war in mindanao essay

Interview: the Struggle for Peace in Mindanao, the Philippines

The southern Philippines has known a long history of armed conflict. Among those regions is Mindanao, where in February 2019 the Bangsamoro people voted to ratify the Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL). This law is a big leap towards peace in the Southern Philippines. To understand why this is such a big leap for peace we interviewed Marc Batac, who is the Regional Programme Coordinator at our member organisation Initiatives for International Dialogue (IID) in the Philippines. IID has been involved in the peace process in Mindanao for almost twenty years.

To give us an overview of the conflict in Mindanao: how did the conflict come about, what are the root causes, who are the main actors and what is it about?

The root cause of armed conflict in Mindanao can be found in the narrative of Mindanao peoples’ continuing struggle for their right to self-determination. A struggle that involves an assertion of their identity and demand for meaningful governance in the face of the national government’s failure to realise genuine social progress and peace and development in the southern Philippines. The struggle is also a response to “historical injustices” and grave human rights violations committed against the peoples of Mindanao.

With the clamor to correct these historical injustices and to recognise their inherent right to chart their own political and cultural path, the Bangsamoro people – together with their non-Moro allies – have struggled to get their calls heard and acted upon by the central government.

A huge number of the victims of the conflict in Mindanao have been ordinary civilians: women and men, young and old who were either displaced from their communities or killed in the crossfire by bullets and bombs that recognize no gender, religion, creed or stature.

There are two opposing views when it comes to the armed struggle in the Bangsamoro region: While the central government had earlier viewed the armed struggle as an act of rebellion against the state, the other party has always claimed it as a legitimate exercise of their right to self-determination.

Over the years, the State has come to recognise the Bangsamoro and Indigenous Peoples struggle for just and lasting peace in Mindanao, albeit always within the framework of the country’s constitution.

A huge number of the victims of the conflict in Mindanao have been ordinary civilians: women and men, young and old who were either displaced from their communities or killed in the crossfire by bullets and bombs that recognize no gender, religion, creed or stature. The impact and social cost of the decades-old war to the people and the entire nation have been vicious and costly. The infographic on the cost of war in Mindanao (see below) explains previous Philippine governments’ huge spending on wars in Mindanao, which clearly talks about ‘lives lost’ rather than ‘lives improved’. Finding peaceful solutions to the causes of the armed conflict in Mindanao is never easy as the toll has affected not just Mindanao but the entire country. This has discouraged foreign and local investments and ultimately bleeding the nation’s coffers with the previous governments spending more on war than on basic social services.

While previous governments tried to resolve these conflicts, the root cause is the failure to address the Mindanao peoples legitimate struggle for their ‘right to self-determination, dignity and governance’, and is a major challenge to achieving sustainable peace in the region.

The conflict between the Government of the Philippines and the armed groups in Mindanao, particularly the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), is not the only conflict affecting the whole region. The conflict in Mindanao is multi-faceted, involving numerous armed groups, as well as clans, criminal gangs and political elites. Main actors to this decades-old conflict are: the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and other groups such as the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF), Abu Sayyaf (considered a bandit group engaged in various criminal activities like kidnapping and bombings), as well as other armed non-state actors who are consistently ‘in conflict’ with the central government.

The Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL) has been passed, which is for now the successful conclusion of a peace process. Can you explain what this is? And how it happened?

The purpose and intent of the law is to establish the new Bangsamoro political entity and provide for its basic structure of government. This also includes an expansion of the territory in recognition of the aspirations of the Bangsamoro people. Said law provides that the Bangsamoro Government will have a parliamentary form of government. The two key components of the peace process that will determine its eventual success are the passing of the BOL and the plebiscite for its ratification in the proposed Bangsamoro territory. With the BOL passage comes a roadmap that outlines a smooth transition leading to the creation of the Bangsamoro government that promises to fulfil the Bangsamoro’s aspirations for peace, justice, economic development and self-governance. The new Bangsamoro political entity will in effect abolish the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) and provide for a basic structure of government in recognition of the justness and legitimacy of the cause of the Bangsamoro people and their desire to chart their own political future through a democratic process.

The BOL is a product not only of political negotiations between the Bangsamoro and the Philippine government through their respective principals and negotiators but of the peacebuilding community’s decades of peacemaking and conflict prevention work and initiatives, both inside and outside of Mindanao and the Philippines.

What has civil society, and particularly Initiatives for International Dialogue (IID), done for this peacebuilding process? And why is it important?

IID became more involved into the Mindanao peace process when then President Joseph Estrada unleashed an “all-out war” against the MILF in 2000 that resulted in countless deaths, wounded and massive dislocation of mainly Moro communities. IID’s Moro and Mindanao partners sought the assistance of civil society and IID in helping to galvanize a response and projection of their voices and perspectives into the entire peace process. IID then proceeded to establish platforms and networks to concretize this accompaniment, forming the Mindanao Peoples Caucus (MPC) – a Tri-people (Moro, settlers and Indigenous peoples) network that engaged the peace process. MPC in turn established the Bantay Ceasefire (Ceasefire Watch) – a grassroots and community-based ceasefire-monitoring network.

GPPAC Southeast Asia members in the Philippines have been in the forefront of engaging the peace process in Mindanao since the “all-out war” declared by then President Estrada in 2000 against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

Eventually, IID together with its partner communities were able to go through consensus building and lobbied in Congress a civil society agenda on crucial provisions in the draft BBL, conducted public advocacy activities and engaged lawmakers and the media.

Why is this such a big win for peace in the Philippines and the region?

GPPAC Southeast Asia members in the Philippines have been in the forefront of engaging the peace process in Mindanao since the “all-out war” declared by then President Estrada in 2000 against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). It has since initiated and helped establish various networks for peace in the country, including Bantay Ceasefire, Mindanao Peaceweavers (MPW), Friends of the Bangsamoro (FoBM) and All-Out Peace (AOP) among others.

For us, the enactment of BOL is major step forward in achieving a just and sustainable peace in Mindanao. The BOL, if implemented according to its intent and purpose, could finally open a smooth path towards peace, development and social progress in the south of the Philippines. A product of a long-drawn peace negotiation, it also serves as a 'justice instrument', which can help in correcting historical injustices committed against the Bangsamoro people, the indigenous peoples, and other inhabitants of Mindanao--injustices that continue to haunt them up to this day.

The BOL, if implemented according to its intent and purpose, could finally open a smooth path towards peace, development and social progress in the south of the Philippines.

For numerous decades, Mindanao and its peoples have witnessed the exceptional savagery of armed conflict. The results have been equally vicious: from the unending cycle of multiple displacements by hapless communities to depleting our nation's fiscal health. In all these armed conflicts happening around Mindanao, the most marginalized and vulnerable especially our women, children and the elderly, were made to endure the profound and unceasing pains of conflicts they never wished to be part of. Now that the BOL has been successfully ratified, and the installation of a transition structure through the Bangsamoro Transition Authority (BTA) is underway, prospects towards a significant improvement in the lives of the peoples of Mindanao and hopefully in the whole country as well.

Are you hopeful that this change will be sustainable for a more peaceful Mindanao? And what needs to be done now?

While the ratification of the BOL and the eventual establishment of the Bangsamoro government are significant political milestones towards realising just peace and social progress not only for Mindanao but for the whole country, we believe that it is not the end-all and be-all of the struggle for peace. What still needs to be addressed during the process are difficult issues around governance, inclusion, land distribution, incursion of foreign aid, dealing with shadow economies and violent extremism in a fragile peace process. The promise of a more enhanced and meaningful autonomy can reach its full potential if a peacebuilding strategy, coupled with participation and protection pathways, is substantively embedded in governance in the incipient Bangsamoro. Civil society has to develop what is now a “post-conflict peacebuilding” paradigm, wherein we have to locate our role and added value during political transition around hard and intractable issues around land, governance, transitional justice and security.

Peace monitoring will continue to be a staple strategy fulfilling civil society’s role as a third party in the peace process. There are other aspects of the law that must be monitored and ensured especially when the “caretaker” BTA starts its job weeks from now, including how in the transition period the normalization programs will be equally supported and cascaded to ensure decommissioning of the MILF forces and support to these combatants and amnesty, transformation of camps and conflict-affected communities. This, of course, will entail bringing to the Normalization table the issues on displacement and post-reconstruction of those IDPs during the sieges in Zamboanga and Marawi cities, including the displaced indigenous communities due to intermittent armed hostilities in ancestral domain areas in the BARMM.

Civil society has to develop what is now a “post-conflict peacebuilding” paradigm, wherein we have to locate our role and added value during political transition around hard and intractable issues around land, governance, transitional justice and security.

Lastly, a whole of society approach in developing and implementing government programs in the BARMM shall respond to social cohesion, trust building and work on inclusion of minority and minoritized issues concerning the IPs in the region and the Christian population. From a civil society’s perspective, it is not a mere governance issue that is at stake here, but actualising the negotiated consensus (BOL, FAB/CAB, and all previously signed peace agreements) and the essence of social justice by guaranteeing affirmative action every step of the way. The civil society scorecard should be designed to critically monitor the following:

Realizing meaningful autonomy and right to self-rule of the Bangsamoro (and the inhabitants of the region) based on their distinct cultural identities, historical struggle, faiths, heritage and traditions;
Grant genuine and efficient fiscal autonomy for the Bangsamoro;
Provide the Bangsamoro effective management and control over and benefits of the natural resources in the Bangsamoro territory;
Full Inclusion of the Indigenous Peoples rights in the Bangsamoro governance to ensure the recognition and protection of their rights and to correct historical marginalization and exclusion; and
Realizing a transitional justice and reconciliation program for the Bangsamoro. Heed previous recommendations to establish a Transitional Justice and Reconciliation Commission for the Bangsamoro (NTJRCB) that shall among others ensure and promote justice, healing and reconciliation.
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Peacebuilding from the grassroots: Resolving conflicts in Mindanao

Written by Julius Cesar Trajano .

Image credit: Mindanao Street Scene by Gary Todd /Flickr; Licence: CC0 1.0 DEED

The peace process between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) was hailed as a significant step towards ending four decades of armed conflict in Mindanao, southern Philippines. In 2018, the Philippine Congress ratified the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) which aims to carve a self-ruled region for Muslims in Mindanao. In January 2019, a majority of the people of the Muslim provinces in Mindanao voted in the plebiscite for their communities to be included in the new autonomous region called the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).

However, the Mindanao peace process should not end just because a peace agreement has been signed or a new autonomous region has been ratified by the people of Mindanao. Despite the progress that has been seen in relation to this peace process, significant challenges to the goal of inclusive peace and development in Muslim Mindanao remain. The presence of other rebel groups advocating for separatism, as well as violent extremist groups and warring political clans, all pose significant threats to peacebuilding in Mindanao.

The Mindanao peace process is a clear case study of the importance of bottom-up approaches to peacebuilding. This is a good time to explore comprehensively this bottom-up peacebuilding approach, which is being driven primarily by the vulnerable communities themselves.

In the context of conflict resolution in the southern Philippines, grassroots-based, bottom-up processes and initiatives are being generated to protect the peace process. This article examines three major contributions of local organisations and actors to the Mindanao peacebuilding process in recent years. These are: (1) countering violent extremism; (2) articulating women’s voices in the peace process; and (3) resolving local conflicts and ‘ rido ’ (clan wars).

Countering violent extremism

There is a new facet in the decades-old armed conflict in Muslim Mindanao: the emergence of violent extremist ideology that has been inspired by the rise of Islamic State (ISIS ) in the Middle East. In 2017, a large group of ISIS-inspired militants attacked and occupied for five months the City of Marawi, a Muslim-majority city in Mindanao. The militants were members of the extremist groups Abu Sayyaf and Maute that had declared allegiance to ISIS.

Experts have attributed the rise of pro-ISIS extremist groups in recent years partly to the delay in implementing the peace agreements agreed with the main Moro rebel movements – i.e. the MILF and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) – as well as the refusal of other armed groups to participate in the peace process. Prior to the successful establishment of the BARMM under the governance of the MILF, the uncertain prospects for implementation of the peace agreements in the past created opportunities for violent extremist groups to discredit the peace process and gain popularity among marginalised sections of Filipino Muslims and also to recruit Moro youth.

Several organisations have started conducting activities to counter pro-ISIS violent extremism in Muslim Mindanao. One such organisation is the Institute for Autonomy and Government (IAG), a public-policy centre based in Mindanao which provides research, capacity-building training and technical assistance in order to advance meaningful autonomy and governance in Mindanao.

In 2017 the IAG conducted a research project to investigate the vulnerability of Muslim youth to radicalisation and recruitment by violent extremist groups in Mindanao. The IAG report offers policy recommendations to counter violent extremism. One such recommendation is for the Philippine government to adopt a comprehensive policy framework to counter extremism that can guide national and local government units in crafting long-term programmes for its prevention.

Local religious leaders also play an important role in countering violent extremism. During the Marawi crisis, there was a strong focus on their role and how they could counter the narrative of the pro-ISIS Maute group. Established in 1996, the Bishops-Ulama Conference (BUC) is a key institution for advancing the peace process in Mindanao. BUC is composed of Catholic bishops, Muslim ulama and Protestant bishop-pastors in Mindanao who collectively envision a society where different religious communities can live together peacefully and harmoniously.

At the height of the Marawi conflict, BUC convened the Multi-Sectoral Peace Conference in Cagayan de Oro City, Mindanao in July 2017. The Conference gathered together religious leaders from Mindanao, military officials, local government officials and NGOs. Together, the BUC and its dialogue partners strongly recommended the introduction of peace education with Islamic concepts as an antidote to extremism.

Articulating women’s voices

Women’s NGOs also contribute to the Mindanao peace process beyond the formal peace talks. Educating the public on Bangsamoro history is one of their contributions. Moro women and peace advocates have cited the significance of educating both the Bangsamoro and Filipino people on Bangsamoro history in order to gain nationwide support for the success of the peace process.

One important movement that conducts peace education is the Women’s Organisation Movement in the Bangsamoro (WOMB), a consortium of Bangsamoro women’s organisations mostly engaged in peace advocacy work. WOMB regularly organises advocacy training workshops in a bid to provide peace advocates and women’s organisations with appropriate strategies in policy advocacy towards realising Bangsamoro autonomy.

Another contribution of women’s organisations to the peace process is assisting war evacuees. Most recently, at the height of the Marawi conflict in 2017, a Marawi-based NGO composed of Muslim women called the Al-Mujadilah Development Foundation was at the forefront of providing life-saving aid to an estimated 220,000 civilians affected by the conflict in the city. Its aid workers explained that women and children affected by the conflict were more vulnerable to sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence, even in evacuation centres. Thus, women aid volunteers and workers need to be on the frontline of providing humanitarian relief, given that they understand women’s needs best of all.

Resolving local conflicts and rido

Community-based mediation is another important process outside the formal peace talks. This is primarily driven by the prevalence of local conflicts such as rido in Muslim Mindanao. Rido, or clan wars, have further complicated the delicate security situation in Muslim Mindanao. Rido is the state of recurring hostilities among families and clans, involving retaliatory acts of armed conflict triggered by an affront or disgrace to the honour of a family or its members. As of 2017, most of the 235 unresolved rido cases were due to land ownership issues and local politics.

In this regard, resolving local rido cases and the associated armed violence must be considered as another peace process which complements the broader Mindanao peace process. Several NGOs are conducting community-based mediation to resolve rido . One such organisation is Tumikang Sama Sama (TSS), which means ‘Together We Move Forward’ in the Tausug language of Sulu Province. TSS is now a large independent organisation of well-respected community mediators who seek to address the security challenges in Sulu Province arising from rido . Between 2010 and 2014, TSS handled 82 rido cases and helped formally settle 48 such cases in conflict-ridden Sulu. TSS uses a combination of formal legal mechanisms and indigenous cultural traditions to achieve results.

As demonstrated in this article, there are several significant issues such as clan wars and an increase in extremist ideology that are not directly addressed by the top-down peace process or by the Bangsamoro Basic Law. Grassroots actors can contribute to mitigating and resolving these issues that may otherwise threaten the sustainability of the overall peace process.

Julius Cesar Trajano is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

The author bears full responsibility for the facts cited and opinions expressed in this article.

11 The Philippines: Peace Talks and Autonomy in Mindanao

Published: March 2019
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This chapter examines how political interests in Mindanao and in Manila have made it difficult to resolve the territorial cleavage in southern Philippines, even though the 1987 Constitution envisioned Muslim autonomy within the unitary republic. It first provides a historical background on the Muslim insurgency in Mindanao, led by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and later, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). It also considers the 1976 Tripoli agreement signed under martial law, the drafting of the 1987 Constitution, and the creation of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao in 1989. It goes on to describe the period of constitutional engagement and more specifically, the “constitutional moment” for resolving the Mindanao question that began in mid-2010. Finally, it analyzes the outcome of the peace talks between the government and the Moro insurgents, along with some of significant the lessons that can be drawn from the experience.

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United States Institute of Peace

Home ▶ Publications

The Long Road to Peace in the Southern Philippines

USIP editorial series provides perspectives from the Bangsamoro region.

Tuesday, January 18, 2022 / By: Brian Harding ; Haroro J. Ingram

Publication Type: Analysis

For four centuries, the Muslim-majority areas in the southern reaches of the Philippines have resisted domination authorities in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, whether its leaders were Spanish, American or Filipino. This dynamic has spawned insurgencies, glimmers of hope for peaceful coexistence and repeated disappointment — all amid endemic violence and poverty.

Philippines Navy Special Forces patrol a lake near the main battle area where Islamic State militants are holed up in Marawi, Philippines. September 15, 2017. (Jes Aznar/The New York Times)

Over the past five and a half years, while the world has focused on Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s excesses, particularly his deadly war on drugs, a groundbreaking possibility for peace has emerged under the first president of the Philippines to hail from Mindanao, the second-largest island located in the southern part of the archipelago.

As the Philippines gears up for general elections in May 2022 that will see a term-limited Duterte cede power, there is an urgent need for Manila and the international community to support the most promising opportunity for a sustainable peace in Mindanao in decades, a hopeful development that has too often flown under the radar.

The United States has a stake in peace in the Southern Philippines, most acutely on two fronts. First, as the United States and the Philippines work to deepen cooperation on external security challenges, principally in the South China Sea, peace in Mindanao would remove a key domestic focus for the armed forces of the Philippines and free resources for other priorities. Second, sustainable peace — and good local governance — would significantly help to address drivers of transnational crime, including terrorism.

It is within this context that the U.S. Institute of Peace is launching an initiative to bring attention to the peace process and the development of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), which was established in early 2019 as part of a peace agreement to end nearly five decades of conflict between the Philippine government and Moro secessionists in Mindanao. This effort will include a series of articles written by Filipino authors that analyze key issues and challenges at this historic juncture of Bangsamoro peace efforts.

The Latest Push for Peace in Mindanao

The establishment of the BARMM in 2019 brought with it the most promising opportunity for sustainable peace in living memory. After decades of war and cyclical peace process failures, an 80-member Bangsamoro Transition Authority (BTA) was appointed by Duterte to implement the two-track peace process and take the region to its first elections in May 2022. Most BTA ministers are former guerrillas who had devoted their lives to revolutionary war but now were responsible for founding a parliamentary system, implementing a legal and policy architecture, establishing government bureaucracies, decommissioning combatants and providing basic services to their impoverished communities.

Under any circumstances, the challenges facing the new Bangsamoro authorities were immense and the timelines in the Bangsamoro Organic Law for achieving key political, legal and normalization milestones overly optimistic. But then, almost a year into the transition period, COVID-19 hit the Philippines. By mid-2020, the BTA was increasingly (and understandably) prioritizing its pandemic response. By the end of 2020, Bangsamoro authorities and civil society were calling for an extension of the transition period, which was eventually granted and signed into law by Duterte on October 28, 2021. The extension grants Bangsamoro authorities three more years to complete the transition process and take the BARMM to its first elections in May 2025.

While the extension may have given the BTA more time, it has done little to relieve pressures on Bangsamoro authorities to succeed in their efforts. For instance, expectation management is a concern for every peace process, but it is especially concerning in the BARMM. In many communities, hopes for what peace dividends will deliver socially, economically and politically are extraordinarily high, highlighting the potential for acute disappointment if those hopes are not met. One of the most concerning issues has been the faltering normalization track that was meant to decommission 40,000 ex-combatants, their arms and camps but has left many disgruntled and many more still needing to be processed.

Extension has also brought with it added uncertainties. For example, a clause in the transition extension means that new BTA ministers could be appointed by either Duterte or the newly elected president in May 2022. At the first Bangsamoro Donor’s Forum organized by the Bangsamoro Planning and Development Authority on December 13, 2021, it was clear that at this historic juncture in the struggle for peace in Mindanao there are plenty of reasons to be cautiously optimistic for the future.

As the authors featured in this USIP series explore, the Bangsamoro region is delicately balanced and the resolution (or otherwise) of some key issues may prove the difference between a peaceful and even prosperous BARMM or another generation traumatized by war.

Inside the Struggle for Peace in the Bangsamoro Region

This USIP series seeks to bring attention to peace efforts in the Southern Philippines by showcasing a broad thematic and multisector spectrum of local perspectives from inside the BARMM. The Filipino contributors featured in this series will explore a range of challenges and opportunities for peace in the Bangsamoro region. From the vital role of Bangsamoro women as peace leaders and the key issues associated with the extension of the transition period to the Bangsamoro government’s inclusivity challenge and the impact of COVID-19 on the achievement of peace and development milestones, the series will take readers inside the multisector effort to achieve peace in Mindanao.

If there is one overarching theme that unites this eclectic collection of authors and subjects, it is the issue of balance. For the Bangsamoro, this challenge arises in discovering how to both embrace and protect the region’s rich ethnic and cultural diversity while also championing a shared Bangsamoro identity. History offers its own challenges as a source of traumas that weigh heavily on the present, as well as a source of immense pride and inspiration. After decades of bloody wars and failed peace efforts, local expectations for what the peace dividends should deliver will need to be balanced by the realities of what can be delivered. All the while, peace spoilers will be looking to exploit any opportunity to tip the balance once again toward war.

Hanging in the Balance

The picture that will emerge from this series is of a complicated and delicately balanced peace process that has every reason to succeed or fail. If there is one lesson to emerge from Mindanao’s too-often bloody history, it is that the aftermaths of failed peace efforts have been a boon for the rise of violent groups exploiting the politics of dashed expectations. For the international community to appreciate why the current confluence of dynamics in the BARMM is raising the stakes for the peace process, it is vital to read the nuanced ground-level perspectives of locals on the inside of the peace process.

Haroro J. Ingram is a senior research fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University and a fellow with Mindanao State University (Marawi).

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Fighting and talking: A Mindanao conflict timeline

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The Mindanao Conflict in the Philippines: Ethno-Religious War or Economic Conflict?

The Politics of Death: Political Violence in Southeast Asia

EXPLAINER: Why Duterte’s sudden call for Mindanao independence won’t fly

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EXPLAINER: Why Duterte’s sudden call for Mindanao independence won’t fly

Photo courtesy of Malacañang; Graphics by Marian Hukom/Rappler

MANILA, Philippines – A couple of days after former president Rodrigo Duterte accused his successor Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of involvement in the illegal drug trade, the man from Davao City stepped up his rhetoric by calling for Mindanao’s independence.

“What is at stake now is our future, so we’ll just separate,” Duterte was quoted as saying on January 30. The former mayor even claimed he had asked his former House speaker – incumbent Davao del Norte 1st District Representative Pantaleon Alvarez – to gather signatures in favor of the advocacy.

The government did not take the call sitting down, decrying the proposal that has – at the same time – baffled critics due to its lack of specifics.

Rappler sums up the gigantic obstacles that advocates of Mindanao secession are facing to make that vision – if they are really serious about it – a reality.

Advocates want to emulate the path to independence of some young nations, but their lived realities are different from those of Mindanao.

In the 2006 book Secession: International Law Perspectives , professor Antonello Tancredi wrote: “International law neither prohibits nor authorizes secession, but simply acknowledges the result of de facto processes which may lead to the birth of new states.”

There is no manual on successful secessions, and separatists can only learn from the experience of other countries.

Duterte-era chief presidential legal counsel Salvador Panelo brought up the statehoods of Singapore and Timor-Leste, but the conditions that paved the way for their independence are different from the realities in Mindanao.

Singapore, for instance, did not gain independence voluntarily . It was expelled by Malaysia in 1965, due to irreconcilable differences in ideology and politics.

Timor-Leste, meanwhile, is a case that inspires Duterte, who said on February 7: “My proposal of a Mindanao secession is a legal process that will be brought to the United Nations (UN), just like what happened to Timor-Leste.”

Yes, the UN organized a referendum in Timor-Leste in 1999, the watershed vote that resulted in its independence from Indonesia. But the young nation’s journey of self-determination was bloody, and its experience does not necessarily bear strong similarities to that of Mindanao.

While there were state-sanctioned killings that triggered the Moro insurgency in the southern Philippines, Timor-Leste had to grapple with what numerous scholars believe is a genocide at the tail-end of the 20th century. The atrocities during that time prompted the rise and consolidation of pro-independence organizations, which Mindanao does not have at the moment.

Jabidah and Merdeka: The inside story

The downfall of military dictator Suharto also ushered in an era of democratic reforms , and the succeeding president, B.J. Habibie, allowed the people of Timor-Leste to pick either full independence from Indonesia or special autonomy.

The Philippine government has spoken strongly against the call for an independent Mindanao.

It seems implausible that the Marcos administration would one day just let political foes in Mindanao do what they want, such as enabling a referendum on secession. After all, the government has already been adamant about quashing Duterte’s out-of-left-field proposal that made national headlines.

Issuing their own statements to reject the former president’s call were the justice and interior departments, as well as National Security Adviser Eduardo Año and Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process Carlito Galvez Jr. – both Marcos appointees who were once part of the Duterte Cabinet.

“The national government will not hesitate to use its authority and forces to quell and stop any and all attempts to dismember the Republic,” Año warned on February 4. “Any attempt to secede any part of the Philippines will be met by the government with resolute force.”

President Marcos has also urged the proponents of a separate Mindanao to drop their advocacy.

“The new call for a separate Mindanao is doomed to fail, for it is anchored on a false premise, not to mention a sheer constitutional travesty,” he said on February 8 .

The politics of secession

The 1987 constitution does not entertain the concept of secession..

Panelo has rebuked Marcos, insisting that espousing the idea of secession is part of freedom of speech guaranteed by the 1987 Constitution.

“Secession is anchored on the principle that the people have the right to self-determination. They have the right to choose the kind of government they want, to choose the officials who will govern them and to determine their future,” Panelo said on February 11.

Still, the present charter does not entertain secessionist movements.

The first two articles of the Constitution put a premium on the country’s territorial integrity, saying that the Armed Forces of the Philippines must work “to secure the sovereignty of the State and the integrity of the national territory.”

Marcos has already made clear how he interprets the Constitution in light of secession calls.

“Our Constitution calls for a united, undivided country. It calls for an eternal cohesion. For this reason, unlike other Constitutions, there is nothing in ours that allows the breaking up of this union, such as an exit provision,” he said.

Duterte does not have the support of the Bangsamoro leadership nor key political figures from Mindanao.

There were calls in the past for Mindanao to separate from the rest of the Philippines, but “they never really got mainstream,” according to former presidential adviser on the peace process Ging Deles.

“What became a real move towards independence or secession was the Bangsamoro,” she said in Rappler’s panel discussion on Mindanao independence on February 9. “It was not a call for an independent Mindanao. It was a call of a specific area that was united in teachers of culture, history, and tradition that were being neglected.”

Duterte, however, cannot convince even the leadership of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) to join his cause.

“As chief minister of the Bangsamoro government, I stand firmly on adhering to the faithful implementation of the provisions of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro towards the right to self-determination,” Bangsamoro Chief Minister Ahod Ebrahim said on February 2, referring to the landmark 2014 peace deal that resulted in Islamic separatists letting go of their firearms.

Other leaders from Mindanao have opposed Duterte’s call, including Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri, Senate Minority Leader Aquilino “Koko” Pimentel III, and House Majority Leader Mannix Dalipe.

It appears that advocates of Mindanao secession have yet to fully organize themselves.

Weeks since Duterte’s statement, there are little indications that would suggest there is truly a “movement” or well-oiled machine to concretize the idea. A signature campaign has also not begun.

When asked about the blueprint of their ambition, Alvarez acknowledged that they are still at the first step of what he said is a three-stage process.

“First is awareness. The people in Mindanao need to know about this movement seeking to separate Mindanao from the rest of the Philippines. The next stage would be acceptance. We have to answer the questions of what and why so the public will understand. After that, we will wait for the right timing, the ‘when,'” he said during Rappler’s panel discussion.

Alvarez insisted their call for Mindanao secession is not personal, but former presidential political adviser Ronald Llamas disagreed.

Llamas suspects that the proposal ultimately stems from the long shadow cast by the possibility of the Marcos administration allowing the International Criminal Court to arrest Duterte over his bloody drug war that resulted in thousands dead.

“My belief is that the call for secession is basically personal. It’s the fear of the ICC,” he said. – Rappler.com

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The War at Stanford

I didn’t know that college would be a factory of unreason.

collage of stanford university architecture and students protesting

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ne of the section leaders for my computer-science class, Hamza El Boudali, believes that President Joe Biden should be killed. “I’m not calling for a civilian to do it, but I think a military should,” the 23-year-old Stanford University student told a small group of protesters last month. “I’d be happy if Biden was dead.” He thinks that Stanford is complicit in what he calls the genocide of Palestinians, and that Biden is not only complicit but responsible for it. “I’m not calling for a vigilante to do it,” he later clarified, “but I’m saying he is guilty of mass murder and should be treated in the same way that a terrorist with darker skin would be (and we all know terrorists with dark skin are typically bombed and drone striked by American planes).” El Boudali has also said that he believes that Hamas’s October 7 attack was a justifiable act of resistance, and that he would actually prefer Hamas rule America in place of its current government (though he clarified later that he “doesn’t mean Hamas is perfect”). When you ask him what his cause is, he answers: “Peace.”

I switched to a different computer-science section.

Israel is 7,500 miles away from Stanford’s campus, where I am a sophomore. But the Hamas invasion and the Israeli counterinvasion have fractured my university, a place typically less focused on geopolitics than on venture-capital funding for the latest dorm-based tech start-up. Few students would call for Biden’s head—I think—but many of the same young people who say they want peace in Gaza don’t seem to realize that they are in fact advocating for violence. Extremism has swept through classrooms and dorms, and it is becoming normal for students to be harassed and intimidated for their faith, heritage, or appearance—they have been called perpetrators of genocide for wearing kippahs, and accused of supporting terrorism for wearing keffiyehs. The extremism and anti-Semitism at Ivy League universities on the East Coast have attracted so much media and congressional attention that two Ivy presidents have lost their jobs. But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus.

For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on Stanford’s palm-covered grounds. The “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” encampment was erected by students in mid-October, even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza, to demand that the university divest from Israel and condemn its behavior. Posters were hung equating Hamas with Ukraine and Nelson Mandela. Across from the sit-in, a rival group of pro-Israel students eventually set up the “Blue and White Tent” to provide, as one activist put it, a “safe space” to “be a proud Jew on campus.” Soon it became the center of its own cluster of tents, with photos of Hamas’s victims sitting opposite the rubble-ridden images of Gaza and a long (and incomplete) list of the names of slain Palestinians displayed by the students at the sit-in.

Some days the dueling encampments would host only a few people each, but on a sunny weekday afternoon, there could be dozens. Most of the time, the groups tolerated each other. But not always. Students on both sides were reportedly spit on and yelled at, and had their belongings destroyed. (The perpetrators in many cases seemed to be adults who weren’t affiliated with Stanford, a security guard told me.) The university put in place round-the-clock security, but when something actually happened, no one quite knew what to do.

Conor Friedersdorf: How October 7 changed America’s free speech culture

Stanford has a policy barring overnight camping, but for months didn’t enforce it, “out of a desire to support the peaceful expression of free speech in the ways that students choose to exercise that expression”—and, the administration told alumni, because the university feared that confronting the students would only make the conflict worse. When the school finally said the tents had to go last month, enormous protests against the university administration, and against Israel, followed.

“We don’t want no two states! We want all of ’48!” students chanted, a slogan advocating that Israel be dismantled and replaced by a single Arab nation. Palestinian flags flew alongside bright “Welcome!” banners left over from new-student orientation. A young woman gave a speech that seemed to capture the sense of urgency and power that so many students here feel. “We are Stanford University!” she shouted. “We control things!”

“W e’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has.

I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement , he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)

In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.

The attack was as clear a litmus test as one could imagine for the Middle East conflict. Hamas insurgents raided homes and a music festival with the goal of slaughtering as many civilians as possible. Some victims were raped and mutilated, several independent investigations found. Hundreds of hostages were taken into Gaza and many have been tortured.

This, of course, was bad. Saying this was bad does not negate or marginalize the abuses and suffering Palestinians have experienced in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone, of every ideology, should be able to say that this was bad. But much of this campus failed that simple test.

Two days after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Stanford released milquetoast statements marking the “moment of intense emotion” and declaring “deep concern” over “the crisis in Israel and Palestine.” The official statements did not use the words Hamas or violence .

The absence of a clear institutional response led some teachers to take matters into their own hands. During a mandatory freshman seminar on October 10, a lecturer named Ameer Loggins tossed out his lesson plan to tell students that the actions of the Palestinian “military force” had been justified, that Israelis were colonizers, and that the Holocaust had been overemphasized, according to interviews I conducted with students in the class. Loggins then asked the Jewish students to identify themselves. He instructed one of them to “stand up, face the window, and he kind of kicked away his chair,” a witness told me. Loggins described this as an effort to demonstrate Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. (Loggins did not reply to a request for comment; a spokesperson for Stanford said that there were “different recollections of the details regarding what happened” in the class.)

“We’re only in our third week of college, and we’re afraid to be here,” three students in the class wrote in an email that night to administrators. “This isn’t what Stanford was supposed to be.” The class Loggins taught is called COLLEGE, short for “Civic, Liberal, and Global Education,” and it is billed as an effort to develop “the skills that empower and enable us to live together.”

Loggins was suspended from teaching duties and an investigation was opened; this angered pro-Palestine activists, who organized a petition that garnered more than 1,700 signatures contesting the suspension. A pamphlet from the petitioners argued that Loggins’s behavior had not been out of bounds.

The day after the class, Stanford put out a statement written by Saller and Jenny Martinez, the university provost, more forcefully condemning the Hamas attack. Immediately, this new statement generated backlash.

Pro-Palestine activists complained about it during an event held the same day, the first of several “teach-ins” about the conflict. Students gathered in one of Stanford’s dorms to “bear witness to the struggles of decolonization.” The grievances and pain shared by Palestinian students were real. They told of discrimination and violence, of frightened family members subjected to harsh conditions. But the most raucous reaction from the crowd was in response to a young woman who said, “You ask us, do we condemn Hamas? Fuck you!” She added that she was “so proud of my resistance.”

David Palumbo-Liu, a professor of comparative literature with a focus on postcolonial studies, also spoke at the teach-in, explaining to the crowd that “European settlers” had come to “replace” Palestine’s “native population.”

Palumbo-Liu is known as an intelligent and supportive professor, and is popular among students, who call him by his initials, DPL. I wanted to ask him about his involvement in the teach-in, so we met one day in a café a few hundred feet away from the tents. I asked if he could elaborate on what he’d said at the event about Palestine’s native population. He was happy to expand: This was “one of those discussions that could go on forever. Like, who is actually native? At what point does nativism lapse, right? Well, you haven’t been native for X number of years, so …” In the end, he said, “you have two people who both feel they have a claim to the land,” and “they have to live together. Both sides have to cede something.”

The struggle at Stanford, he told me, “is to find a way in which open discussions can be had that allow people to disagree.” It’s true that Stanford has utterly failed in its efforts to encourage productive dialogue. But I still found it hard to reconcile DPL’s words with his public statements on Israel, which he’d recently said on Facebook should be “the most hated nation in the world.” He also wrote: “When Zionists say they don’t feel ‘safe’ on campus, I’ve come to see that as they no longer feel immune to criticism of Israel.” He continued: “Well as the saying goes, get used to it.”

Z ionists, and indeed Jewish students of all political beliefs, have been given good reason to fear for their safety. They’ve been followed, harassed, and called derogatory racial epithets. At least one was told he was a “dirty Jew.” At least twice, mezuzahs have been ripped from students’ doors, and swastikas have been drawn in dorms. Arab and Muslim students also face alarming threats. The computer-science section leader, El Boudali, a pro-Palestine activist, told me he felt “safe personally,” but knew others who did not: “Some people have reported feeling like they’re followed, especially women who wear the hijab.”

In a remarkably short period of time, aggression and abuse have become commonplace, an accepted part of campus activism. In January, Jewish students organized an event dedicated to ameliorating anti-Semitism. It marked one of Saller’s first public appearances in the new year. Its topic seemed uncontroversial, and I thought it would generate little backlash.

Protests began before the panel discussion even started, with activists lining the stairs leading to the auditorium. During the event they drowned out the panelists, one of whom was Israel’s special envoy for combatting anti-Semitism, by demanding a cease-fire. After participants began cycling out into the dark, things got ugly.

Activists, their faces covered by keffiyehs or medical masks, confronted attendees. “Go back to Brooklyn!” a young woman shouted at Jewish students. One protester, who emerged as the leader of the group, said that she and her compatriots would “take all of your places and ensure Israel falls.” She told attendees to get “off our fucking campus” and launched into conspiracy theories about Jews being involved in “child trafficking.” As a rabbi tried to leave the event, protesters pursued him, chanting, “There is only one solution! Intifada revolution!”

At one point, some members of the group turned on a few Stanford employees, including another rabbi, an imam, and a chaplain, telling them, “We know your names and we know where you work.” The ringleader added: “And we’ll soon find out where you live.” The religious leaders formed a protective barrier in front of the Jewish students. The rabbi and the imam appeared to be crying.

scenes from student protest; row of tents at Stanford

S aller avoided the protest by leaving through another door. Early that morning, his private residence had been vandalized. Protesters frequently tell him he “can’t hide” and shout him down. “We charge you with genocide!” they chant, demanding that Stanford divest from Israel. (When asked whether Stanford actually invested in Israel, a spokesperson replied that, beyond small exposures from passive funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500, the university’s endowment “has no direct holdings in Israeli companies, or direct holdings in defense contractors.”)

When the university finally said the protest tents had to be removed, students responded by accusing Saller of suppressing their right to free speech. This is probably the last charge he expected to face. Saller once served as provost at the University of Chicago, which is known for holding itself to a position of strict institutional neutrality so that its students can freely explore ideas for themselves. Saller has a lifelong belief in First Amendment rights. But that conviction in impartial college governance does not align with Stanford’s behavior in recent years. Despite the fact that many students seemed largely uninterested in the headlines before this year, Stanford’s administrative leadership has often taken positions on political issues and events, such as the Paris climate conference and the murder of George Floyd. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Stanford’s Hoover Tower was lit up in blue and yellow, and the school released a statement in solidarity.

Thomas Chatterton Williams: Let the activists have their loathsome rallies

When we first met, a week before October 7, I asked Saller about this. Did Stanford have a moral duty to denounce the war in Ukraine, for example, or the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims in China? “On international political issues, no,” he said. “That’s not a responsibility for the university as a whole, as an institution.”

But when Saller tried to apply his convictions on neutrality for the first time as president, dozens of faculty members condemned the response, many pro-Israel alumni were outraged, donors had private discussions about pulling funding, and an Israeli university sent an open letter to Saller and Martinez saying, “Stanford’s administration has failed us.” The initial statement had tried to make clear that the school’s policy was not Israel-specific: It noted that the university would not take a position on the turmoil in Nagorno-Karabakh (where Armenians are undergoing ethnic cleansing) either. But the message didn’t get through.

Saller had to beat an awkward retreat or risk the exact sort of public humiliation that he, as caretaker president, had presumably been hired to avoid. He came up with a compromise that landed somewhere in the middle: an unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s “intolerable atrocities” paired with a statement making clear that Stanford would commit to institutional neutrality going forward.

“The events in Israel and Gaza this week have affected and engaged large numbers of students on our campus in ways that many other events have not,” the statement read. “This is why we feel compelled to both address the impact of these events on our campus and to explain why our general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus has limited the breadth of our comments thus far, and why you should not expect frequent commentary from us in the future.”

I asked Saller why he had changed tack on Israel and not on Nagorno-Karabakh. “We don’t feel as if we should be making statements on every war crime and atrocity,” he told me. This felt like a statement in and of itself.

In making such decisions, Saller works closely with Martinez, Stanford’s provost. I happened to interview her, too, a few days before October 7, not long after she’d been appointed. When I asked about her hopes for the job, she said that a “priority is ensuring an environment in which free speech and academic freedom are preserved.”

We talked about the so-called Leonard Law—a provision unique to California that requires private universities to be governed by the same First Amendment protections as public ones. This restricts what Stanford can do in terms of penalizing speech, putting it in a stricter bind than Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, or any of the other elite private institutions that have more latitude to set the standards for their campus (whether or not they have done so).

So I was surprised when, in December, the university announced that abstract calls for genocide “clearly violate Stanford’s Fundamental Standard, the code of conduct for all students at the university.” The statement was a response to the outrage following the congressional testimony of three university presidents—outrage that eventually led to the resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill. Gay and Magill, who had both previously held positions at Stanford, did not commit to punishing calls for the genocide of Jews.

Experts told me that Stanford’s policy is impossible to enforce—and Saller himself acknowledged as much in our March interview.

“Liz Magill is a good friend,” Saller told me, adding, “Having watched what happened at Harvard and Penn, it seemed prudent” to publicly state that Stanford rejected calls for genocide. But saying that those calls violate the code of conduct “is not the same thing as to say that we could actually punish it.”

Stanford’s leaders seem to be trying their best while adapting to the situation in real time. But the muddled messaging has created a policy of neutrality that does not feel neutral at all.

When we met back in November, I tried to get Saller to open up about his experience running an institution in turmoil. What’s it like to know that so many students seem to believe that he—a mild-mannered 71-year-old classicist who swing-dances with his anthropologist wife—is a warmonger? Saller was more candid than I expected—perhaps more candid than any prominent university president has been yet. We sat in the same conference room as we had in September. The weather hadn’t really changed. Yet I felt like I was sitting in front of a different person. He was hunched over and looked exhausted, and his voice broke when he talked about the loss of life in Gaza and Israel and “the fact that we’re caught up in it.” A capable administrator with decades of experience, Saller seemed almost at a loss. “It’s been a kind of roller coaster, to be honest.”

He said he hadn’t anticipated the deluge of the emails “blaming me for lack of moral courage.” Anything the university says seems bound to be wrong: “If I say that our position is that we grieve over the loss of innocent lives, that in itself will draw some hostile reactions.”

“I find that really difficult to navigate,” he said with a sigh.

By March, it seemed that his views had solidified. He said he knew he was “a target,” but he was not going to be pushed into issuing any more statements. The continuing crisis seems to have granted him new insight. “I am certain that whatever I say will not have any material effect on the war in Gaza.” It’s hard to argue with that.

P eople tend to blame the campus wars on two villains: dithering administrators and radical student activists. But colleges have always had dithering administrators and radical student activists. To my mind, it’s the average students who have changed.

Elite universities attract a certain kind of student: the overachieving striver who has won all the right accolades for all the right activities. Is it such a surprise that the kids who are trained in the constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look at the world like a series of multiple-choice questions, with clearly right or wrong answers? Or that they think they can gamify a political cause in the same way they ace a standardized test?

Everyone knows that the only reliable way to get into a school like Stanford is to be really good at looking really good. Now that they’re here, students know that one easy way to keep looking good is to side with the majority of protesters, and condemn Israel.

It’s not that there isn’t real anger and anxiety over what is happening in Gaza—there is, and justifiably so. I know that among the protesters are many people who are deeply connected to this issue. But they are not the majority. What really activates the crowds now seems less a principled devotion to Palestine or to pacifism than a desire for collective action, to fit in by embracing the fashionable cause of the moment—as if a centuries-old conflict in which both sides have stolen and killed could ever be a simple matter of right and wrong. In their haste to exhibit moral righteousness, many of the least informed protesters end up being the loudest and most uncompromising.

Today’s students grew up in the Trump era, in which violent rhetoric has become a normal part of political discourse and activism is as easy as reposting an infographic. Many young people have come to feel that being angry is enough to foment change. Furious at the world’s injustices and desperate for a simple way to express that fury, they don’t seem interested in any form of engagement more nuanced than backing a pure protagonist and denouncing an evil enemy. They don’t, always, seem that concerned with the truth.

At the protest last month to prevent the removal of the sit-in, an activist in a pink Women’s March “pussy hat” shouted that no rape was committed by Hamas on October 7. “There hasn’t been proof of these rape accusations,” a student told me in a separate conversation, criticizing the Blue and White Tent for spreading what he considered to be misinformation about sexual violence. (In March, a United Nations report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence,” including “rape and gang rape,” occurred in multiple locations on October 7, as well as “clear and convincing information” on the “rape and sexualized torture” of hostages.) “The level of propaganda” surrounding Hamas, he told me, “is just unbelievable.”

The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong. You don’t have to understand what you’re arguing for in order to argue for it. You don’t have to be able to name the river or the sea under discussion to chant “From the river to the sea.” This kind of obliviousness explains how one of my friends, a gay activist, can justify Hamas’s actions, even though it would have the two of us—an outspoken queer person and a Jewish reporter—killed in a heartbeat. A similar mentality can exist on the other side: I have heard students insist on the absolute righteousness of Israel yet seem uninterested in learning anything about what life is like in Gaza.

I’m familiar with the pull of achievement culture—after all, I’m a product of the same system. I fell in love with Stanford as a 7-year-old, lying on the floor of an East Coast library and picturing all the cool technology those West Coast geniuses were dreaming up. I cried when I was accepted; I spent the next few months scrolling through the course catalog, giddy with anticipation. I wanted to learn everything.

I learned more than I expected. Within my first week here, someone asked me: “Why are all Jews so rich?” In 2016, when Stanford’s undergraduate senate had debated a resolution against anti-Semitism, one of its members argued that the idea of “Jews controlling the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions” represented “a very valid discussion.” (He apologized, and the resolution passed.) In my dorm last year, a student discussed being Jewish and awoke the next day to swastikas and a portrait of Hitler affixed to his door.

David Frum: There is no right to bully and harass

I grew up secularly, with no strong affiliation to Jewish culture. When I found out as a teenager that some of my ancestors had hidden their identity from their children and that dozens of my relatives had died in the Holocaust (something no living member of my family had known), I felt the barest tremor of identity. After I saw so many people I know cheering after October 7, I felt something stronger stir. I know others have experienced something similar. Even a professor texted me to say that she felt Jewish in a way she never had before.

But my frustration with the conflict on campus has little to do with my own identity. Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say “Fuck Israel” or “Free Palestine” to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was “unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,” but that it had “met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.” As a friend emailed me not long ago: “A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.”

Readers may be tempted to discount the conduct displayed at Stanford. After all, the thinking goes, these are privileged kids doing what they always do: embracing faux-radicalism in college before taking jobs in fintech or consulting. These students, some might say, aren’t representative of America.

And yet they are representative of something: of the conduct many of the most accomplished students in my generation have accepted as tolerable, and what that means for the future of our country. I admire activism. We need people willing to protest what they see as wrong and take on entrenched systems of repression. But we also need to read, learn, discuss, accept the existence of nuance, embrace diversity of thought, and hold our own allies to high standards. More than ever, we need universities to teach young people how to do all of this.

F or so long , Stanford’s physical standoff seemed intractable. Then, in early February, a storm swept in, and the natural world dictated its own conclusion.

Heavy rains flooded campus. For hours, the students battled to save their tents. The sit-in activists used sandbags and anything else they could find to hold back the water—at one point, David Palumbo-Liu, the professor, told me he stood in the lashing downpour to anchor one of the sit-in’s tents with his own body. When the storm hit, many of the Jewish activists had been attending a discussion on anti-Semitism. They raced back and struggled to salvage the Blue and White Tent, but it was too late—the wind had ripped it out of the ground.

The next day, the weary Jewish protesters returned to discover that their space had been taken.

A new collection of tents had been set up by El Boudali, the pro-Palestine activist, and a dozen friends. He said they were there to protest Islamophobia and to teach about Islam and jihad, and that they were a separate entity from the Sit-In to Stop Genocide, though I observed students cycling between the tents. Palestinian flags now flew from the bookstore to the quad.

Administrators told me they’d quickly informed El Boudali and his allies that the space had been reserved by the Jewish advocates, and offered to help move them to a different location. But the protesters told me they had no intention of going. (El Boudali later said that they did not take over the entire space, and would have been “happy to exist side by side, but they wanted to kick us off entirely from that lawn.”)

When it was clear that the area where they’d set up their tents would not be ceded back to the pro-Israel group willingly, Stanford changed course and decided to clear everyone out in one fell swoop. On February 8, school officials ordered all students to vacate the plaza overnight. The university was finally going to enforce its rule prohibiting people from sleeping outside on campus and requiring the removal of belongings from the plaza between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. The order cited the danger posed by the storm as a justification for changing course and, probably hoping to avoid allegations of bias, described the decision as “viewpoint-neutral.”

That didn’t work.

About a week of protests, led by the sit-in organizers, followed. Chants were chanted. More demands for a “river to the sea” solution to the Israel problem were made. A friend boasted to me about her willingness to be arrested. Stanford sent a handful of staff members, who stood near balloons left over from an event earlier in the day. They were there, one of them told me, to “make students feel supported and safe.”

In the end, Saller and Martinez agreed to talk with the leaders of the sit-in about their demands to divest the university and condemn Israel, under the proviso that the activists comply with Stanford’s anti-camping guidelines “regardless of the outcome of discussions.” Eight days after they were first instructed to leave, 120 days after setting up camp, the sit-in protesters slept in their own beds. In defiance of the university’s instructions, they left behind their tents. But sometime in the very early hours of the morning, law-enforcement officers confiscated the structures. The area was cordoned off without any violence and the plaza filled once more with electric skateboards and farmers’ markets.

The conflict continues in its own way. Saller was just shouted down by protesters chanting “No peace on stolen land” at a Family Weekend event, and protesters later displayed an effigy of him covered in blood. Students still feel tense; Saller still seems worried. He told me that the university is planning to change all manner of things—residential-assistant training, new-student orientation, even the acceptance letters that students receive—in hopes of fostering a culture of greater tolerance. But no campus edict or panel discussion can address a problem that is so much bigger than our university.

At one rally last fall, a speaker expressed disillusionment about the power of “peaceful resistance” on college campuses. “What is there left to do but to take up arms?” The crowd cheered as he said Israel must be destroyed. But what would happen to its citizens? I’d prefer to believe that most protesters chanting “Palestine is Arab” and shouting that we must “smash the Zionist settler state” don’t actually think Jews should be killed en masse. But can one truly be so ignorant as to advocate widespread violence in the name of peace?

When the world is rendered in black-and-white—portrayed as a simple fight between colonizer and colonized—the answer is yes. Solutions, by this logic, are absolute: Israel or Palestine, nothing in between. Either you support liberation of the oppressed or you support genocide. Either Stanford is all good or all bad; all in favor of free speech or all authoritarian; all anti-Semitic or all Islamophobic.

At January’s anti-anti-Semitism event, I watched an exchange between a Jewish attendee and a protester from a few feet away. “Are you pro-Palestine?” the protester asked.

“Yes,” the attendee responded, and he went on to describe his disgust with the human-rights abuses Palestinians have faced for years.

“But are you a Zionist?”

“Then we are enemies.”

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Saving Private Dadizon: Memorial to Biliran’s World War I hero saved from obscurity

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by Mary Lailani Tupaz
Apr. 1, 2024 11:16 am in Features

Andres P. Dadizon was a Filipino soldier from Barangay Bunga in Cabucgayan, Biliran, who answered the call to arms during the first world war.

He joined the US Army and went to Europe to fight for the stars and stripes.

Sadly, he lost his life in battle, but his legacy lives on and continues to inspire generations.

For years, Dadizon's memory remained dormant and forgotten, lost with time. However, fate had other plans for the Biliranon hero.

Restoring the local pride

His statue was installed at Camp Bumpus, formerly known as the Leyte Park Hotel, which served as the headquarters of the Philippine Constabulary.

However, when the camp was transferred to Campetic, Palo, Leyte, the statue was neglected and left to deteriorate. Typhoon Yolanda struck in 2013, and the statue was dragged to the shore.

In 2021, the provincial government of Biliran spearheaded a campaign to restore Dadizon's statue to its rightful place in history.

This was made possible through the tireless efforts of the Philippine Tourism Authority (PTA), the Department of Tourism (DOT), and the unwavering dedication of local officials, including former Governor Roger Espina.

Dadizon's statue was rescued from obscurity and guided back to its rightful home in Biliran province by those who refused to let his memory perish, especially Allan Paul U. Tubis, his relative.

Tribute to heroism

On December 20, 2023, Executive Secretary Lucas P. Bersamin signed Presidential Proclamation No. 430. The proclamation recognized Dadizon's patriotism, courage, and dedication to the country and the province. To honor him, the Biliran Police Provincial Office was renamed "Camp Private Andres P. Dadizon, Police Regional Office 8."

During the Provincial Statistical Committee's First Quarter Meeting on March 18, Police Lieutenant Colonel Teodora P. Salarza confirmed the new name of their camp. The Sangguniang Panlalawigan of Biliran had already approved Resolution No. 204, series of 2021, on August 20, 2021, in support of the new name.

Colonel Felix G. Gervacio Jr. explained that although they have started using Camp Private Andres P. Dadizon in their letterheads this March, the official launch of the new name is scheduled for May 11, during the 32nd anniversary of Biliran.

This decision was not just an administrative matter but also a tribute to Dadizon, whose legacy had been long overdue for acknowledgment. The unveiling ceremony will take place after the rehabilitated statue of Dadizon is installed at the camp.

Dadizon's statue stands tall in Biliran, a testament to heroism, honor, and sacrifice. His journey from forgotten warrior to revered icon highlights the power of remembrance and the resilience of the human spirit, etching his legacy into the province's fabric. It serves as a reminder of the unyielding spirit of those who call this land their own. (MLT, PIA Biliran)

Andres P. Dadizon
Camp Private Andres P. Dadizon

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Mary Lailani Tupaz

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Israel raids Gaza hospitals, as poll shows Americans disapprove of Israeli war conduct

Israeli forces are carrying out “an intelligence-based operation” at al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis, the Israel Defense Forces said Wednesday, without giving further details. The IDF said forces are also continuing their raid on al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, which began over a week ago. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin urged Israel to abandon military plans for a ground offensive in Rafah, the southern Gaza city where more than 1 million Palestinians have crowded to escape fighting elsewhere in the enclave.

Israel strikes Lebanese paramedic center, news agency says; Hezbollah hits northern Israel
Most Americans oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, poll finds
Israeli forces expand Gaza hospital raids

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Here's what to know, live coverage contributors 13.

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Republicans hug Netanyahu tighter as Democratic tensions with Israel war strategy boil March 20, 2024 Republicans hug Netanyahu tighter as Democratic tensions with Israel war strategy boil March 20, 2024
Blinken begins new round of Gaza talks in Saudi Arabia March 20, 2024 Blinken begins new round of Gaza talks in Saudi Arabia March 20, 2024
Blinken to visit Israel amid tensions over plan to invade Rafah March 20, 2024 Blinken to visit Israel amid tensions over plan to invade Rafah March 20, 2024

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Israel-Gaza war

Israel-Gaza war: Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to make a quick stop in Israel as tensions are rising between the United States and Israel over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to invade Rafah . The Israeli military said Wednesday that it was continuing its raid on al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, where people said they were trapped in dire conditions.

Middle East conflict: Tensions in the region continue to rise. As Israeli troops aim to take control of the Gaza-Egypt border crossing, officials in Cairo warn that the move would undermine the 1979 peace treaty. Meanwhile, there’s a diplomatic scramble to avert full-scale war between Israel and Lebanon .

U.S. involvement: U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria killed dozens of Iranian-linked militants , according to Iraqi officials. The strikes were the first round of retaliatory action by the Biden administration for an attack in Jordan that killed three U.S. service members .

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Opinion Guest Essay

The Great Rupture in American Jewish Life

Credit... Daniel Benneworth-Gray

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By Peter Beinart

Mr. Beinart is the editor at large of Jewish Currents and a journalist and writer who has written extensively on the Middle East, Jewish life and American foreign policy.

March 22, 2024

F or the last decade or so, an ideological tremor has been unsettling American Jewish life. Since Oct. 7, it has become an earthquake. It concerns the relationship between liberalism and Zionism, two creeds that for more than half a century have defined American Jewish identity. In the years to come, American Jews will face growing pressure to choose between them.

They will face that pressure because Israel’s war in Gaza has supercharged a transformation on the American left. Solidarity with Palestinians is becoming as essential to leftist politics as support for abortion rights or opposition to fossil fuels. And as happened during the Vietnam War and the struggle against South African apartheid, leftist fervor is reshaping the liberal mainstream. In December, the United Automobile Workers demanded a cease-fire and formed a divestment working group to consider the union’s “economic ties to the conflict.” In January, the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force called for a cease-fire as well. In February, the leadership of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the nation’s oldest Black Protestant denomination, called on the United States to halt aid to the Jewish state. Across blue America, many liberals who once supported Israel or avoided the subject are making the Palestinian cause their own.

This transformation remains in its early stages. In many prominent liberal institutions — most significantly, the Democratic Party — supporters of Israel remain not only welcome but also dominant. But the leaders of those institutions no longer represent much of their base. The Democratic majority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer, acknowledged this divide in a speech on Israel on the Senate floor last week. He reiterated his longstanding commitment to the Jewish state, though not its prime minister. But he also conceded, in the speech’s most remarkable line, that he “can understand the idealism that inspires so many young people in particular to support a one-state solution” — a solution that does not involve a Jewish state. Those are the words of a politician who understands that his party is undergoing profound change.

The American Jews most committed to Zionism, the ones who run establishment institutions, understand that liberal America is becoming less ideologically hospitable. And they are responding by forging common cause with the American right. It’s no surprise that the Anti-Defamation League, which only a few years ago harshly criticized Donald Trump’s immigration policies, recently honored his son-in-law and former senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

Mr. Trump himself recognizes the emerging political split. “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” he said in an interview published on Monday. “They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.” It’s typical Trumpian indecency and hyperbole, but it’s rooted in a political reality. For American Jews who want to preserve their country’s unconditional support for Israel for another generation, there is only one reliable political partner: a Republican Party that views standing for Palestinian rights as part of the “woke” agenda.

The American Jews who are making a different choice — jettisoning Zionism because they can’t reconcile it with the liberal principle of equality under the law — garner less attention because they remain further from power. But their numbers are larger than many recognize, especially among millennials and Gen Z. And they face their own dilemmas. They are joining a Palestine solidarity movement that is growing larger, but also more radical, in response to Israel’s destruction of Gaza. That growing radicalism has produced a paradox: A movement that welcomes more and more American Jews finds it harder to explain where Israeli Jews fit into its vision of Palestinian liberation.

The emerging rupture between American liberalism and American Zionism constitutes the greatest transformation in American Jewish politics in half a century. It will redefine American Jewish life for decades to come.

A photograph of a group of people in front of the Capitol building. One woman holds a sign that says “Jews say: Ceasefire Now.” Another person holds a sign that says “No to war, no to apartheid.”

“A merican Jews,” writes Marc Dollinger in his book “Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America,” have long depicted themselves as “guardians of liberal America.” Since they came to the United States in large numbers around the turn of the 20th century, Jews have been wildly overrepresented in movements for civil, women’s, labor and gay rights. Since the 1930s, despite their rising prosperity, they have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. For generations of American Jews, the icons of American liberalism — Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Gloria Steinem — have been secular saints.

The American Jewish love affair with Zionism dates from the early 20th century as well. But it came to dominate communal life only after Israel’s dramatic victory in the 1967 war exhilarated American Jews eager for an antidote to Jewish powerlessness during the Holocaust. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which was nearly bankrupt on the eve of the 1967 war, had become American Jewry’s most powerful institution by the 1980s. American Jews, wrote Albert Vorspan, a leader of Reform Judaism, in 1988, “have made of Israel an icon — a surrogate faith, surrogate synagogue, surrogate God.”

Given the depth of these twin commitments, it’s no surprise that American Jews have long sought to fuse them by describing Zionism as a liberal cause. It has always been a strange pairing. American liberals generally consider themselves advocates of equal citizenship irrespective of ethnicity, religion and race. Zionism — or at the least the version that has guided Israel since its founding — requires Jewish dominance. From 1948 to 1966, Israel held most of its Palestinian citizens under military law; since 1967 it has ruled millions of Palestinians who hold no citizenship at all. Even so, American Jews could until recently assert their Zionism without having their liberal credentials challenged.

The primary reason was the absence from American public discourse of Palestinians, the people whose testimony would cast those credentials into greatest doubt. In 1984, the Palestinian American literary critic Edward Said argued that in the West, Palestinians lack “permission to narrate” their own experience. For decades after he wrote those words, they remained true. A study by the University of Arizona’s Maha Nassar found that of the opinion articles about Palestinians published in The New York Times and The Washington Post between 2000 and 2009, Palestinians themselves wrote roughly 1 percent.

But in recent years, Palestinian voices, while still embattled and even censored , have begun to carry. Palestinians have turned to social media to combat their exclusion from the press. In an era of youth-led activism, they have joined intersectional movements forged by parallel experiences of discrimination and injustice. Meanwhile, Israel — under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu for most of the past two decades — has lurched to the right, producing politicians so openly racist that their behavior cannot be defended in liberal terms.

Many Palestine solidarity activists identify as leftists, not liberals. But like the activists of the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements, they have helped change liberal opinion with their radical critiques. In 2002, according to Gallup , Democrats sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 34 points. By early 2023, they favored the Palestinians by 11 points. And because opinion about Israel cleaves along generational lines, that pro-Palestinian skew is much greater among the young. According to a Quinnipiac University poll in November, Democrats under the age of 35 sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israelis by 58 points.

Given this generational gulf, universities offer a preview of the way many liberals — or “progressives,” a term that straddles liberalism and leftism and enjoys more currency among young Americans — may view Zionism in the years to come. Supporting Palestine has become a core feature of progressive politics on many campuses. At Columbia, for example, 94 campus organizations — including the Vietnamese Students Association, the Reproductive Justice Collective and Poetry Slam, Columbia’s “only recreational spoken word club” — announced in November that they “see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation.” As a result, Zionist Jewish students find themselves at odds with most of their politically active peers.

Accompanying this shift, on campus and beyond, has been a rise in Israel-related antisemitism. It follows a pattern in American history. From the hostility toward German Americans during World War I to violence against American Muslims after Sept. 11 and assaults on Asian Americans during the Covid pandemic, Americans have a long and ugly tradition of expressing their hostility toward foreign governments or movements by targeting compatriots who share a religion, ethnicity or nationality with those overseas adversaries. Today, tragically, some Americans who loathe Israel are taking it out on American Jews. (Palestinian Americans, who have endured multiple violent hate crimes since Oct. 7, are experiencing their own version of this phenomenon.) The spike in antisemitism since Oct. 7 follows a pattern. Five years ago, the political scientist Ayal Feinberg, using data from 2001 and 2014, found that reported antisemitic incidents in the United States spike when the Israeli military conducts a substantial military operation.

Attributing the growing discomfort of pro-Israel Jewish students entirely to antisemitism, however, misses something fundamental. Unlike establishment Jewish organizations, Jewish students often distinguish between bigotry and ideological antagonism. In a 2022 study , the political scientist Eitan Hersh found that more than 50 percent of Jewish college students felt “they pay a social cost for supporting the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.” And yet, in general, Dr. Hersh reported, “the students do not fear antisemitism.”

Surveys since Oct. 7 find something similar. Asked in November in a Hillel International poll to describe the climate on campus since the start of the war, 20 percent of Jewish students answered “unsafe” and 23 percent answered “scary.” By contrast, 45 percent answered “uncomfortable” and 53 percent answered “tense.” A survey that same month by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that only 37 percent of American Jewish voters ages 18 to 35 consider campus antisemitism a “very serious problem,” compared with nearly 80 percent of American Jewish voters over the age of 35.

While some young pro-Israel American Jews experience antisemitism, they more frequently report ideological exclusion. As Zionism becomes associated with the political right, their experiences on progressive campuses are coming to resemble the experiences of young Republicans. The difference is that unlike young Republicans, most young American Zionists were raised to believe that theirs was a liberal creed. When their parents attended college, that assertion was rarely challenged. On the same campuses where their parents felt at home, Jewish students who view Zionism as central to their identity now often feel like outsiders.

In 1979, Mr. Said observed that in the West, “to be a Palestinian is in political terms to be an outlaw.” In much of America — including Washington — that remains true. But within progressive institutions one can glimpse the beginning of a historic inversion. Often, it’s now the Zionists who feel like outlaws.

G iven the organized American Jewish community’s professed devotion to liberal principles, which include free speech, one might imagine that Jewish institutions would greet this ideological shift by urging pro-Israel students to tolerate and even learn from their pro-Palestinian peers. Such a stance would flow naturally from the statements establishment Jewish groups have made in the past. A few years ago, the Anti-Defamation League declared that “our country’s universities serve as laboratories for the exchange of differing viewpoints and beliefs. Offensive, hateful speech is protected by the Constitution’s First Amendment.”

But as pro-Palestinian sentiment has grown in progressive America, pro-Israel Jewish leaders have apparently made an exception for anti-Zionism. While still claiming to support free speech on campus, the ADL last October asked college presidents to investigate local chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine to determine whether they violated university regulations or state or federal laws, a demand that the American Civil Liberties Union warned could “chill speech” and “betray the spirit of free inquiry.” After the University of Pennsylvania hosted a Palestinian literature festival last fall, Marc Rowan, chair of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York and chair of the board of advisers of Penn’s Wharton business school, condemned the university’s president for giving the festival Penn’s “imprimatur.” In December, he encouraged trustees to alter university policies in ways that Penn’s branch of the American Association of University Professors warn ed could “silence and punish speech with which trustees disagree.”

In this effort to limit pro-Palestinian speech, establishment Jewish leaders are finding their strongest allies on the authoritarian right. Pro-Trump Republicans have their own censorship agenda: They want to stop schools and universities from emphasizing America’s history of racial and other oppression. Calling that pedagogy antisemitic makes it easier to ban or defund. At a much discussed congressional hearing in December featuring the presidents of Harvard, Penn and M.I.T., the Republican representative Virginia Foxx noted that Harvard teaches courses like “Race and Racism in the Making of the United States as a Global Power” and hosts seminars such as “Scientific Racism and Anti-Racism: History and Recent Perspectives” before declaring that “Harvard also, not coincidentally but causally, was ground zero for antisemitism following Oct. 7.”

Ms. Foxx’s view is typical. While some Democrats also equate anti-Zionism and antisemitism, the politicians and business leaders most eager to suppress pro-Palestinian speech are conservatives who link such speech to the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda they despise. Elise Stefanik, a Trump acolyte who has accused Harvard of “caving to the woke left,” became the star of that congressional hearing by demanding that Harvard’s president , Claudine Gay, punish students who chant slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” (Ms. Gay was subsequently forced to resign following charges of plagiarism.) Elon Musk, who in November said that the phrase “from the river to the sea” was banned from his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), the following month declared , “D.E.I. must die.” The first governor to ban Students for Justice in Palestine chapters at his state’s public universities was Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who has also signed legislation that limits what those universities can teach about race and gender.

This alignment between the American Jewish organizational establishment and the Trumpist right is not limited to universities. If the ADL has aligned with Republicans who want to silence “woke” activists on campus, AIPAC has joined forces with Republicans who want to disenfranchise “woke” voters. In the 2022 midterm elections, AIPAC endorsed at least 109 Republicans who opposed certifying the 2020 election. For an organization single-mindedly focused on sustaining unconditional U.S. support for Israel, that constituted a rational decision. Since Republican members of Congress don’t have to mollify pro-Palestinian voters, they’re AIPAC’s most dependable allies. And if many of those Republicans used specious claims of Black voter fraud to oppose the democratic transfer of power in 2020 — and may do so again — that’s a price AIPAC seems to be prepared to pay.

F or the many American Jews who still consider themselves both progressives and Zionists, this growing alliance between leading Zionist institutions and a Trumpist Republican Party is uncomfortable. But in the short term, they have an answer: politicians like President Biden, whose views about both Israel and American democracy roughly reflect their own. In his speech last week, Mr. Schumer called these liberal Zionists American Jewry’s “silent majority.”

For the moment he may be right. In the years to come, however, as generational currents pull the Democratic Party in a more pro-Palestinian direction and push America’s pro-Israel establishment to the right, liberal Zionists will likely find it harder to reconcile their two faiths. Young American Jews offer a glimpse into that future, in which a sizable wing of American Jewry decides that to hold fast to its progressive principles it must jettison Zionism and embrace equal citizenship in Israel and Palestine, as well as in the United States.

For an American Jewish establishment that equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, these anti-Zionist Jews are inconvenient. Sometimes, pro-Israel Jewish organizations pretend they don’t exist. In November, after Columbia suspended two anti-Zionist campus groups, the ADL thanked university leaders for acting “to protect Jewish students” — even though one of the suspended groups was Jewish Voice for Peace. At other times, pro-Israel leaders describe anti-Zionist Jews as a negligible fringe. If American Jews are divided over the war in Gaza, Andrés Spokoiny, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Funders Network, an organization for Jewish philanthropists, declared in December, “the split is 98 percent/2 percent.”

Among older American Jews, this assertion of a Zionist consensus contains some truth. But among younger American Jews, it’s false. In 2021, even before Israel’s current far-right government took power, the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 38 percent of American Jewish voters under the age of 40 viewed Israel as an apartheid state, compared with 47 percent who said it’s not. In November, it revealed that 49 percent of American Jewish voters ages 18 to 35 opposed Mr. Biden’s request for additional military aid to Israel. On many campuses, Jewish students are at the forefront of protests for a cease-fire and divestment from Israel. They don’t speak for all — and maybe not even most — of their Jewish peers. But they represent far more than 2 percent.

These progressive Jews are, as the U.S. editor of The London Review of Books, Adam Shatz, noted to me, a double minority. Their anti-Zionism makes them a minority among American Jews, while their Jewishness makes them a minority in the Palestine solidarity movement. Fifteen years ago, when the liberal Zionist group J Street was intent on being the “ blocking back ” for President Barack Obama’s push for a two-state solution, some liberal Jews imagined themselves leading the push to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Today, the prospect of partition has diminished, and Palestinians increasingly set the terms of activist criticism of Israel. That discourse, which is peppered with terms like “apartheid” and “decolonization," is generally hostile to a Jewish state within any borders.

There’s nothing antisemitic about envisioning a future in which Palestinians and Jews coexist on the basis of legal equality rather than Jewish supremacy. But in pro-Palestine activist circles in the United States, coexistence has receded as a theme. In 1999, Mr. Said argued for “a binational Israeli-Palestinian state” that offered “self-determination for both peoples.” In his 2007 book, “One Country,” Ali Abunimah, a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, an influential source of pro-Palestine news and opinion, imagined one state whose name reflected the identities of both major communities that inhabit it. The terms “‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ are dear to those who use them and they should not be abandoned,” he argued. “The country could be called Yisrael-Falastin in Hebrew and Filastin-Isra’il in Arabic.”

In recent years, however, as Israel has moved to the right, pro-Palestinian discourse in the United States has hardened. The phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which dates from the 1960s but has gained new prominence since Oct. 7, does not acknowledge Palestine and Israel’s binational character. To many American Jews, in fact, the phrase suggests a Palestine free of Jews. It sounds expulsionist, if not genocidal. It’s an ironic charge, given that it is Israel that today controls the land between the river and the sea, whose leaders openly advocate the mass exodus of Palestinians and that the International Court of Justice says could plausibly be committing genocide in Gaza.

Palestinian scholars like Maha Nassar and Ahmad Khalidi argue that “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” does not imply the subjugation of Jews. It instead reflects the longstanding Palestinian belief that Palestine should have become an independent country when released from European colonial control, a vision that does not preclude Jews from living freely alongside their Muslim and Christian neighbors. The Jewish groups closest to the Palestine solidarity movement agree: Jewish Voice for Peace’s Los Angeles chapter has argued that the slogan is no more anti-Jewish than the phrase “Black lives matter” is anti-white. And if the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States calls for the genocide of Jews, it’s hard to explain why so many Jews have joined its ranks. Rabbi Alissa Wise, an organizer of Rabbis for Cease-Fire, estimates that other than Palestinians, no other group has been as prominent in the protests against the war as Jews.

Still, imagining a “free Palestine” from the river to the sea requires imagining that Israeli Jews will become Palestinians, which erases their collective identity. That’s a departure from the more inclusive vision that Mr. Said and Mr. Abunimah outlined years ago. It’s harder for Palestinian activists to offer that more inclusive vision when they are watching Israel bomb and starve Gaza. But the rise of Hamas makes it even more essential.

Jews who identify with the Palestinian struggle may find it difficult to offer this critique. Many have defected from the Zionist milieu in which they were raised. Having made that painful transition, which can rupture relations with friends and family, they may be disinclined to question their new ideological home. It’s frightening to risk alienating one community when you’ve already alienated another. Questioning the Palestine solidarity movement also violates the notion, prevalent in some quarters of the American left, that members of an oppressor group should not second-guess representatives of the oppressed.

But these identity hierarchies suppress critical thought. Palestinians aren’t a monolith, and progressive Jews aren’t merely allies. They are members of a small and long-persecuted people who have not only the right but also the obligation to care about Jews in Israel, and to push the Palestine solidarity movement to more explicitly include them in its vision of liberation, in the spirit of the Freedom Charter adopted during apartheid by the African National Congress and its allies, which declared in its second sentence that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, Black and white.”

For many American Jews, it is painful to watch their children’s or grandchildren’s generation question Zionism. It is infuriating to watch students at liberal institutions with which they once felt aligned treat Zionism as a racist creed. It is tempting to attribute all this to antisemitism, even if that requires defining many young American Jews as antisemites themselves.

But the American Jews who insist that Zionism and liberalism remain compatible should ask themselves why Israel now attracts the fervent support of Representative Stefanik but repels the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the United Automobile Workers. Why it enjoys the admiration of Elon Musk and Viktor Orban but is labeled a perpetrator of apartheid by Human Rights Watch and likened to the Jim Crow South by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Why it is more likely to retain unconditional American support if Mr. Trump succeeds in turning the United States into a white Christian supremacist state than if he fails.

For many decades, American Jews have built our political identity on a contradiction: Pursue equal citizenship here; defend group supremacy there. Now here and there are converging. In the years to come, we will have to choose.

Peter Beinart ( @PeterBeinart ) is a professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also the editor at large of Jewish Currents and writes The Beinart Notebook , a weekly newsletter.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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War and Peace in Mindanao Essay Example
(PDF) The Mindanao Conflict in the Philippines: Ethno-Religious War or
U.S. troops marching on Mindanao Island, Philippines, 1945
Battle of Mindanao
Understanding the Mindanao Conflict
Situation Alert: Continuing conflict in Mindanao, Philippines, causes

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PDF The Mindanao Conflict in the Philippines
century, and after the end of the Philippine-American War, was most of the island brought under central control, although hostility and conflict remained endemic. Thus, persisting for some five centuries, the Mindanao conflict is the second-oldest on earth, after the conflict between North and South Sudan (which can be dated back to the 10. th
Interview: the Struggle for Peace in Mindanao, the Philippines
The impact and social cost of the decades-old war to the people and the entire nation have been vicious and costly. The infographic on the cost of war in Mindanao (see below) explains previous Philippine governments' huge spending on wars in Mindanao, which clearly talks about 'lives lost' rather than 'lives improved'.
Peacebuilding from the grassroots: Resolving conflicts in Mindanao
The peace process between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) was hailed as a significant step towards ending four decades of armed conflict in Mindanao, southern Philippines. In 2018, the Philippine Congress ratified the Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL) which aims to carve a self-ruled region for Muslims in Mindanao.
The Mindanao conflict in the Philippines : roots, costs, and potential
This paper summarizes the roots and status of the conflict in Mindanao, a large island with a current population of about 18 million -the second oldest internal conflict . The Mindanao conflict in the Philippines : roots, costs, and potential peace dividend
(PDF) Mindanao Conflict in the Philippines: Ethno-Religious War or
The war in Mindanao was gory, brutal and costly. The ... Identity, and Conflict: The Case of the Philippine Moros', Working Papers, Social and Cultural Issues. 1(96) (Singapore: Institute of ...
Making Peace in Deeply Divided Societies: the Case of Mindanao in the
The southernmost island of Mindanao has faced almost three decades of civil war between the Christian-dominated Philippine government in Manila and the Moro Muslims who once sought for political independence. In finally securing the peace among ... Related Papers. Peacemaking and State-Society Interactions in Conflict-torn Mindanao, Philippines ...
[PDF] The Mindanao Conflict in the Philippines: Roots, Costs, and
This paper summarizes the roots and status of the conflict in Mindanao, a large island with a current population of about 18 million -the second oldest internal conflict in the world- briefly examines the social costs, estimates the direct economic costs, lists the indirect costs and the dynamic advantages from cessation of the conflicts, and suggests certain key criteria for lasting ...
Peace Process In Mindanao, The Philippines: Evolution And Lessons
However, the Mindanao process is now a crucial reference for other peace processes, given that it is the most recent. Of the 59 armed conflicts that have ended in the last 30 years, 44 concluded ...
PDF Philippines: Shattered lives: Beyond the 2008-2009 Mindanao armed
BEYOND THE 2008-2009 MINDANAO ARMED CONFLICT "We inherited an age-old conflict in Mindanao, exacerbated by a politically popular but near-sighted policy of massive retaliation. This only provoked the other side to continue the war." - President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo during her State of the Nation Address, 27 July 2009 REPORT SUMMARY
(PDF) The Mindanao conflict in the Philippines: Roots, costs, and
In addition to better law enforcement, strengthening of the rule of law in central and southwestern Mindanao will also call for recognizing in practice the need for co-existence of different legal traditions—Islam- 10 "On the Economic Consequences of Civil War," Oxford Economic Papers, 51, 1999.
11 The Philippines: Peace Talks and Autonomy in Mindanao
Under the 1973 Constitution, which consolidated executive and legislative power in Marcos' hands, this simply meant he would decide. 10 In 1977, Marcos unilaterally created two separate autonomous zones, one in central Mindanao and one in western Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago, which were run by co-opted Moro elites. Fighting resumed, but ...
The Importance of Settling Clan Feuds for Peace in the Philippines
Clan feuds, or rido, are a constant threat to peace and stability across the territories of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) in southern Philippines. Armed conflict displaces tens of thousands of people in Mindanao each year and rido is one of the causes of these displacements. The persistent cycles of rido contribute to other forms of social issues and violence ...
The Long Road to Peace in the Southern Philippines
Over the past five and a half years, while the world has focused on Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte's excesses, particularly his deadly war on drugs, a groundbreaking possibility for peace has emerged under the first president of the Philippines to hail from Mindanao, the second-largest island located in the southern part of the archipelago.
Fighting and talking: A Mindanao conflict timeline
Recent news of conflict in Mindanao and negotiations for a lasting peace have a long and deep history that stretches from the current Aquino Administration to the Marcos regime. ... Joseph Estrada (1998-2001) 2000: Then President Joseph Estrada suspends the peace talks and declares an "all-out war" against the MILF. By July of that year, the ...
Philippines: 'Battle of Marawi' leaves trail of death and destruction
The 'Battle of Marawi': Death and destruction in the Philippines is the first detailed human rights analysis of the conflict, based on a research trip to Lanao del Sur, Mindanao in September. It documents how IS-allied militants targeted Christian civilians for the worst of the abuses, including at least 25 extrajudicial killings, mass ...
PDF The Philippines' Moro Conflict: the Problems and Prospects in The Quest
peace are dwindling by the minute as the conflict continues to devastate the Mindanao region. For the Moro people, the conflict is representative of their ongoing effort to recover their sovereignty, an objective that the liberation fronts are trying to achieve on their collective behalf. For the Philippine government, the current goal is to keep
PDF The Quest for Peace in the Literatures of Mindanao
Literatures of Mindanao Abstract This essay explores the wisdom of the ancients in the pursuit of peace among Mindanao's different communities as inscribed in the people's folk litera-tures. Many of Mindanao's ethnic communities draw lessons from various epics which are orally chanted or sung whose motifs are usually about war and conflict.
Moro conflict
The Moro conflict was an insurgency in the Mindanao region of the Philippines which involved multiple armed groups. Peace deals have been signed between the Philippine government and two major armed groups, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), but other smaller armed groups continue to exist. In 2017, the peace council settled around 138 clan ...
The Mindanao Conflict in the Philippines: Ethno-Religious War or
Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The Mindanao Conflict in the Philippines: Ethno-Religious War or Economic Conflict? ... The war in Mindanao was gory, brutal and costly. The price paid included an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 people killed, more than a million people made homeless and destitute, approximately ...
War and Peace in the Philippines
The implementation of the peace agreement between the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the government of the Republic of the Philippines has passed its first year anniversary. Spoilers ...
EXPLAINER: Why Duterte's sudden call for Mindanao ...
The people in Mindanao need to know about this movement seeking to separate Mindanao from the rest of the Philippines. The next stage would be acceptance. We have to answer the questions of what ...
PDF Landlessness, War, and Displacement in Literatures of Mindanao and Sulu
Filipinos and foreign multinational corporations, with Mindanao transformed into a war zone from which hundreds of thousands would be forced to migrate from the 1970s to the present. The inaccuracies of the passage are attributable, perhaps, to Bulosan's lack of strong connections to Mindanao. If the connections were as strong as the ones
Free Essay: War and Peace in Mindanao
War and Peace in Mindanao. Murray Smith In December 2006 I had the chance to visit the island of Mindanao in the Southern Philippines. Mindanao and the surrounding islands rarely make the headlines except when some Western tourists are kidnapped. But Mindanao has been the scene of an ongoing conflict that has now lasted for more than 35 years ...
Opinion
Guest Essay. Looking Away From an Epidemic of Rape. ... a nonprofit my sister and I founded to raise awareness about people's suffering during the two-year civil war between Ethiopia and Tigray ...
The War at Stanford
But few people seem to have noticed the culture war that has taken over our California campus. For four months, two rival groups of protesters, separated by a narrow bike path, faced off on ...
PIA
Andres P. Dadizon was a Filipino soldier from Barangay Bunga in Cabucgayan, Biliran, who answered the call to arms during the first world war. He joined the US Army and went to Europe to fight for the stars and stripes. Sadly, he lost his life in battle, but his legacy lives on and continues to ...
Opinion
The justices are betting that they can't be held to account.
Israel raids Gaza hospitals, as poll shows Americans disapprove of
Israel-Gaza war. Israel-Gaza war: Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to make a quick stop in Israel as tensions are rising between the United States and Israel over Israeli Prime Minister ...
Opinion
Asked in November in a Hillel International poll to describe the climate on campus since the start of the war, 20 percent of Jewish students answered "unsafe" and 23 percent answered "scary ...