As part of Kaya’s commitment to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the staff and board would like to amplify conversations around literature, colonization, and the possibilities of solidarity. In this post, we link to resources that have helped orient our thinking and actions, and we plan to share more on how the Asian diaspora can articulate solidarity with Palestine, especially in the context of publishing. We invite you to send anything that has been especially meaningful to you at this time. Reach us on social media: @kayapress on Instagram and Twitter, or email us directly at info@kaya.com.

“What Palestine requires is an approach to writing whose primary purpose is to gather others up with us, to generate within them an energy which their bodies cannot translate into anything but revolutionary movement.”
Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi in Protean Magazine

“The incoherence of Asian America lies in the gap between the acceptable politics of inclusion and limited solidarity and the potentially more radical politics of expansive solidarity … Can we practice continually an expansive solidarity with the others our country excludes, subordinates, and targets the most—both inside and outside our borders?”
Norton Lecture 3: On the Death of Asian Americans by Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Our vigils cannot contain the pain of this world. But they can transmit a fundamental truth: that their bombs and their lies cannot break those who tend to the flowers.”
The Second Week by The Palestinian Youth Movement in The New Inquiry

“The Foundation was born into a United States ripe with anti-Arab, Islamophobic sentiment. This landscape has not changed. Today, thousands take to the streets to protest the genocidal escalation in Gaza, and pledge their solidarity to the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism, and the Poetry Foundation has decided to silence them.”
Boycott of the Poetry Foundation – An Open Letter in Lithub

“While the Poetry Foundation censors pro-Palestinian voices, Mizna will continue to support artists, writers, and filmmakers in making and presenting work that proposes political liberation and self-determination, especially in Palestine. Decolonization is not a metaphor.”
Poetry Foundation Statement by Mizna

 “We refuse the instrumentalization of our queerness, our bodies, and the violence we face as queer people to demonize and dehumanize our communities, especially in service of imperial and genocidal acts.”
A Liberatory Demand from Queers in Palestine

“What we are not allowed to say, as Palestinians speaking to the Western media, is that all life is equally valuable. That no event takes place in a vacuum. That history didn’t start on October 7, 2023, and if you place what’s happening in the wider historical context of colonialism and anticolonial resistance, what’s most remarkable is that anyone in 2023 should be still surprised that conditions of absolute violence, domination, suffocation, and control produce appalling violence in turn.”
No Human Being Can Exist by Saree Makdisi in n+1

“How can you formulate the right to move people into Palestine despite the wishes of all the already present native Palestinians, without at the same time implying and repeating the tragic cycle of violence and counter-violence between Palestinians and Jews? How do you avoid what has happened if you do not more precisely reconcile allowable claims?
Permission to Narrate by Edward Said in The London Review of Books

“Panicked by a world aghast at its actions in Gaza, Israel and its advocates have reverted to charges of antisemitism against those who would challenge Israel’s brutality—but everything from the mass marches to the vocal Jewish opposition to the opinion surveys on Biden’s handling of the crisis indicate that equating solidarity with antisemitism is not only factually wrong; it is unconvincing.”
Israel Is Losing This War by Tony Karon and Daniel Levy in The Nation

“We refuse the false choice between Jewish safety and Palestinian freedom; between Jewish identity and ending the oppression of Palestinians. In fact, we believe the rights of Jews and Palestinians go hand-in-hand. The safety of each people depends on the other’s.”
A Dangerous Conflation – An Open Letter in n+1

“Oppressed Palestinians, for their part, have no legal infrastructure within which to adjudicate their claims, and are thus at the mercy of the legitimating power of the colonizer’s courts. In order to take seriously the contention that the colonized must author their own liberation, we must admit that neither the terrain nor terms of struggle will be legal.”
Acts Harmful to the Enemy by Jake Romm and Dylan Saba in n+1

“Today, the left faces a new situation, in which most younger people and people of colour are disgusted by what they see unfolding in Palestine, and with Democrats for facilitating it: anti-imperialism is a popular position, and it cannot be marginal to the project of economic redistribution, whatever emerges next to carry forward those dual aspirations.”
Gaza and New York by Alexander Zevin in New Left Review

“A famous video from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests shows a young man riding on a bicycle toward the demonstrations. When questioned by a Western journalist why he is going there, he cheerfully replies, “It’s my duty.” This, too, is what we believe to be our duty. … Our support for Palestinian self-determination is politically and morally consistent with our advocacy for Taiwanese independence.”
Collective Statement on Solidarity with the Palestinian People by New Bloom

Translations of Dr. Refaat Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die” into Chinese, Indonesian, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, and more

“Just as there has been a sense of impossibility in writing at this time, ending this introduction similarly evokes a feeling of incompleteness, of the poverty of language against this moment. Still, within the context of editing, there is work to be done.”
Editors’ Introduction: Cultural Studies toward a Free Palestine by Alyson K. Spurgas, Yumi Pak, Robert F. Carley, andré m. carrington, Eero Laine, SAJ, and Chris Alen Sula in Lateral