From Palestine to the Philippines, stop the US war machine
Exploring the meaning behind the popular slogan
Content note: this article includes descriptions of killings and violence, including torture, sexual violence, and transphobia
If you’ve been on Palestine marches, especially in the Philippines or the US, you might have seen or heard: ‘from Palestine to the Philippines, stop the US war machine’. It’s used in the Philippines and across the world where Filipino blocs join other migrant or internationalist solidarity blocs. In this edition of sa hangganan I would like to share some thoughts on this chant and explore the links between the Philippines, Israel, the US, and Palestine.
PS: I know this is an ambitious piece on a complex subject where others have much more expertise than me — there will be limitations and gaps in what I cover here, so I hope anything that I’ve explained poorly or forgotten is a prompt for further research and learning.
Israel and the Philippines
The Philippines as a nation-state has long been an ally to Israel. When I lived in the Philippines, a colleague told me proudly that the Philippines’ was the tie-breaking vote that approved the creation of Israel as a state at the UN Resolution 181 in 1947. As far as I can tell, this is sort of true: the Philippines was one of three countries pressured by the US to vote in favour of the partition of Palestine, which ultimately allowed the resolution to pass.
Since then, the Philippines — as an ex-US colony — has generally followed the American position on Israel, i.e. unquestioning support, and Israel has become the Philippines’ second largest arms and weapons provider. In 2022, the Philippines spent a whopping $245.98 million on Israeli tanks, military aircrafts, drones, weapons, and explosive ammunition — all of which is tested on Palestinians through the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
In Israel, there are about 30,000 Filipino migrants, mainly working as carers. Unsurprisingly, Filipino migrants have faced racist systemic abuse in Israel: for example, children of migrant workers in Israel cannot get citizenship — even if they are born there. In 2019, children of Filipino migrants were targeted by deportation orders and raids, and in 2022, the Israeli Population and Immigration Authority encouraged the “willing departure” of Filipino migrants from Israel. Furthermore (as in the UK), migrant workers, including Filipinos, often finds themselves in enormous debt incurred from “placement fees” to secure their work in Israel, trapping them in the country even if they want to leave.
Since the genocidal war on Gaza started in October, thousands of migrant workers have fled the country, leading Israel to launch a mass recruitment drive for 20,000 new migrant workers. In an interview with GMA News, Israeli Ambassador to the Philippines Ilan Fluss declared: “Israelis prefer to have as caregivers Filipinos. Israelis very much like Filipinos, you know, English-speaking. Filipinos are the kindest people in the world.” This was a thinly-veiled attempt at wooing the Philippine government into lifting the temporary ban on migration to Israel following the October 7 attacks. While the Philippine government hasn’t lifted the ban yet, it welcomed the recruitment drive as a “big help” for Filipinos. Meanwhile, in Gaza, Israel has not allowed any Filipino-Palestinians to flee and seek safety in the Philippines.
In short: the Philippines barters its population for export to Israel, where it faces systemic discrimination, while Israel commits genocide against Palestinians, which includes Filipino-Palestinians — financially supported by Israel-Philippines trade in weapons. The import of Filipino carers and other migrants to Israel also enables the Israeli economy to keep functioning, the Israeli population to prosper, and Israeli weapons manufacturers to keep producing the means to murder and torture Palestinians.
The US war machine
This Philippines’ complicity in the mass murder and displacement of Palestinians from their land is abhorrent and must be stopped, but it should also be understood within the context of US imperialism in the Philippines. The export of Filipino care workers to Israel follows a pattern of colonial extractive migration first established by the US during its occupation of the Philippines (1898-1946). The US set up nursing and midwifery schools in the Philippines as part of its mission of Benevolent Assimilation to ‘instruct’ Filipinos in the art of self-governance, which included hygiene. Filipino women were considered by American colonisers to be bad mothers, so the US brought white American female nurses into the Philippines to teach Filipino women to be better mothers (to learn more about this, see Catherine Ceniza Choy’s Empire of Care). But in reality, this educational system set up a system of exporting Filipino nurses and carers to the US as cheap labour, so when Israel started to face a care crisis, the settler colony turned to the Philippines as a source of readily available foreign labour.
The Philippine-American war (1899-1902) and the subsequent American colonisation of the Philippines were devastating: it’s estimated that at least 20,000 Filipino soldiers and 200,000 Filipino civilians were killed during the war, as General Jacob H. Smith called on his troops to “kill everyone over ten”. It was also in the Philippines that the US first started using water as a form of torture — known then as the “water cure” (although the Spanish first brought it to the Philippines). This form of torture was later developed into waterboarding, which was used by British and American troops to torture civilians and prisoners of war in Vietnam, Palestine, Guantánamo, and elsewhere.
Even after the Philippines was granted independence in 1946, the US has maintained military and naval bases in the Philippines, which are the sites of frequent sexual violence — including the horrific murder of Jennifer Laude, a trans woman who worked as a sex worker near a US naval base in Olongapo City, by a US Marine stationed there. Although he was found guilty of homicide (a rare verdict against an American), he was later pardoned by then Philippine president Duterte. The US also played a key role in supporting the Marcos dictatorship from 1965 to 1986, under which the Philippines’s labour export policy was created. Finally, the US has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in counter-terrorist work in the Philippines — specifically to combat “Islamic terrorism” in Mindanao, the majority Muslim region of the country.
In Palestine, the US war machine has manifested in the form unwavering military and economic aid for Israel since the creation of the state. In 2016, the US committed to sending Israel military aid every year for ten years from 2018 to 2028, making Israel the largest recipient of this type of American assistance in the world. Through this agreement, Israel receives $3.3 billion every year and $500 million for missile defence, which represented 16% of Israel’s military budget in 2022. The US has also played a key role in facilitating diplomatic relations for Israel. Support for Israel is a key feature of US foreign policy and domestic politics — with even the most progressive mainstream politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders failing to call for a ceasefire in the context of the current genocide.
The vital role of American support for Israel has been widely documented so I won’t go into too much further detail, but I hope I’ve conveyed how US imperialism spans from Gaza to Manila. However, I think it’s important to distinguish that in the case of the Philippines, the US is a foreign power pressuring and influencing domestic actors for its own interests (which may or may not align with Philippine state interests), while in the case of Israel, these are policies and military campaigns that Israel wants to be pursuing in accordance to its own logic and mission of Zionist occupation and settler colonialism. The US helps make possible Israeli occupation and settler colonialism, but Israel would be pursuing it with or without American funding. I’ve seen a lot of tankies online asserting that the oppression of Palestinians and Filipinos “stems from US Capitalism-Imperialism.” But colonialism has a long history in Palestine: starting with with the Ottoman Empire, then the British Mandate (1918-1948), and now Israel with American, German, British, and other governments providing key financial, political, and PR support.
Although powerful, the chant is misleading — collapsing different struggles in the Philippines into one. There are Filipino people’s movements against US and Chinese imperialism — advocating for a stronger Philippine nation-state to resist foreign powers, but there are also also armed resistance groups taking up the fight against the Philippine state itself, whose struggle will not be furthered through a more powerful and nationalist nation-state.
Struggle for land
This chant should be a reminder that Palestine is a struggle for land protection and sovereignty, as are the struggles of land-defenders, Indigenous People, and Muslim communities in the Philippines — and this is the power and potential of solidarity between people in the two countries. The chant also reminds us that the state is not the people. While the Philippines continues to buy drones, tanks, and arms from Israel at a sickening rate, the Philippines is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a land defender — many of these defenders are Indigenous People and Muslim communities fighting against the state and mining and other extractive industries to retain control over their ancestral land.
In the context of western Asian diaspora groups and campaigns like ‘Stop Asian Hate’ staying remarkably silent on Palestine, the chant emphasises that liberation is not achieved through (positive) representation or acceptance by the white supremacist mainstream, but rather that liberation is a fight — sometimes fought with guns, sometimes fought with rocks.
‘From Palestine to the Philippines’ is a flawed but powerful slogan if we choose to read it as call to support and join the struggle for sovereignty over land within a global system of colonialism and capitalism that does everything to remove Indigenous People and land-defenders from their land.
As Mohammed El-Kurd writes on solidarity and the chant ‘We are all Palestinians’:
“The rallying cry that we are all Palestinians must abandon the metaphor and manifest materially. Meaning, all of us—Palestinians or otherwise—must embody the Palestinian condition, the condition of resistance and refusal, in the lives we lead and the company we keep. Meaning we reject our complicity in this bloodshed and our inertia when confronted with all of that blood. Because Gaza cannot stand alone in sacrifice.”
No slogan or chant is perfect, they all flatten complex issues into easily digestible ideas by design. They’re an invitation to be part of the movement and to explore further, rather than an action in-and-of themselves. This is what I’ve tried to do here.
To donate, support, and take action for Palestine and land-defenders in the Philippines, here are some organisations you can support:
Things I’ve been reading, watching, listening to
Reading:
The Truth About Modern Slavery, book by Emily Kenway
The spiraling absurdity of Germany’s pro-Israel fanaticism, article by Michael Sappir in +972
England’s ludicrous experiment in privatised water is coming to a messy end, article by my brilliant friend Adam Almeida in the Guardian
Watching:
This Is Me… Now: A Love Story — the film and documentary about/by Jennifer Lopez, which she self-financed because no one would pay $20 million for it to be made. Is a fever dream movie about a re-kindled love affair between celebrities worth $20 million? I’ll let you be the judge.
Listening to:
Tigers Blood, new album by Waxahatchee
99% Invisible podcast, in particular the episode “Chambre de bonne” about the socio-economics and politics of Paris’ tiny maid’s rooms
Some personal news
I quit my job! And I’m launching myself into freelance / part-time work! Wish me luck! And send me any leads on freelance work you think I might enjoy lol.
I wrote about Theresa May’s legacy on migrant domestic workers’ rights here.
That’s it for this month. Thank you for reading this extra long post! I’m also really touched and thankful for all the love and support I’ve gotten since I started this newsletter. I really really appreciate it, thank you.
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