The Other 228–Redux
Let me start with an apology to the Palestinian people.
In the two years since the start of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, so much has changed and so much has stayed the same. It feels like Israel’s invasion of Iran was yesterday. It feels like they captured the Madleen last week. Does anyone even remember the exploding pagers in Lebanon? The list of lows Israel proves willing to sink to keeps getting longer and longer. And yet the end result is a constant: Palestinian children murdered in front of their parents, Palestinian homes leveled by American missiles, and Palestinian activists ignored by propaganda outlets from Fox News to CNN to the New York Times.
In the midst of all of that, me. Thousands have rallied against this genocide and I’ve sat here, uselessly. This isn’t necessarily because I want to. I am, in activism as I am in life, simply too late. I would join a college encampment but there aren’t any of those left. I would protest against Biden and Harris’s arms sales to Israel but they’re not in office anymore. I would volunteer for the Global Sumud Flotilla but all of the boats set sail months ago, and I can’t operate a sailboat anyway. And yet I had the audacity to proclaim “I will be doing anything” in one article for a tiny school magazine where I didn’t even say the word “genocide.” (I rectified this in the print version but that’s hardly an excuse.) Palestine deserves more than The Other 228. That much is obvious. It should have been obvious when I wrote it almost a year ago.
But I will try not to criticize anyone’s support for Palestine for being “too late.” The common refrain of “one day, everyone will have always been against this” seems a little useless when so many are already against this and it’s still happening anyway. And it’s blindingly obvious that “this” is not over. Remember the ceasefire that got signed a couple weeks ago? Israel already broke it. Aid trucks are still being blocked from entering Gaza as the entire population starves. Nearly all buildings in Gaza are still in ruins, many with bodies underneath them. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, settler violence against Palestinians continues to grow. Anyone who genuinely cares about Palestine can see that the fight is going to continue.
So as the world marks two years of genocide in Gaza, I issue a response to The Other 228. I believe I needed to write about the shared history of Taiwan and Palestine, and the initial acts of colonial violence that shaped both national identities. But at the time, I lacked enough knowledge to bring that discussion into the present day, saying little about the current genocide. For this, I apologize. It’s one thing to be vaguely against genocide in principle and another thing to understand the extent of American society’s investment in said genocide continuing. Like the painfully obvious double standard in how every mainstream media outlet reported on the ceasefire: Israeli “hostages” being exchanged with Palestinian “prisoners.” Ah, yes. The thousands of Palestinians taken from their homes and tortured in Israeli prisons aren’t hostages; they just happen to be there, for no particular reason. (That’s not even counting the fact that most of said Palestinian hostages are children, or the fact that they vastly outnumber the Israeli captives taken by Hamas. But I digress.)
I concluded The Other 228 by noting plenty of Americans claim to support Taiwan but could not imagine a liberated Palestine. That’s still true, but I should have added: many Taiwanese exhibit the same hypocrisy. Taiwanese support for Israel, a fellow US ally, runs deep. Taiwanese semiconductors and other technology are still regularly exported to Israel. The Taiwanese government has regularly pledged support for Israel and even sent aid to one of their illegal settlements in the West Bank. And yet we cannot entirely dismiss the Taiwanese as mere reactionary puppets of the United States. Across Taiwan, small but dedicated groups of activists have dared to break the silence on Israel’s act of genocide. In the face of Taiwanese Zionism, they organize protests, educate their fellow Taiwanese, and demonstrate that the connection between 228 and the Nakba is more than history: it has the power to transform the Taiwanese identity into one that understands the struggle of all colonized peoples around the world.
The Hong Kong-based Lausan Collective has collected this set of pro-Palestine informational zines in both Chinese and English, several of which have Taiwanese contributors. New Bloom Magazine, one of my favorite left-wing Taiwanese news publications, has joined a monthly mutual aid fundraiser that aims to provide long-term, continuous sources of aid to Gazan families. Taiwanese writer Leona Chen has one-upped my own article by connecting the Palestinian struggle to that of the aboriginal Taiwanese, a minority within a minority whose history is even less well-recognized than the rest of Taiwan. Leona Chen, Brian Hioe, Aurora Chang, and others prove that the world does not have to be organized along pro-US and anti-US “camps.” There is fascist, genocidal power, and there are those who oppose it. That’s the only level of conflict that matters.
I don’t need to be remembered as a hero. So I’m not going to pretend I have been anything close to a good activist for the Palestinian people. The best I can do is point you towards people who are. The flotilla organizers are already planning more actions. There are organizations on the ground in Gaza helping people relocate under constant threat of being bombed. There are protests around the country–including in Pittsburgh–that need every participant they can get. I’ve been to exactly one of them (see what I said about being too late?) but there are going to be more. Go donate to their efforts. Go spread their message. Maybe even share some of those zines with your friends and family. In the face of a genocide, committed by one of the most heavily militarized societies in history for nearly eighty years, funded by our own government with our own tax dollars, it’s all we can do.