Archipelago of Resettlement

Front matter

ARCHIPELAGO OF RESETTLEMENT

Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine

EVYN LE ESPIRITU GANDHI

Part One. Mapping Sources: Archipelagic Histories And Fluid Frontiers

1. Archipelagic History: Vietnam, Palestine, Guam, 1967-1975 21

2. The “New Frontier”: Settler Imperial Prefigurations and Afterlives of the US War in Vietnam 51

PART TWO. TRACING MIGRATIONS: ARCHIPELAGOS OF SETTLER COLONIALISM, US EMPIRE, AND REFUGEE REFUSAL

3. Operation New Life: Vietnamese Refugees and US Settler Militarism in Guam 79

4. Refugees in a State of Refuge: Vietnamese Israelis and the Question of Palestine 102

PART THREE. UNSETTLING RESETTLEMENTS: ARCHIPELAGOS OF DECOLONIZATION ACROSS GUAM, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, AND VIETNAM

5. The Politics of Staying: The Permanent/Transient Temporality of Settler Militarism in Guam 133 viii CONTENTS

6. The Politics of Translation: Competing Rhetorics of Return in Israel-Palestine and Vietnam

Afterword. Floating Islands: Refugee Futurities and Decolonial Horizons

Notes Bibliography Index

191 237 257

10. 11.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MAP

Archipelago of resettlement, archipelago of trans-Indigenous resistance 6

FIGURES

Larchipel de Palestine orientale, Julien Bousac 12

General V6 Nguyên Giáp with Yasser Arafat, 1970 31 Governor Carlos G. Camacho in Vietnam, 1969 40

Hoài (Ongoing, Memory), 2018 69

Guam school bus during Operation New Life, 1975 88 Vietnamese refugees at Camp Asan, 1975 94

Vietnamese refugees at Ben Gurion Airport, 1979 112 Vietnamese refugee child at Ben Gurion Airport, 1979 113 Governor Ricardo J. Bordallo, First Lady Madeleine Bordallo, and the Viét Nam Thuong Tin, 1975 141

The Journey of Vaan Nguyen, 2005 175

The Journey of Vaan Nguyen, 2005 183

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has two beginnings. I first wrote about Vietnamese refugee resettlement in Israel-Palestine as a Rhetoric PhD student in Daniel Boyarin’s “Rhetoric and History: Comparative Diasporas” class at University of California, Berkeley, during fall 2013. This paper became the kernel of my dissertation. The deadly airstrikes on Gaza during summer 2014 further clarified the stakes of this research. Writing became a way to situate my support for the contemporary Palestinian liberation struggle as a second-generation Vietnamese- Filipina.

The second beginning of this book is rooted in family history. In April 1975, my mother and grandmother left Vietnam as refugees and were processed on the Chamorro island of Guam during Operation New Life. After moving around Southern California, they eventually resettled in Oceanside, California, near Camp Pendleton on Luisefio, Juanefio, and Kumeyaay lands, where I grew up. I am forever indebted to my Ba Ngoai, H6 Ngoc Hoa, who helped raise me and who loves me unconditionally, and my mother, Yén Lé Espiritu, who initiated the field of critical refugee studies and who inspires me every day, both personally and professionally. Their courage and refugee resilience have profoundly shaped who I am today.

This project developed in conversation with scholars across three institutions. At UC Berkeley, on Ohlone lands, I am grateful for the friendship and intellectual camaraderie of Lilith Acadia, Andrew Cheng, Natalia Duong, Will Gow, Kuan Hwa, Ryan Ikeda, Anooj Kansara, Chris Waldo, and Camila Yadeau, among others. Trinh T. Minh-ha taught me that writing can be beautiful and theory should arise from context. Colleen Lye helped me develop a strong foundation in Asian American literature, and her tough love approach prepared me for the challenges xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS of this profession. Daniel Boyarin’s class on diaspora theory informs my critique of the nation-state. Keith Feldman’s work on Palestine as well as his insightful feedback on the dissertation deeply shapes this book. Ryan Rhadigan first introduced me to Indigenous and settler colonial studies. Rachel Lim remains one of my sharpest interlocutors and dearest friends. At College of the Holy Cross, on Nimpuc tribal lands, I thank Ann Marie Leshkowich and Tat-Siong Benny Liew for their postdoctoral mentorship. Pau Cafigueral Batllosera, Ernest Hartwell, and Rebecca Castleman provided invaluable friendship during our carpool commutes to and from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Now at University of California, Los Angeles, on the traditional homelands of the Gabrielino/Tongva people, I thank my amazing department: Victor Bascara, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Jennifer Chun, Grace Kyugwon Hong, Jingi Ling, Purnima Mankekar, Valerie Masumoto, Natalie Masuoka, Kyeyong Park, Renee Tajima-Pefia, Karen Umemoto, David Yoo, Min Zhou, Kelly Fong, Lily Anne Welty Tamai, Wendy Fujinami, Kylin Sakamoto, and Greg Pancho. Both Nguyén-vé Thu-huong and Keith L. Camacho provided crucial feedback on the manuscript and supported my research even before I came to UCLA. I couldn't have asked for a more incredible and supportive cohort of fellow junior colleagues: Loubna Qutami, Lee Ann Wang, Cindy Sangalan, and Jolie Chea. Lastly, I thank all the students I have taught across multiple institutions, who have pushed my thinking in important ways.

This research has also benefited from conversations and friendships across many different fields. In Vietnamese refugee studies, I thank Vinh Nguyen, Trung PQ Nguyen, Timothy K. August, Lan Duong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Catherine H. Nguyen, Long Bui, Cindy Nguyen, Quyén Nguyen-Le, Ly Thuy Nguyen, Thy Phu, and Thuy Vo Dang, among others. I am inspired by scholars of Asian settler colonial studies and Asian-Indigenous relations, including Candace Fujikane, Dean Saranillio, Iyko Day, Yu-ting Huang, Juliana Hu Pegues, Quynh Nhu Le, Demiliza Saramosing, and Tiffany Wang-Su Tran. Presenting my research on a panel with Palestinian and Palestine studies feminists Lila Sharif, Sarah Ihmoud, Maryam Griffin, and Jennifer Lynn Kelly at the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association conference was pivotal. Lila Sharif also offered invaluable feedback on chapter 6. In Chamorro and Guahan studies, I have learned deeply from Craig Santos Perez, Kristin Obierno, Tiara Naputi, Josephine Faith Ong, Antoinette Charfauros McDaniel, Alfred Flores, and Michael Lujan Bevacqua. In Asian American and American studies more broadly, I thank Cathy Schlund-Vials, Chad Shomura, Quinn Lester, Douglas Ishii, Heidi Amin-Hong, and Terry Park. Huan He, Christina Juhasz-Wood, and Rachel Lim have been an incredibly supportive writing group, particularly during the final stages of this manuscript. I also thank the University of California, Irvine, Global Studies Conference, especially Sharad Chari, Briana Nichols, and Eman Ghanayem, for the opportunity to workshop chapter 1; and the University of Southern California Migration and Refugee Studies working group, particularly Lillian Ngan, who invited me, for their helpful feedback on chapter 2.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii

I appreciate all the interlocutors, transcribers, translators, and archivists across multiple archipelagic geographies who made this book possible. Thank you to everyone who trusted me with their stories and oral histories in Vietnam, Guam, and Israel-Palestine, including those who chose to remain unnamed. I especially thank Vaan Nguyen for answering all my questions and her father, Hoai My Nguyén, for connecting me to other Vietnamese Israelis. Vivian Dames hosted me in Talofofo, Guam, and connected me to key folks across the island, and Sophia Ritchie hosted me in Ramallah, Palestine, and helped me navigate the West Bank. Ishwanzya D. Rivers of PhD Transcribing, Ken Saw, and Jenny Lu helped with English-language transcriptions, and Diem Ramakrishnan, Justin Vu, and Angela Dang assisted with Vietnamese-language transcriptions. Adriana X. Jacobs graciously shared early translations of Vaan Nguyen’s Hebrew-language poetry even prior to the 2021 publication of The Truffle Eye in English. Kobi Fischer scanned and translated documents from the Israel State Archives. Tom Pessah answered my Hebrew inquiries. Shireen Hamza helped transcribe the Arabic quotes from Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, discussed in chapter 6. Archivists at the Institute of Palestine Studies in Ramallah, the Richard F. Taitano Micronesian Area Research Center at the University of Guam, and the Nieves M. Flores Memorial Library in Hagatiia provided crucial research support.

Iam honored to publish my book with the University of California Press, which released a powerful statement in solidarity with Palestine in May 2021. I thank Niels Hooper for nurturing this project into publication and George Sanchez for including the book in the American Crossroads series. Naja Pulliam Collins, Robin Manley, and Cindy Fulton all helped with the publication process. PJ Heim created the index. Jana K. Lipman and the anonymous reviewer's incisive feedback strengthened the manuscript in countless ways. Ajean Lee Ryan’s cover art perfectly encapsulates the archipelagic.

This research was supported by the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, a Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies Research Grant, a UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender Travel Grant, a UCLA Asian American Studies Center Grant, and a UCLA Institute of American Cultures Research Grant. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, and the UCLA Library. Learn more at the TOME website, openmonographs.org. An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as Evyn Lé Espiritu, “Cold War Entanglements, Third World Solidarities: Vietnam and Palestine, 1967-75; Canadian Review of American Studies 48, no. 3 (2018): 352-86, reprinted by permission of University of Toronto Press. An earlier version of chapter 6 was published as Evyn Lé Espiritu, “Vexed Solidarities: Vietnamese Israelis and the Question of Palestine, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 29, xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS no. 1 (2018): 8-28, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd (http://www .tandfonline.com). I also thank Tony Azios for the opportunity to share research from chapter 3 as a Memoirs Pasifika podcast episode.

I am incredibly grateful to all my family, especially my Ba Ngoai, my parents, and my siblings, Maya and Gabriel, whose commitment to education in all its forms inspires me. My best friend and husband, Ashvin Gandhi, believed in me even before I started this project and has been a much-needed anchor through the ups and downs of the research and writing process. Thank you as well to the entire Gandhi family, who have warmly embraced me as their own.

This book is for all the activists, academics, cultural producers, and movement makers fighting for decolonization, liberation, and refuge for all peoples. As I write this in spring 2021, the numbers of refugees seeking asylum is at an all-time high. Guam is yet again being considered as a processing center for refugees displaced by US military intervention, this time from Afghanistan, and people around the world are raising their voices in solidarity with Palestine. It is my hope that this book can offer guidance for thinking through refugee-Indigenous solidarities during this time of ongoing struggle.

Introduction Nuéc: Archipelogics and Land/Water Politics

In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country, and a homeland are one and the same: nuóc.

—LÊ THI DIEM THUY?

Beirut was the birthplace for thousands of Palestinians who knew no other cradle. Beirut was an island upon which Arab immigrants dreaming of a new world landed.

—MAHMOUD DARWISH?

... Remember: home is not simply a house, village, or island; home is an archipelago of belonging.

—CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ?

Vietnam is nudc: water, country, homeland. Land and water. Water is land. A duality without division; a contrast without contradiction.

Nuéc Viét Nam: a home, a cradle, a point of departure.

One island in an archipelago of diasporic collectivity.

According to Vietnamese mythology, Vietnam was born out of the consummation of water and land. Au Co, the mountain fairy, fell in love with Lac Long Quan, the sea dragon king. Together they produced a hundred human children, Bach Viét. But Au Co longed for the mountains, and Lac Long Quan longed for the sea, and so they separated, dividing their children across the lands and waters of Vietnam.

Perhaps this originary division of a mother’s children prefigured future cleavages: the division of North from South Vietnam along the 17th parallel in 1954, followed by two decades of civil war and US military intervention, and then the division of a unified Vietnam from its post-1975 refugee diaspora, who fled war’s aftermath by air and by sea, who touched down on new lands and were washed in saltwater.

Vietnamese refugees resettled around the world, forging new islands of belonging in their respective countries of asylum. Collectively, these islands make up an archipelago of resettlement: a postwar diaspora connected by the fluid memory of a beloved homeland, lost to war. As the Pacific Ocean links what Tongan writer Epeli Hauʻofa famously termed a “sea of islands, so too does nudc connect the archipelago of Vietnamese refugee resettlement.*

But resettlement is vexed when refugees resettle in settler colonial states. Resettlement is unsettling when predicated on the systemic dispossession of Indigenous peoples. This book asks: What are the political implications of refugees claiming refuge on stolen land? Do archipelagos of refugee resettlement reinforce ongoing structures of settler colonialism? Or can they be refracted through nudc—a land/water dialectic—to call forth decolonial solidarities? These questions challenge us to think through distinct yet overlapping modalities of refugee and Indigenous displacement, shaped by entangled histories of war, imperialism, settler colonialism, and US military violence. They invite us to imagine new forms of ethical relationality.

Yêu nudc: to love one’s country, “[t]he highest virtue demanded of a Vietnamese”? Mat nuéc: to lose one’s country, “to be without the life source of water”® Lam nu6éc: to make water/land, to quench the thirst of a parched heart

This book puts Indigenous and settler colonial studies in conversation with critical refugee studies in order to theorize the refugee settler condition: the vexed positionality of refugee subjects whose citizenship in a settler colonial state is predicated upon the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. Settler colonialism is a distinct form of colonial violence defined by the expropriation of Indigenous lands and waters for colonial settlement. As a reiterative “structure” rather than a singular “event,” settler colonialism incessantly seeks to overwrite Indigenous relationships to place.’ In other words, settlers attempt the “elimination” —or what Palestinian American scholar Lila Sharif calls “vanishment”—of Indigenous subjects from the lands and waters that have shaped their cosmologies, in order to establish a myth of colonial nativity.’ But settler colonial projects are never totalizing. Indigenous survivance persists, via place-based acts of resistance, resurgence, and decolonization.’

Critical refugee studies, meanwhile, intervenes in dominant representations of the refugee as a victim of persecution or an object of humanitarianism, to instead conceptualize the refugee as a paradigmatic figure of geopolitical critique. In “We Refugees,” Giorgio Agamben, building on the work of Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, posits the refugee as “nothing less than a border concept that radically calls into question the principles of the nation-state?! Nation-states, with their conflation of one nation or people with one sovereign state, territorialize land and erect borders to delineate inclusion and exclusion. Refugees render visible the fiction that a nation-state order can guarantee human rights for stateless peoples.” Refugeehood thus calls forth “a no-longer-delayable renewal of categories, a push to reimagine more multiplicitous forms of collective organization.” Refugees are not, however, mere abstract figures of political philosophy but complex subjects with individual stories. According to Yén Lé Espiritu, the “refugee” is a “critical idea but also . . . a social actor whose life, when traced, illuminates the interconnections of colonization, war, and global social change.” Refugee movement marks overlapping structures of forced displacement; to trace an archipelago of refugee resettlement, therefore, is to illuminate the entanglement of these seemingly disconnected structures.

Critical analyses of settler colonial states necessitate an engagement with Indigenous and settler colonial studies in addition to critical refugee studies, insofar as these states’ “jurisdiction is predicated upon the ability to settle certain people and unsettle others?" Reconfiguring Indigenous lands and waters as colonial property, settlers mark not only stateless refugees but also Indigenous subjects as external threats to the national body politic. Indeed, one could argue that Indigenous subjects are even more disruptive to the settler colonial state than stateless refugees, given that the ongoing presence of Indigenous subjects challenges the myth of colonial nativity, while stateless refugees can be absorbed and granted citizenship in the settler colonial state. Contra Agamben and Arendt, Espiritu argues that refugees can “constitute a solution, rather than a problem” for nation-states.'° For example, following defeat at the end of the Vietnam War, the United States elided accusations of imperial intervention by reframing itself as the humanitarian rescuer of anticommunist Vietnamese refugees: what Espiritu identifies as the “we-win-even-when-we-lose” syndrome.” By extension, this book argues that refugees are often positioned as a solution for settler colonial states seeking to counter critiques of colonial violence: the humanitarian resettlement of refugees not only projects an image of multicultural inclusion but also pointedly occludes ongoing structures of Indigenous dispossession.

I propose that we name these refugees, resettled in settler colonial states, refugee settlers, and that we grapple with the colonial implications of the refugee settler condition. Previous scholarship has identified the ways in which settler colonialism intersects with white supremacy, heteronormativity, and racial capitalism, necessitating an analysis of the power dynamics structuring different non-native settler positions. Lorenzo Veracini, for example, distinguishes settlers from

: ‘ . : : »18 migrants, “a category encompassing all forms of nonsovereign displacement:

More specifically, Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma) borrows Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite’s term “arrivant” to describe nonsovereign slaves and coolies forcefully brought to the Americas, thus calling attention to “arrivant colonialism?" Byrd’s work echoes that of Haunani-Kay Trask (Kanaka Maoli), who critiques the ways “settlers of color’ have undermined Native Hawaiian sovereignty via civil rights struggles for inclusion into the settler colonial state.” Inspired by Trask, Asian Americanists such as Candace Fujikane, Jonathan Y. Okamura, and Dean Saranillio have developed the field of “Asian settler colonialism,” which includes scholarship on Chinese “railroad colonialism” across Native American lands; Japanese American internment on Native American reservations; Asian-Indigenous cross-representations throughout the Américas; colonial entanglements between Alaska Native peoples and Asian immigrants in the “last frontier” of Alaska; aesthetics of ocean passage across Oceania; and “settler allies” and “settler aloha ‘aina” in Hawaiʻi.” Iyko Day proposes the term “alien” to index the particular racialization of Asian laborers simultaneously rendered perpetual foreigners in North American settler colonial states, while Yu-ting Huang prefers “co-colonizer” and “minor settler” to identify Chinese labor migration to the Pacific Islands.” None of these studies, however, adequately address the distinct positionality of the refugee in settler colonial states.”

Although this is the first book to theorize the refugee settler condition, the term “refugee settler” itself is not new. An analysis of American newspapers from the late nineteenth century reveals that the term was once used to describe white working-class settlers who braved the so-called “frontier” in pursuit of private property, and who were subsequently chased out of their settlements by Indigenous nations defending their lands.” This white settler narrative of refugeehood— which depicts white settler colonists as innocent victims of Native violence, rather than aggressive intruders onto sovereign land—is foundational to American national identity, since it morally absolves the US of settler imperial violence.” In the words of one high school valedictorian in 1924: “Once we were a handful of refugee settlers; today we are 110 million strong?” Indigenous and settler colonial studies scholars meanwhile have argued that the term “refugee settlers” may apply to Indigenous “refugee” subjects, forcibly displaced from their traditional homelands by American expansion, who end up resettling on another Indigenous nation’s territory.” Alternatively, historian Ikuko Asaka has used the term “refugee settler” in reference to fugitive Black subjects fleeing slavery during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who aspired to inclusion in the white settler body politic in North America.” Lastly, during World War II, many Anglophone newspapers described Palestine as a “homeland for Jewish refugee settlers”? Although the term “settlers” here acknowledges the non-native status of Jewish refugees who had fled the Holocaust, the designation of Palestine as a “homeland” for these Jewish subjects undermines Palestinians’ Indigenous claims to the land.*°

The term “refugee settler” is thus contested, alternatively deployed to describe native and non-native peoples displaced onto Indigenous lands. In this book, I use the term “refugee settlers” to describe non-Indigenous refugees who, due to resettlement following forced displacement, become settlers in settler colonial states. Refugee settlers are not directly responsible for the settler colonial policies of the state into which they are both interpolated and interpellated. However, their processes of home-making—of creating an island of belonging in their new country of resettlement—do take place on contested land, rendering them what Michael Rothberg calls “implicated subjects.’*! The challenge, then, is to put refugee critiques of the nation-state in conversation with Indigenous critiques of settler colonialism in order to challenge settler colonial states’ monopoly over the land and sea. Articulated together, refugee modalities of statelessness and Indigenous epistemologies of human-land-water relations can unsettle settler colonial state violence, pointing us toward more pluralized forms of collective belonging routed through nuóc. To lam nuóc then, to make water/land, is to forge decolonial futurities.

Resettlement: to settle again, after forced unsettlement

Re-settlement: to reproduce the act of producing a settlement

Reset-tlement: to settle again, and again and again, to constantly resettle, to never settle, to unsettle the settled status of the resettled

In this book, I examine Vietnamese refugee settlers in Guam and Israel-Palestine using Espiritu’s method of “critical juxtaposing”: the “bringing together of seemingly different and disconnected events, communities, histories, and spaces in order to illuminate what would otherwise not be visible about the contours, contents, and afterlives of war and empire”? Guam and Israel-Palestine are often relegated to the margins of American studies. Area studies’ divisions, furthermore, inhibit discussions of the two in relation. Guam and Israel-Palestine, however, should be central to analyses of settler colonialism, US empire, and decolonization. To analyze the two in relation, furthermore, illuminates connections between seemingly distinct forms of settler colonial and imperial violence and attendant forms of Indigenous and refugee critique.

Previous scholarship on Vietnamese refugees has focused primarily on the United States, examining how refugee resettlement reinforces the machinations of liberal empire.** Less accounted for is how imperialism is co-constitutive with settler colonialism, manifesting what Byrd has termed the “transit of empire”: the usage of “executive, legislative, and judicial means to make ‘India’ those peoples and nations who stand in the way of U.S. military and economic desires.”**

Israel-Palestine

MAP 1. This map illustrates Vietnamese refugee migration to Guam and Israel-Palestine— what this book terms an archipelago of resettlement. This archipelago of Vietnamese refugee resettlement, in turn, illuminates a corresponding archipelago of trans-Indigenous resistance: how Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles are connected through the Vietnamese refugee figure. Map drawn by M. Roy Cartography.

During the Vietnam War, for example, the US military racialized enemy territory as “Indian country,” linking settler colonialism across Turtle Island with imperialism in Southeast Asia.” Although the continental United States remains an important site for grappling with the refugee settler condition—indeed, chapter 2 of this book examines post-1975 Vietnamese Americans as a point of departure—it is overrepresented in the existing scholarship on Vietnamese refugees. This book therefore centers the overlooked sites of Guam and Israel-Palestine, extending the geographical scope of critical refugee studies. Tracing an archipelago of Vietnamese refugee resettlement to Guam and Israel-Palestine, moreover, illuminates two more forms of critical geography: an archipelago of US empire—how the Vietnam War is linked to US military buildup in Guam and unwavering support of Israel— and a corresponding archipelago of trans-Indigenous resistance—how Chamorro decolonization efforts and Palestinian liberation struggles are connected through the Vietnamese refugee figure. Chickasaw scholar Chadwick Allen coined the term “trans-Indigenous” to explore “new methodologies for a global Indigenous literary studies in English:’** In conversation with Allen, I invoke “trans-Indigenous” to trace “purposeful Indigenous juxtapositions” between locally situated but interconnected struggles against settler colonialism and refugee displacement.” In sum, the figure of the archipelago indexes formations of settler imperial power as well as challenges to it.

Guam, an unincorporated territory of the United States since 1898, served as the first major US processing center for Vietnamese refugees after the Fall of Saigon. Between April and October 1975, more than 112,000 refugees were processed by the US military in Guam. Operation New Life transformed the island, a strategic US military outpost in the Pacific, into a postwar humanitarian refuge. Such humanitarian rhetoric overwrote, however, the US military’s continual dispossession of Indigenous Chamorros. Today, Vietnamese Americans who chose to stay in Guam after Operation New Life instead of resettling in the continental United States must grapple with their relationship to Chamorro decolonization struggles.

In June 1977, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin granted asylum to sixty-six Vietnamese refugees as his first official act in office, citing parallels with the plight of Jewish Holocaust refugees three decades earlier. Two more groups of Vietnamese refugees would follow, bringing the total population of resettled Vietnamese Israelis to 366 by 1979. This was the first time Israel offered asylum and eventual citizenship to non-Jewish subjects. Furthermore, this case remains an exception to Israel’s strict asylum policy, which continues to displace and dispossess native Palestinians, as well as turn away asylum seekers from Eritrea, Sudan, and Syria. By virtue of their citizenship, Vietnamese Israelis remain implicated in Israel’s settler colonial foundation and ongoing structures of occupation, a situation that marks their fraught positionality in relation to the Palestinian liberation struggle.

In some ways, Guam and Israel-Palestine represent very different case studies in the history of Vietnamese refugee resettlement. While Guam served primarily as a temporary processing center for Vietnamese refugees, Israel-Palestine functioned as a country of permanent resettlement. Furthermore, the socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds of the refugees in these two cases differ. Vietnamese refugees who were processed in Guam in 1975 were primarily anticommunist politicians of the fallen Republic of Vietnam; high-ranking officials of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN); individuals connected to the US government, military, or embassy; and their families—in other words, those most vulnerable to political retribution after the Fall of Saigon. For the most part, this first wave of Vietnamese refugees was highly educated and well connected.

In contrast, Vietnamese refugees who resettled in Israel-Palestine were part of the second wave, who left primarily by boat. From 1977 to 1979, more than a quarter million “boat refugees” fled Vietnam to escape the communist government’s radical reorganization of society. Without direct connections to US officials, many of these refugees—farmers, fishermen, former business owners, ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs, and low-level South Vietnamese government workers—drifted aimlessly at sea for days and even weeks, in the hopes of being picked up in international waters and dropped off at a Southeast Asian refugee camp of first asylum.” Of the 277,500 people who fled Vietnam, at least 30,000 to 40,000 perished at sea.” Images of the boat refugees circulated prominently in the international media, prompting the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to declare a global crisis. In response, countries around the world, including the State of Israel, offered to resettle the boat refugees.

Vietnamese refugee resettlement in Guam and Israel-Palestine are connected, however, by two interrelated nodes of structural violence. First, both Guam and Israel-Palestine are spaces of settler colonialism. In 1521, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan stumbled upon the Chamorro island of Guahan, meaning “we have.” In 1668, Spanish missionaries led by Father Diego Luis de Sanvitores formally colonized the island and renamed it “Guam?” During the following two centuries, genocide, disease, and forced relocation to Spanish-controlled population centers dramatically reduced the Chamorro population in Guam from approximately 100,000 to 9,000.”

In 1898, following defeat in the Spanish-American War, Spain relinquished colonial control of Guam to the settler imperial United States. In the Insular Cases of 1901, the Supreme Court ruled that the United States did not have to extend civil rights to its colonial subjects; in short, the Constitution does not “follow the flag?“ US military buildup in Guam began in earnest after World War II. In August 1945, Admiral Chester Nimitz requested 55 percent of the land for US naval operations, and in 1946 the Land Acquisition Act authorized the Navy Department to acquire private land with minimal—and sometimes no—compensation to Chamorro residents.” By 1947, an estimated 1,350 Chamorro families had lost their homes.“ Over the following decades, Guam was transformed from “a lonely American outpost surrounded by hostile Japanese islands” into “the center ofan American-dominated lake that encompassed the entire western Pacific Ocean,” second in military importance only to Hawaiʻi.“ Following passage of the Organic Act of 1950, Chamorros were granted US citizenship but denied key constitutional rights, such as the right to congressional representation and the right to vote in presidential elections. According to Governor Ricardo J. Bordallo, who oversaw the processing of Vietnamese refugees during Operation New Life, the Organic Act was “not designed to enhance the dignity of the indigenous people” but rather “designed to enhance the colonial authority of the United States” Today, the US military occupies a third of Guam’s land, manifesting “the highest ratio of U.S. military spending and military hardware and land takings from indigenous U.S. populations of any place on Earth.’ In sum, in Guam, “settler colonialism and militarization have simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another,’ a dynamic that historian Juliet Nebolon has termed “settler militarism?“ Tracing what Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho call the “militarized currents” linking Guam, Israel-Palestine, and Vietnam helps to illuminate corresponding connections between settler militarism, settler colonialism, and settler imperialism.

As in Guam, Zionist settlement in Palestine disregarded the land claims of Indigenous Palestinians.” In 1892, Austrian Jewish writer Nathan Birnbaum first coined the term “Zionism” to describe the exiled Jewish people’s millennia-long aspiration to return to Zion, after their expulsion from Jerusalem following the destruction of their temples in 586 BCE and 70 CE, respectively. It was Theodor Herzl, though, who mobilized Zionism as a nationalist project. In response to the rise of both ethnonationalism and anti-Semitism in Europe during the late nineteenth century, he advocated the establishment of a Jewish nation-state.” In 1946, Hô Chi Minh suggested Ha N6i to David Ben-Gurion as the headquarters of a Jewish government in exile.” Zionist organizations eventually decided on Palestine as the ideal location, however, given the land’s religious significance.

Zionists settler colonial disregard for the native Palestinian population is epitomized by the terra nullius belief that Palestine was “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Jewish historian Michael Brenner identifies five main waves of Zionist immigration, or aliyahs—a term with religious connotations of an accession to Mount Zion—to Palestine, extending from the 1880s to World War II and thus spanning Palestine’s status as a subject of the Ottoman Empire to a British mandate following World War I.” By 1936, Jewish settlers constituted almost a third of Palestine’s population, prompting the “Great Revolt”: a three-year nationalist uprising by Palestinians demanding independence from Britain and an end to colonial control over immigration. Increasing tensions between native Palestinians, Jewish settlers, and British administrators culminated in the Zionist foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 as a Jewish settler state. Some 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes in terror: a catastrophe collectively remembered as al-Nakba.* Palestinian scholar Edward Said mourns the painful irony of having been “turned into exiles by the proverbial people of exile, the Jews.” Palestinians who stayed within Israel's 1948 borders, meanwhile, were rendered third-class citizens. Two decades later, the Israel Defense Forces conquered Gaza and the West Bank during the Six Day War of 1967, initiating Israel’s colonial occupation of an ever-shrinking space of Palestinian mobility.” Referred to in “wry and subversive understatement” as al-Naksa, or the “setback? the 1967 war displaced an additional 400,000 Palestinians, about half of whom were 1948 refugees displaced yet again.” To this day, Israeli laws written to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel forbid Palestinian refugees and exiles the Right of Return.