Written by French Vivienne T. Templonuevo/THE RED CHRONICLES
Layout by Luis Marco Mendoza and Lynden Valenzuela/THE RED CHRONICLES
“Arms and occupation hummed with profit and wealth, while the blood of the children sang the sonnets of death.”
From 1948 down to the modern millennium, displacement of families, merciless decapitation of Palestinian children, burning of bodies, and brutal manslaughter sanctioned by the Israeli state, became a carnage spectacle in the public eye. Now, all eyes are pinned on the City of Rafah, the southernmost city of Palestine, for the world does not sleep on the impending threats and scorching bullets gunned by the Zionist regime of Israel. Yet, relentless and indiscriminate bombings of refugee camps inhumanely befell. Fathers and mothers had no time to lament and grieve their losses as the scythe of genocidal attacks pointed to their necks. Bombings became intensified day by day.
As gut-wrenching as it is, the Western imperialist states, coupled with their allied nations, have been continuously blacksmithing the scythe of ethnic cleansing, death, and killings. It is a bitter pill to swallow, but admittedly, it is now blatantly apparent as to which state operatively backs and overtly perpetuates the US-Israeli war machine that left the 13,800 Palestinian children in cold blood and carnage. Alluded from the foregoing, one of which is none other than our very state—the Philippines.
Nowhere it is written in the pages of replete historical accounts that the Philippine State has ever instituted its very own politico-economic system with a bold independent foreign policy, and a genuine framework of national industrialization. Save in cases of national democratic mass efforts, the country’s face of modern liberal democracy has always been yielding to the will of the ultra-neoliberals and imperialist powers that reign the world order.
The aforementioned purview was manifestly cemented when the Philippines’ abstention for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the Gaza strip had transpired during the 2023 United Nations General Assembly. A flimsy excuse to justify the “abstain” vote arose from the callous reason of “recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself.” Disgruntling as it is, but, what transpired is not the first instance that the country exhibited its massive economic and political support to the Zionist apartheid state.
On the clamor posed against former US President Donald Trump on the unilateral declaration of Jerusalem, on being the capital of Israel, the Philippine State abstained from rejecting the same last 2017. In 2021, the national government received 20 Sabrah Ascod light tanks and Pandur II armored personnel carriers from the Israeli state.
Thereafter, succeeding state relations exhibited that the new Marcosian regime enabled the country’s submission to the US sphere of influence by centering the US-RP alliance in its foreign policy.
In 2023, the Philippines once again heightened its economic ties with the Israeli government, a longstanding US-allied state, by contracting with the latter, a $114 million worth of armaments, planes, and heavy weaponry. It is therefore undeniably flagrant that the foregoing purchases bolstered the Israeli State funds, which massively powered its expansionist agenda and mass genocide in the Palestinian territories.
Earlier this year, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. sanctioned the trilateral mutual defense treaty with the United States, permitting the latter to maintain its sphere of influence and geopolitical interest in the Asia Pacific Region. Arising from its manifest attempt to sustain its global militarist and economic control in Asia and the Pacific, the US extends its hegemonic stronghold to the Middle East or Asia-Minor—thus, its unwavering funding to the Israeli state while brewing genocidal attacks against the Palestinian people.
Last April 2024, US President Joe Biden signed into law a $94 Billion bill, which aimed to colossally fund, and extensively hand military aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. It transpired while the US concocted its weaponry shipment to Israel amid the killing of 35,000 Palestinians in a span of a seven-month-long genocidal spree. Needless to state, the US government blatantly backed genocide, and impending aggressions in different global regions, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloodied regime.
Thus, it is grievously apparent that the Philippine government has been consistently submitting to Uncle Sam’s violent whims, economic caprices and militarist agenda, along with his long-time ally, the Zionist apartheid Israeli state. While the country’s very own citizenry, along with various human rights organizations, multi-sectoral groups, and clergymen, decries its staunch dissent against the state support of the Israeli apartheid state, the Philippine state appears to have left the calls for justice in the fathomless abyss.
As the dehumanizing demise of thousands of Palestinians grimly intensifies, nothing in the government’s foreign policy has ever pivoted away from its resolute support to the expansionist powers of Israel and the United States. Continuous purchasing of arms and persistent pedestalling of such foreign states’ economies and militarist supremacy blatantly unveiled the narrative that the Philippine State is indeed a purveyor of a cold-blooded war machine in the vast lands of olives from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—State of Palestine.
While the Philippine government has lamentably fallen asleep on its legal and moral imperative to reject the imperialists’ bailiwick and war crimes, as it wrote in the erroneous page of history, the masses must prod against the complicity of our State resonating from its vile apparatuses.
Rooting from the historically embedded subjugation, colonialism and oppression that morbidly drained the Filipino peoples’ blood, sweat, and tears, the 75-year struggle against the settler colonialist state of Israel, genocide, local dispossession, and imperialist occupation in the Palestinian lands is no longer a stranger to our collective national struggle as Filipinos.
Nakba has never ended since 1948, nor has the reign of imperial dominion over the Philippine soil.
Now more than ever, we must tirelessly demand justice for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and genuine national liberation. In the face of fearmongering imperialists and genocide-enabling states, our collective rejection of their subduing control calls for immediacy.
Thus, to liberate the oppressed is to unceasingly resist. Bear in mind that we are never free until Palestine is free.