Originally published in Field Notes. Republished with permission.
When my debut poetry collection, Book of Cord, was published, I was twenty-one. At the time, I’d chosen to include that I was a great-granddaughter of the Ketagalan nation’s last standing chief in my author biography because it felt like a spiritual origin story. When prompted by novelist Shawna Yang Ryan in our Q&A for TaiwaneseAmerican.org, I shared that “my indigenous background is shaped by loss and silence, and so when I write of being Ketagalan, it is never to claim their histories or glories as my own. It is to mourn their dispossession, their shame, and the emptiness I have inherited as a result.” This continues to feel true for me; and I hope my ancestors would permit the way I try to find them: by synthesizing good-faith speculation, scholarly research (“me-search”), and family lore to render us more coherent to each other.
The Ketagalan mantle is well-known (Ketagalan Boulevard, Ketagalan Forum, Ketagalan Foundation and Institute, Ketagalan Culture Center, Ketagalan Media, etc.); the reasons for its erasure are less so. As an American-born Taiwanese descended from both the Ketagalan Nation—one of Taiwan’s unrecognized Pingpu peoples—and Han Taiwanese settlers, I have come to see how we as Taiwanese, and within the diaspora, inhabit a paradoxical position: loud in our rebuke of colonization by successive regimes, yet quietly complicit in the colonization of Indigenous lands. This dissonance has deepened my resolve to trace how we as Taiwanese have broadly continued to obscure, rationalize, and permit cycles of dispossession; and perhaps how we selectively recognize it elsewhere in the world. What does it mean to build a coherent nation on land whose original stewards are simultaneously invoked and erased?
This question feels especially urgent when I reflect on the connections between Pingpu (Indigenous Plains) identity in Taiwan and the ongoing struggle for Palestinian self-determination. June Jordan once described Palestine as “a moral litmus test for the world,” and I believe that as a Taiwanese American, I must respond to that test not with defensiveness, but with curiosity and principled clarity.
I am cautious about drawing direct comparisons. Each colonial project operates within distinct historical, geopolitical, and cultural logics. Yet transnational solidarity has never required perfect congruence. What moves me are not the mirrored specifics of oppression, but the shared yearning for dignity, sovereignty, and historical truth.
In the Reflections chapter of her book, Collective Rights of Indigenous Peoples, esteemed scholar and Pingpu activist Jolan Hsieh / Bavaragh Dagalomai quotes a statement shared by the Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP): “When we join together, in solidarity, in relationships and partnerships based on understanding and mutual respect, when we all recognize that the right to self-determination is within all of us, and not granted by an artificial, external, and oppressive force, ‘anything is possible.’”
Therefore I believe when we reach for one another, disrupting the unjust mythologies of and borders between our identities, we are building a world where survival is not the ceiling, but the ground from which we imagine freedom.
When I was in third grade, I was struck deeply by the fictional diary of Julie Weiss, Scholastic’s Dear America account of a young Austrian Jewish girl in 1938. Her older brother, Max, is resolutely principled; in one entry, Jule writes that her brother has disappeared in the night, leaving behind only a Rilke poem to indicate that he has “gone where he belonged… by that he means Palestine.” In the expository epilogue, Zionism is described simply as “a movement that sought a Jewish homeland in Palestine,” and boys like Max among the “Jewish youth who escaped safely from Nazi Austria to Palestine, which is now Israel.” I am sure I was not the only young reader moved by Julie’s plight and persuaded by such fiction to view Israel as salvation for Jewish refugees fleeing generations of anti-Semitic persecution. I would even argue that books like these taught me compassion, and sowed the first seeds of my belief in transnational solidarity. Growing up, when my Taiwanese elders– most of them Han Taiwanese, many of them political exiles– invoked a longing for their own Zion, I felt profoundly moved and thought often of Julie and her brother, and all the dreams we share of return and nationhood after displacement.
Fiction… emerges from selective memory. It is not neutral. It can comfort, but it can also conceal. It can teach compassion while simultaneously justifying horrific violence.
Now, two decades later, I still feel tenderness toward that literary relationship and the empathy it stirred in me. But I also see more clearly how fiction—especially historical fiction—emerges from selective memory. It is not neutral. It can comfort, but it can also conceal. It can teach compassion while simultaneously justifying horrific violence. Narratives that once stirred my solidarity now compel my accountability, because I have since learned how stories of righteousness can be used to rationalize dispossession.
As James Baldwin wrote: “The state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of Western interests.” That sentence pierces through the pervasive myths of Zionism, asking us to reckon not only with our emotional attachments, but with the larger structures that shape whose survival is made possible, and at whose expense. He further elaborates that it was “the Palestinians [who] have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.”
Settler colonialism in Palestine and Taiwan
When discussing settler colonialism, I’m referring to a specific structure of invasion that aims not only to occupy land, but to eliminate and replace Indigenous presence—politically, culturally, and demographically. In this sense, there are structural similarities between the Zionist project in Palestine and the Han-centric colonization of Taiwan.
In both cases, the settler state sought to overwrite Indigenous identities (Palestinian, in one case; Taiwanese Indigenous groups in the other), claiming legitimacy through narratives of historical return or civilizational advancement. This included renaming geographies, criminalizing Indigenous languages, displacing local populations, and using state institutions to enforce new dominant national identities.
Richard Morrock defines “divide and rule” as the “conscious effort of an imperialist power to create and turn to its own advantage the ethnic, linguistic, cultural, tribal, or religious differences within the population of a subjugated colony.”1 Further, though all colonial empires have implemented the “divide-and-rule” praxis in some way, “only the Axis powers—the Nazis in Eastern Europe and the Japanese in East Asia,” Morrock observes, “used the ‘divide-and-rule’ strategy with comparable dexterity.” The divide-and-rule playbook outlines four tactics: 1) the creation of differences within the conquered population; 2) the compounding of existing differences, 3) the exploitation of these differences for the benefit of the colonial power; and 4) the politicization of these differences so that they carry into the post-colonial period.
Taiwan: The creation and compounding of existing differences began administratively. From the arrival of the Dutch, who imposed a hybrid colonization (Chinese agricultural settlers; Dutch administrators and military) to Japan’s consolidated colonial authority, Indigenous communities were repeatedly displaced and categorized in ways that unnaturally governed their own identity formation.
Niki J. P. Alsford has noted more succinctly: “Japanese colonial policies of categorization locked Indigenous communities into imagined boundaries that not only prevented some forms of Indigenous cultural unity but also imposed cultural compartmentalization on those who had not previously identified with such labels.” The choices Indigenous peoples made under coercion—be they assimilation, allegiance, or resistance—would have lasting impact on the kinds of territories and recognition they could access. For example, the Dutch employed Chinese agents to sell hunting licenses and grant lucrative contracts on the basis of acculturation; those who could “cut it” were allowed to stay in the fertile, game-rich territories. Those who refused were forcibly expelled into an “unassimilated” space that would become a defining characteristic, thereby distinguishing between the “raw” peoples of the mountain and the assimilated “cooked” peoples of the plains.
Further, to garner support from all ethnic groups in Taiwan, the Japanese crafted a divide-and-rule policy by pitting Indigenous against Chinese. In one categorization, Japanese ethnographers distinguished Indigenous peoples as “invested with a cultural authenticity that marked them as avatars of prelapsarian Taiwan antedating Chinese immigration, based in part on high Japanese appraisals of Austronesian cultural production.” Yet among the Indigenous, the Japanese administrators further partitioned their homelands, enforcing lasting demarcations that exist today, visibly in contemporary issues like tribal recognition and affirmative action programs.
The Ketagalan nation, my ancestors, became one of the ten sub-tribes administratively classified by the Japanese, characterized by their early contact with the Han Chinese and their highly Sinicized societies. If the Japanese neutered the Pingpu nations, then it was the Chinese Nationalists who codified their de facto extinctions.
The Chinese Nationalist government, while operating under Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s principles for a multi-ethnic China, “only recognized the indigenous peoples living within its territory as minorities—a traditional Han chauvinistic perspective which [ultimately] denies the concept of indigenousness.” What’s more, their official policy revoked the Japanese system for minority categorization in Taiwan, and declared the extinction of the Pingpu due to their deep Sinicization.
What had characterized the Pingpu under the Japanese therefore extinguished them under the Chinese Nationalists, who accelerated Han settler colonialism in Taiwan when they occupied Taiwan in 1949. In 1650 the Ketagalan were the second-largest Austronesian ethno-linguistic groups living in the northernmost part of Taiwan.3 Today, we are concurrently unrecognized, invisible, and yet widely named; at once everywhere and nowhere.
Palestine: In 1917 the Balfour Declaration was authored by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. While the declaration stipulates that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” the national or political rights of the Palestinians themselves are conspicuously unaddressed. In fact, in the document Palestinians are not even referred to as Palestinians but as “non-Jews,” defining them relative to not being Jewish rather than as an inherently sovereign population.
Contrary to the popular portrayal of Zionism—such as the one in the Dear America epilogue—as a movement solely about refuge and self-determination for persecuted Jews, many scholars and activists have demonstrated that Zionism, in practice, functioned as a settler-colonial project. Rather than offering a true solution to anti-Semitism, Zionism became a way for Western powers to relocate the “Jewish problem”—to move European Jews elsewhere, rather than confront and dismantle anti-Semitism at its source.
While the movement was cloaked in the emotionally compelling language of protection, survival, and historical redemption, its implementation in Palestine displaced and sought to eliminate Indigenous Palestinians. To resolve this paradox, Zionists drew from both religious and political ideologies—invoking Biblical entitlement and historical trauma—to justify the appropriation of land and the removal of its inhabitants. This logic redefined survival as something that necessitated domination, casting Palestinians not as fellow humans, but as obstacles to a redemptive national vision.
Zionism was not truly a movement for safety—it was, for many Palestinians and their allies, a story of colonization told through the language of liberation.
In this light, Zionism was not truly a movement for safety—it was, for many Palestinians and their allies, a story of colonization told through the language of liberation. It is a project that replaced one people’s catastrophe with another’s—transforming a quest for refuge into a system of violent dispossession.
As Marc Lamont Hill writes, “had Jews merely wanted to live in Palestine, this would not have been a problem… Jews, Muslims, and Christians had coexisted for centuries throughout the Middle East.” But the settler-colonial impulses of Zionism sought exclusive sovereignty, not coexistence, predicated upon the forced exile, erasure, and removal of Palestinians—even retroactively, with the mythology that Palestine was originally “a land without a people.”
This project did not end with the Nakba in 1948, but has been continued through a sophisticated strategy of “divide and rule” tactics aimed at undermining Palestinian solidarity.
Richard Falk further describes how Palestinians living within the state of Israel face a fundamental form of fragmentation: though they may hold citizenship, they are excluded from Israeli nationality, and with it, from full rights and protections. At the same time, Jews anywhere in the world can claim Israeli nationality and its privileges—underscoring the structural inequality at the heart of the state’s legal apparatus.
Israel’s strategy of fragmentation extends beyond physical borders. It works ideologically, too—undermining and discrediting Palestinian leaders, organizations, and institutions it cannot control, while selectively empowering others to create compliant local elites. As Tareq Baconi writes in Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance, Israel has long “encouraged and promoted divide-and-rule tactics between the Islamist national movement, Hamas, and secular nationalism around Fatah.” This mirrors tactics used by colonial powers across history—fracturing resistance to maintain control. This playbook reinforces the illusion that Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, Israel, and the diaspora are disconnected—”as if they are different people with different problems,” in the words of Palestinian journalist and peace advocate Ahmed Abu Artema. “But ultimately,” he writes, “their problem is one: Israel’s occupation and colonization of their land, which has led to their expulsion, dispossession, and oppression.”
Zionism and Han chauvinism
For Indigenous peoples from Palestine to Taiwan, the language of “modernization” and “civilization” has long served as a cover for their destruction. Both Han chauvinism and Zionist ideology function as settler-colonial logics, yet they diverge in their approach to the Indigenous subject: the former emphasizes assimilation; the latter, often, extermination..
Taiwan: Han chauvinism has historically sought to absorb Indigenous peoples through Sinicization—transforming “barbarians” into “civilized” Han subjects by erasing cultural markers and imposing a dominant worldview. Geographic displacement and racial categorization have together reinforced and constructed Indigenous identity, even as they undermine its survival. For many Pingpu peoples, Sinicization meant staying on native lands—but only as long as they could forfeit language, customs, and kinship systems. Assimilation became the condition for survival, perpetuating further vulnerabilities in a cycle of dispossession.
Jacob Dreyer writes: “Han seems to be a malleable term that means ‘civilized’ more than it denotes an ethnic phenotype,” and, further, that its possibilities transcend geographic, national, administrative boundaries. “Han people have recorded the concept that race is a fiction for millennia. It is encapsulated in a phrase attributed to Confucius: “夷狄入华夏，则华夏之。华夏入夷狄则夷狄之” (“When barbarians come to China, they become Chinese. When Chinese go to the land of barbarians, they become barbaric”). Citing a Confucian phrase—“夷狄入華夏，則華夏之；華夏入夷狄，則夷狄之”—Dreyer underscores that to be Han is to be culturally elevated, and that this elevation is conditional, reversible, and political. Han identity thus operates as a hegemonic ideal: capacious enough to absorb “the other,” so long as the other complies—thus opening up “eligibility” to the Mongolians, the Manchurians, me.
While Han chauvinism has historically created roles for “useful others” within the imperial framework—roles that preserve hierarchy but offer conditional inclusion—Zionism, by contrast, has largely operated with no such flexibility, and has frequently left no room for Palestinian presence at all. Early Zionist leaders declared Palestine “a land without a people for a people without a land,” denying the existence of Palestinians altogether. Jewish settlers did not come to be absorbed into the existing social fabric; they came to replace it. In place of integration was expulsion. In place of assimilation, eradication. The Nakba of 1948 made this tragically clear.
Shahd Abusalama’s writing has been a lucid primer for me in relating the rhetoric undermining “savage” Indigenous Taiwanese to the Orientalist representations of Palestinians as “primitive,” rootless wanderers. Both portrayals delegitimize Indigenous claims to land and justify their displacement. In the case of Taiwan, survival has often depended on strategic assimilation. In Palestine, survival has often been foreclosed entirely, as humanitarian efforts themselves have been premised on the “advanced” Zionist settler and the “backward” Palestinian peasant—a hierarchy that was internalized globally.
What has made Zionism so compelling to many Jewish people around the world is precisely this emotional architecture: a vision of safety, redemption, and belonging born from centuries of trauma. Zionism offered the promise that ancestry need not be compromised by assimilation, and that suffering could be transformed into sovereignty. This vision is undeniably powerful and compelling—and devastating in its consequences.
We cannot build lasting peace without disarming and de-escalating the stories and beliefs that empower Zionism, especially among everyday people.
But I am left with this: we cannot build lasting peace without disarming and de-escalating the stories and beliefs that empower Zionism, especially among everyday people. I see their pain in their writing, in their activism, in the ways they position themselves as both wronged and righteous. And I believe that we need modes of politics and belonging that do not simply dismiss inherited histories of trauma and suffering as illegitimate, but channel them toward principles of radical democracy, shared collectivity, and equal rights without colonization. If not, we risk enabling a future cycle of vengeance—or further perpetuating the one we are already in.
I hold sympathy for all of these stories, for the ways collective memory shapes us, for how identities are passed down as both precious and pre-scripted. But sympathy is not a substitute for accountability.
As a descendent of Sinicized Pingpu peoples, I know what it means to inherit a legacy of assimilation—how survival can require the gradual forfeiture of memory. My ancestors were made “civilized” at great cost. Yet unlike Zionism, Han chauvinism did not require our removal—only our disappearance in place. This is a crucial difference. As scholar Fayez Sayegh wrote, Palestinians initially greeted Jewish immigrants as refugees or pilgrims, offering hospitality, not resistance. That generosity was met not with coexistence, but with colonization.
As of this month, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 2023 has surpassed 54,880. An additional 126,227 Palestinians have been wounded. The devastation is immeasurable; still, the myths permitting and flaming this violence have only hardened.
Cruelly, in the face of all this, the government of Taiwan continues to insist upon Taiwan and Israel’s shared common ideals as defenders of freedom and democracy. Influential texts like this one have become pervasive in my own beloved community, seductively lauding Israel’s “global networks,” “intelligence assets,” and “economic successes” through a neoliberal logic that tethers survival to strength through conquest, rather than justice. I feel so heavy with grief—sympathetic toward our desperation for self-determination, but lucid enough to know that we will not achieve it by emulating a power built upon displacement and genocide.
So I ask: How do we honor the humanity of everyone involved without collapsing the systems they’ve inherited into false equivalencies? Who can be called upon to be a peacemaker?
I am not a scholar or historian. I learned about my lineage in community, through ferocious elder-activists who embodied a specific and radical slant of history. But I have come to recognize the limits of any individual worldview, including theirs. Thus it is straightforward—though heartbreaking—to understand how dominant Han Taiwanese discourse aligns itself with Israel: we have not yet completed the hard, essential work of transitional justice for the Pingpu indigenous peoples, and so we grasp at a narrative of survival that mistakes conquest for security.
What’s more, the desire to feel pride in where we come from can easily incentivize curated histories—softened, selective, rationalized. What we need now is not a revised set of national myths, but a deeper commitment to peace-building in a time when even our need to belong has been essentialized and weaponized.
But history, if approached with honesty, doesn’t flatten. It complicates. It braids the extension of compassion with the search for context, even when that context unsettles what we hold sacred.
I believe this work is as emotional as it is political. I believe it is necessary. Because what may feel like a betrayal of our ancestors’ beliefs may, in truth, be the beginning of a liberatory practice for our descendants. From the river to the sea.
Leona Chen is a Taiwanese American community organizer, writer, and speaker committed to building upon the legacy of Taiwanese American elder-activists. Her 2017 debut poetry collection, BOOK OF CORD (Tinfish Press), confronts the shaping of Taiwanese identity through state and family narratives. She is the editor-in-chief of TaiwaneseAmerican.org, community organizer with the Taiwanese American Federation of Northern California, and program director for the Taiwanese American Foundation. Leona can be found at leona-chen.com and through her bilingual Substack, leonawchen.substack.com.
