It was never about religion but resources. Contrary to its mainstream portrayal in corporate media, the ongoing war in Palestine is not between two belief systems in competition over who is correct. It is a war between Zionist colonialism and Palestinian resistance, between world imperialism led by the US and the anti-imperialist forces of national liberation.
Israel is built on Palestine. More accurately, Zionists are building it over the bodies of Palestinians, both the living and the dead. Whom the invaders cannot coerce, they displace; and whom they cannot displace, they kill. The world Zionist movement is at the beck and call of US imperialism, which uses the former to establish the latter’s terrorist base in the Arab world.
The 1948 establishment of Israel is among history’s most brazen landgrabs, and its expansion is as violent as it is vulgar. No territory, agricultural or otherwise, is excluded. In a matter of weeks, violence prompted by the recent Israeli eviction of Palestinian residents in Sheikh Jarrah has yielded a body count of over 200 in Gaza, almost one-third of them children.
Most of Palestine’s farmlands have been seized by Israeli settlements. Israeli corporations own virtually all water sources available to Palestine. When the circumstances suit them, Arab reactionaries among the feudal and capitalist elite collude with the invaders. With colonizers in control of the means of food production, how are the Palestinian masses to survive?
Food insecurity from decades of assault on national sovereignty—this is much too familiar to Filipinos. Our peasantry, which makes up over 70% of the population, knows the violence of landgrabs all too well. US imperialism, the same monstrous force faced by Palestine when it faces Zionist colonialism, remains unwilling to surrender land it has forcibly been claiming since Spain sold them the archipelago in 1898.
The bullets of the Israel Defense Forces is not entirely different from that of Ayala henchmen evicting farmers in Laguna, Lorenzo goons strafing agrarian reform beneficiaries in Davao del Norte, or Yulo stooges shooting at peasants in Palawan. Zionist gunfire has the same murderous effect as that of the US-Duterte regime, the latter having perpetrated at least 22 massacres in the countryside in five years.
The Palestinian struggle for sovereignty is identical to their struggle for land—a struggle intertwined with ours. Seven out of 10 Filipino farmers remain landless, with several of them becoming agricultural workers earning criminally low wages. Such feudal landlessness is maintained by US imperialism as its social base, trampling on our sovereignty to thwart national industrialization and make our economy dependent on theirs.
Unyon ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura stands with the Palestinian masses in our common struggle for land, justice, and peace. Just as we strengthen the peasant and labor movements to combat imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism, so do we link arms with them as they combat the terrorist state of Israel, the world Zionist movement, US imperialism, and Arab reaction represented by feudalism and capitalism.
Support Palestinian resistance! #FreePalestine!
Down with colonialism and imperialism!
Long live international solidarity!
UMA Pilipinas 