against the AAPI community. In between reporting on anti-Asian misinformation and educating the community about Project 2025’s implications for the Asian American community, the group has spoken out against the dehumanizing language people have used to describe Palestinians in the conflict. During Chinese Lunar New Year, Asians 4 Palestine NYC provocatively combined their cultural festivities with political protest. They attached the #ceasefirenow hashtag to the post about their Chinese Lunar New Year parade in Flushing, NYC, as seen below.
In addition, this group has organized repeated political disruption, including an event hosted by Grace Meng (NY House, D), Judy Chu (CA House, D), and Ted Lieu (CA House, D). Asians 4 Palestine NYC has been encouraging members of the community to fax Congresswoman Grace Meng to express displeasure at her condemnation of the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as antisemitic. The group also points to the large amounts of funding sent to Israel as compared to the seemingly inadequate relief aid for Hurricane Helene as evidence of moral failure by current Asian American lawmakers. The organization’s petition to Kamala Harris to enact an arms embargo has received 104,000 votes as of October 9, 2024. We note that Meng and Lieu have failed to support an immediate ceasefire, a position which certain Asian American activist organizations like Asians 4 Palestine NYC and 18 Million Rising criticize.
Many of the Asians4PalestineNYC members are of Chinese and Vietnamese descent and state that as “Asians who’s families fled to this country due to colonial violence and war, we cannot let our supposed political representation enact and green light the exact same brutality and genocide to the Palestinians now.” On Instagram, a young Korean American woman living in Guam, Ji hye Choi, related her experience of military occupation and aggression as a resident of Guam; she connected her ancestral Korean history of Japanese occupation to stand in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Thus, protesting in support of Palestine becomes a stand against settler imperialism as a whole. Additionally, other young Asian Americans have appealed on social media for recognition that Palestine is a part of Asia; for Asian American activists, Pan-Asian liberation must then include liberation of Palestine. This rhetoric implies that Asian American liberation must be fought on both a domestic and international battlefront. This empathy for Palestinian victims based on shared historical circumstances is also echoed in forums like the Asian American subreddit on the larger Reddit forum site. “As a child of refugee parents went through unimaginable horrors in Vietnam and Cambodia,” one comment states, “my heart will always go out to innocent civilians who find themselves at the mercy of their circumstances.”
Not all Asian American social justice organizations align themselves so thoroughly with Palestine, however. The Asian American Foundation (TAAF), which was founded in response to the Atlanta Spa shootings in 2021, aims to support and fund NGOs that work against Asian hate and address inequalities within Asian American communities. However, TAAF has been criticized for their ties to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an anti-hate organization working against antisemitism. As the ADL has been accused of surveilling Palestinian and Black Lives Matter activists, TAAF’s own members and other Asian American NGOs have called for the organization to remove ADL presence from their board of directors. However, contrary to these wishes, TAAF has only affirmed their ties to ADL. Though Asians 4 Palestine NYC, 18 Million Rising, and TAAF all call for Asian American liberation, who or what is included within that liberation is contested.
Religion has also become a significant dividing factor in the South and Southeast Asian American community’s support for Palestine. Asian Americans with roots in Muslim-majority countries, like Indonesia, with over a fourth of Asia’s Muslim population living within its borders, tend to be more sympathetic with Palestine. Indonesian American student organizations have mobilized on social media in support of Palestine. Other grassroots activist communities, like Buah, have hosted solidarity events and teach-ins that connect the events happening in Palestine with the ongoing conflict in Papua. Buah has also called for artists and poets within the diaspora community to add to its Palestine-based zine. “I grew up in an Indonesian Muslim household, so supporting Palestine was the default, but it was largely in nebulous, religious terms,” said a contributor to that zine. She then continues to say that while religion served as an initial base, her solidarity was solidified through feminist and post-colonial theory.
Indian Americans that affiliate with Hinduism represent an interesting demographic whose split support reflects the contentious Muslim and Hindu relations in India. This fracturing is best shown through the social media discourse brought forth by Hindu American activist groups on X. Hindus for Human Rights, a nonprofit organization that aims to combat Hindutva (an ethno-nationalistic right-wing political ideology centered on Hinduism) and casteism in both South/Southeast Asia and North America, alludes to the similarity between Hindutva and Zionism and urges Hindu Americans to support Palestine in order to maintain democracy. For this group, failing to support Palestine on the basis of religion would add to democratic backsliding. In contrast, the nonprofit advocacy group the Hindu American Foundation, a far-right-wing group, stands in support of Israel. A comment in their X thread pinpoints Islam as a common Jewish and Hindu enemy—for the adherents of this common disinfo narrative, antisemitism parallels anti-Hindu discrimination and violence. We must not only consider how Islamophobia enters the cultural lexicon through an American lens, but also consider the influence that existing geopolitical conflicts within South Asia have on diasporic communities.
This form of Asian American activism represents a significant departure from the historically imposed “Model Minority” stereotype—the expectation that demands Asian American complicity in not “rocking the boat.” In laying bare Asian American participation in vocal support of Palestine and in vocal support of Israel, we show that the Israel-Palestine conflict is not just a political wedge issue that divides party loyalties. Candidates cannot expect a uniform Asian American stance. Perhaps the vocal activism supporting both sides of the conflict also signals broader cultural shifts in the ways in which Asian Americans actively participate and become visible in US politics. Unlike popular belief, Asian Americans are invested in more than just academics and the ongoing conversation surrounding affirmative action; by taking a visible and vocal stance, many in the Asian American community are rejecting stereotypes that have long been used to marginalize and ‘other’ them. Through evolving political engagement, these activist constituents form a modern Asian American political and social identity.