The Palestinian revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani wrote that imperialism had “laid its body over the world,” and that the Palestinian cause is “a cause for every revolutionary, wherever he is. A cause of the exploited and oppressed masses.” Kanafani declared, and we chant this today, “In our thousands in our millions we are all Palestinians.”(1)
The Palestinian cause is rightfully at the forefront of the current global anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movement, covering the struggle for human rights, environmental justice, and national sovereignty. Filipinos stand in solidarity with Palestine and send love and support to the Madleen and to the thousands of activists marching courageously to Gaza (2) to deliver much-needed aid and resources.
Filipino participants in this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair recognize and denounce the horror of the ongoing genocide but are still largely unconvinced to join the call to boycott the Fair for its demonstrated complicity in Israel’s actions. Some have gone as far as belittling the boycott and dismissing it as merely “a symbolic gesture,” “counter-productive,” or even distracting from the “real enemy.” Essentially, organizers and delegates argue that we should just maximize this “historic” Guest of Honor opportunity to “tell our stories of resistance” instead of boycotting the Fair, which one seasoned writer described as mute and inconsequential, like a tree falling in the forest.
But to boycott the Fair, especially as its Guest of Honor, is to tell our stories of resistance more powerfully, truthfully, and effectively. As declared by the Palestinian-led Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) Movement, “Palestinians believe that solidarity entails respecting the boycott call, which is an authoritative call of the oppressed.”(3)
The Philippines has long been known as an ally of Israel. President Manuel Quezon opened the country to Jewish refugees escaping the Holocaust in the 1930s. In 1947, the Philippines was the only Asian country to support UN Resolution 181 advocating for the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel.
Through the decades, the Philippines and Israel have forged partnerships in agriculture, technology and innovation, security, tourism, and culture. Some recent collaborations cover the areas of agrotechnology, water management, and poultry and cacao production.(4) Israeli firm Ratio Petroleum was awarded a service contract to explore 416,000 hectares across the east Palawan basin for potential oil and gas resources.(5) In April 2025, the National Privacy Commission signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Israeli Privacy Protection Authority regarding personal data protection and cross-border enforcement.(6)
According to a Swedish report dated March 2025, the Philippines is the third-largest defense buyer from Israel, after the United States (13%) and India (34%).(7) In 2018, President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the military to buy arms only from Israel and acknowledged Israel’s assistance in the government’s attack on the Islamic City of Marawi in 2017, supposedly waged against “extremists.”(8) The Marawi Siege caused the displacement of thousands of Muslim families and their years-long detention in evacuation camps. Israel was also accused of supplying Duterte’s government with the weapons used in the so-called war on drugs which has killed tens of thousands of poor Filipinos,(9) as well as in the government’s counterinsurgency campaign against activists. Recently, the military exercises between the United States and the Philippines featured Israeli air defense missile systems. The Philippines had also purchased Sabrah 2 light tanks from Elbit, Shaldag boats from Israel Shipyards, and Hermes-type drones.(10)
The Philippines is tightly clutched by the claws of imperialism, our natural resources open to exploitation and plunder. Likewise, imperialists drag us into their profit-driven wars. Indirectly with its purchases and partnerships, the Philippine government has been funding Israel and the United States’ global military expansion, at the expense of the Filipino people’s taxes, security, their very life, and the environment.
With its prominent presence at the Frankfurt Book Fair, it follows that the Philippines also expresses support for how cultural institutions are utilized by Israel and its allies in the deliberate, persistent, and violent erasure of Palestinian identity and history.
According to the Jewish scholar Maya Wind, “genocide is structural to the Israeli state and is sustained by its most liberal institutions, including its universities.” Wind studied how Israeli universities were established as state-building institutions. They produced knowledge for the state, such as military intelligence systems, state propaganda, or legal scholarship to assist Israel in avoiding accountability for its war crimes.(11) Faculty and students helped manufacture weapons, including biological weaponry to poison drinking water.(12)
Israel has destroyed every Palestinian university in Gaza and continues to bomb schools that serve as shelters. Palestinian libraries, archives, and museums were completely torn down by shelling. And Palestine’s most important resource — the people, including teachers, students, writers, librarians, archivists, and the children who are the future culture-bearers — are displaced, missing, and killed by the tens of thousands.
Palestinian intellectuals have called this scholasticide.(13) And this demolition has been going on for as long as the Zionist project is being carried out. According to the Librarians and Archivists with Palestine: “In 1948, during the Nakba, 30,000 books and manuscripts were looted from Palestinian homes; in 1982, … Israel looted and confiscated the library and archives of the Palestine Liberation Organization; libraries and archives were damaged during the Second Intifada, and have been repeatedly targeted in Gaza.”(14)
The intentional destruction of cultural heritage is a war crime. But Israel continues to ignore international outcry and interventions against its settler-colonialist project.
As explained by the BDS Movement, “Cultural institutions are part and parcel of the ideological and institutional scaffolding of Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid against the Palestinian people. Israeli cultural institutions … are clearly implicated in supporting, justifying and whitewashing Israel’s occupation and systematic denial of Palestinian rights.”(15) The Frankfurt Book Fair has stated its unequivocal support of Israel and commitment to centering Israeli voices, framing the Palestinian liberatory struggle as a terrorist attack on Israel and on humanity itself.(16) In its Israeli-propped infrastructure and in its programming, the Frankfurt Book Fair justifies and normalizes the genocide in Gaza and the erasure of Palestine. University presses participate at the Fair despite Palestinian scholasticide. Children’s book publishers participate at the Fair despite hundreds of Palestinian children being murdered each day. The Philippines as Guest of Honor shall tell its stories despite Palestinians being robbed of the privilege to tell their own.
Historically, writers, scholars, and intellectuals have shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice. Writers, publishers, artists, scholars, and book-makers at this time are asked to choose a side.
After October 7, 2023, publishers like the Arab Publishers Association, the Emirates Publishers Association, and the Sharjah Book Fair withdrew from Frankfurt. Indonesia and Malaysia launched national boycotts of the Fair. In 2024, more than 7,000 writers and book workers in North America, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere declared their “commitment to boycott complicit Israeli publishers in an important stand against genocide.”(17) Publishers and writers have chosen the right side. There is still time for Filipino cultural workers to do so.
Won’t Filipino solidarity with the Palestinians be stronger and clearer if the Philippines withdraws as Guest of Honor and boycotts the Fair, rather than have it stumble and splutter trying to spin and contrive justifications for participating? The success of the BDS Movement in helping end apartheid in South Africa belies claims that Israel’s actions cannot be helped, that the boycott cannot stand against Israel’s powerful weapons. Attending the Fair even to protest in Palestine’s behalf is unnecessarily treading dangerous waters, as Germany is known for its repression of pro-Palestine actions and it has long been established whose side the Fair is on. Delegates also cannot pretend that the Fair is an opportunity for the Philippines to “tell our stories,” since the government’s US- and Israel-backed counterinsurgency program continues to silence and suppress the majority of the Philippine population, its farmers and workers, from speaking out.(18)
“We are all Palestinians,” goes the chant. The erasure of indigenous peoples, farmers, refugees, by colonizers and imperialists in war and occupation is a story that is familiar to us Filipinos because we have experienced it and continue to experience it in various forms. Filipinos are Palestinians in that we have also long been resisting imperialism.(19)(20)
Kanafani declared, “Wherever you strike [imperialism], you damage it, and you serve the world revolution.” Boycotters are expected to boycott the Frankfurt Book Fair as long as the latter remains complicit with Israel. When victory is inevitably achieved, it will be sweeter to those who stood with Palestine, who refused to accept the imperialists’ twisted narrative.
Allow me to end with a lengthy quote by Mohammed el-Kurd (21) which I feel encapsulates the debate on whether or not to boycott the Frankfurt Book Fair:
“How many of us stutter when asked about resistance, or disavow our right to resist entirely, our need to resist? How many of us choose our careers over our kin? How many of us could have done something, anything, but did not?
“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.”
References:
(1) https://socialistworker.co.uk/reviews-and-culture/ghassan-kanafani-who-told-us-we-are-all-palestinians/
(2) https://marchtogaza.net/
(3) https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/cultural-boycott-guidelines
(4) https://www.bworldonline.com/economy/2025/03/25/661762/israeli-firms-working-on-at-least-two-phl-agricultural-projects/
(5) https://aseanenergy.org/news-clipping/israeli-energy-firm-eyes-palawan-exploration/
(6) https://privacy.gov.ph/philippines-israel-deepen-cooperation-on-personal-data-protection/
(7) https://www.defensenews.com/global/mideast-africa/2025/05/27/israeli-defense-firms-lament-a-chill-from-erstwhile-client-philippines/
(8) https://www.pna.gov.ph/articles/1046981
(9) https://www.rappler.com/philippines/243082-report-says-israel-hide-arms-sales-philippines/
(10) https://www.defensenews.com/global/mideast-africa/2025/05/27/israeli-defense-firms-lament-a-chill-from-erstwhile-client-philippines/
(11) https://www.democracynow.org/2024/3/15/maya_wind_towers_of_ivory_and
(12) https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bds-teach-in-sociologists-for-palestine/id1751383034?i=1000670792003
(13) https://euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/hlps.2025.0348
(14) https://librarianswithpalestine.org/gaza-report-2024/
(15) https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi/cultural-boycott-guidelines
(16) https://www.buchmesse.de/en/news/israel
(17) https://publishersforpalestine.org/2025/03/22/help-spread-the-word-boycott-the-frankfurt-book-fair/
(18) https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/publications/red-tagging-in-the-philippines-the-modern-mccarthyism-threatening-freedom-of-expression/
(19) https://philippinerevolution.nu/statements/peoples-war-for-freedom-and-democracy/
(20) https://philippinerevolution.nu/statements/boundless-solidarity-with-the-indefatigable-struggle-of-the-palestinian-people/
(21) https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/are-we-indeed-all-palestinians/
Presented at “On the Palestinian-led Campaign to Boycott the Frankfurt Book Fair: A Hybrid Forum on its Origins, Rationale and Objectives” organized by the Likhaan Institute of Creative Writing, University of the Philippines, Diliman, June 13, 2025
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