Solidarity with Palestine

Written By Vinh Hua

We are a multi-ethnic collective of people with ancestral ties to Việt Nam currently residing in the Puget Sound Coast Salish Territory. We declare our position in full support and solidarity for Palestinian liberation.

Over the past couple of weeks, we have watched in horror and sadness as Israeli forces continue its decades-long forceful displacement of Palestinians. Israeli settlers attempted to expel Palestinians from the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah with violence. Just a couple of days later, Israeli police forces opened fire on Al-Aqsa Mosque, injuring hundreds of civilians. Israel then launched air raids on the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas in the world where about 40% of the population are children under 14 years old.

We want to address a couple of popular narratives currently circulated and perpetuated by mainstream media. 

  1. Speaking out against Israeli is not anti semitic. 

    Criticizing the actions of the State of Israeli is not antisemitic, and this claim is ahistorical. Prior to occupation, Palestine was home to peoples of various religious faiths. Palestinian Jewish people exist. We must not conflate Zionism to all of Judaism, and opposing Zionism is not automatically akin to antisemitism.

  2. This is not a “conflict.”

    We want to unequivocally assert that this is not a “conflict” between two sides of equal power. This is a violent settler colonial process backed by the U.S. empire to serve its own interests. When an Australian TV interviewer called this a conflict in 1970, revolutionary Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani said “It is not a conflict. It is a liberation movement fighting for justice”. 

    As Vietnamese people, we are familiar with the use of the term “conflict” to minimize the scale of imperialist violence. During the Second Indochina War, the term “the Vietnam conflict” was often used as the U.S. Congress never made a declaration of war. This obscured the United States’ role, and gave the US a shield to shirk public scrutiny and accountability.

    Today, as many public figures and mainstream U.S. news outlets continue to call the occupation of Palestine a “conflict,” we are clear that what has been going on is genocide through settler colonialism and occupation.

  3. What is happening is a violent process of settler colonialism.

    Theodor Herzl, known as the father of political Zionism, promised that Israel “will be a representative of Western civilization,” bringing order to a “plague-ridden, blighted corner of the Orient.” He purposefully invoked Orientalism and the white man’s burden logic to garner support from European colonial powers. 

    This language, too, is familiar to us as we recall how the French justified its colonization of Indochina as mission civilisatrice (“civilising mission” in French). The real driver, of course, was economic exploitation of resources, raw materials and cheap labor.

    Settler colonialism is different from colonialism in that it aims to possess the land and to disappear existing populations to create a homogenous state. What has happened to Palestine since the 1948 النكبة‎ (“Nakba”, Arabic for catastrophe) is the violence that this process necessitates. About 700,000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948. To date, it’s estimated that more than 6 million Palestinians are in diaspora.

    Israel controls all airports and seaports and all exits and entrances, and Palestinians cannot leave, even for medical emergencies. Israelis have rights that Palestinians do not have, such as access to electricity, water, and sewage systems.

    Ten years ago, the UN reported: “A closer examination of violations of the rights to water and sanitation in the West Bank demonstrates how deliberately retrogressive measures and violations of the obligation to respect the right to water is used as a means to displace Palestinians from land and thereby facilitate Israeli control over resources, including land and water.”

As people in diaspora with ancestral ties to Viet Nam, Sông2Sea recognizes the history and connections between Việt Nam and Palestine, and how the relationship between these two modern states demonstrates a history of anti-imperial resistance and international solidarity in the decolonial period for Asia and Africa after World War II.

Official diplomatic relations between the Democratic Republic of Việt Nam and the Palestine Liberation Organization were first established in 1968 — the year that US President Nixon sabotaged peace talks of cease-fire in the Second Indochina War to bolster his chances of getting elected. After the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Việt Nam, the reunified country officially recognized Palestine in 1988, and the PLO’s representative office in Hà Nội became the Embassy of the State of Palestine. 

Over the years, Việt Nam has provided aid to Palestine, such as undertaking the cost of the embassy building and sending rice as food aid to Palestine. This relationship extends beyond diplomatic ties; it is also a shared ideological struggle. The PLO has translated a number of writings from General Võ Nguyên Giáp into Arabic, and has produced posters that read “from the revolution in Viet Nam to the coming revolution in Palestine”.

As people who oppose imperialism living in the United States with families in Asia, we have huge stakes in the ending of the military occupation in Palestine, where Israel is the bastion of American imperialism in West Asia.

According to the U.S. Department of State’s reports, Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. In 2016, the U.S. and Israeli governments signed their third 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on military aid which provided $38 billion in military aid to Israel. This MOU followed a previous $30 billion 10-year agreement. 

As Zionism strives to erase the statehood of Palestine, we must affirm again and again the already existing Palestine nation since the beginning of this occupation. Unlike Herzl’s assertion that it is “a land without people for a people without land”, Palestine was, and is, a vibrant crossroad of culture, religion, and trade. Its people have, as Dr. Fayez Sayegh writes, “lost not only political control over its country, but physical occupation of its country as well: it has been deprived not only of its in-alienable right to self-determination, but also of its elemental right to exist on its own land”. This is absolutely unacceptable. 

Sông2Sea supports Palestinians’ right to self determination and statehood. We call for the critical reception of information regarding Palestine, and for others to be wary of Israeli and American state propaganda. 

We support the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement (BDS), which is a Palestinian-led effort to end international support for Israel's oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law. The three demands of BDS are: 

  1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall.

  2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality.

  3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194

We support the one-state solution and call for others to do the political education necessary to understand this. Edward Said stated: “Palestine is multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious. There is as little historical justification for homogeneity as there is for notions of national or ethnic and religious purity today.”

In Vietnamese there is a proverb: “Chết đứng còn hơn sống quỳ.” In English it translates to: “Die standing rather than live kneeling.” Today we are seeing Palestinians fight in this spirit. We see their anti-imperial resistance. We see history being made. We dream of a liberated Palestine in our lifetime, and we call on others to invest in this vision with us. We call for our friends, family, and community members to take a firm stance with Palestine now and always.

Sources: 

Vinh Hua
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