When the Left Forgot How to Think: Pro-Hamas Propaganda and the Filipino Left
How pro-Hamas propaganda absorbed parts of the Filipino left and sidelined critical analysis of political forces.
When the Left Forgot How to Think: Pro-Hamas Propaganda and the Filipino Progressive Movement
The scene has become familiar. At UP Diliman, Ateneo, PUP, and other campuses, progressive students and activists march under Palestinian flags. National democratic organizations under the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) banner stage rallies condemning "US-Israel genocide." Statements from groups linked to the national democratic tradition describe the October 7, 2023 attacks not primarily as a massacre of civilians but as "armed resistance," "Al-Aqsa Flood," or a necessary response to decades of occupation. The Communist Party of the Philippines itself welcomed the Hamas-led offensives and rejected the label of terrorism for those who carried them out.
This is not ordinary solidarity with Palestinian civilians under bombardment. It is a political and intellectual shift. Large sections of the Filipino left that once claimed Marxism and critical analysis as their backbone have absorbed a simplified, emotionally charged framing of the conflict that leaves little room for the method they once demanded of everyone else.
The Old Standard
Classical left analysis—whether Marxist, materialist, or simply rigorous progressive thinking—insisted on examining the actual character of political forces. It asked: What is the class composition and ideology of the organization claiming to represent the oppressed? How does it govern the territory it controls? What is its program for women, minorities, dissenters, and secular forces? Does it subordinate working-class interests to religious nationalism or theocratic goals?
Political Islam and reactionary nationalisms were not automatically granted the status of progressive forces simply because they opposed a Western-aligned state. The left was supposed to distinguish between the legitimate grievances of a people and the political projects that claim to speak for them. That distinction was the difference between analysis and cheerleading.
The Pivot
After October 7, that distinction largely collapsed in significant parts of the Philippine progressive ecosystem. The dominant frame became a binary: Israel (and by extension the United States) as pure aggressor, and Palestinian armed groups—including Hamas—as pure resistance. Critical examination of Hamas's own record was treated as distraction, bad faith, or alignment with imperialism.
Hamas is an Islamist movement with a long record of embedding military infrastructure among civilians, suppressing internal opposition in Gaza, and maintaining a political program that has historically rejected a permanent two-state settlement on terms short of the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. These are not Zionist talking points; they are observable features of the organization's practice and ideology. Yet in many progressive statements and campus mobilizations in the Philippines, these realities are either ignored or waved away as irrelevant once the larger narrative of occupation is invoked.
The result is a selective solidarity. Outrage is intense and continuous regarding Israeli military actions and Western support for them. Comparable scrutiny is rarely applied to Hamas's governance failures, its treatment of Gazan civilians who dissent, or the strategic choice to prioritize perpetual armed confrontation over negotiated political outcomes that might reduce suffering. The method of critical analysis is suspended precisely where it is most needed.
The Local Cost
This intellectual capture is not cost-free in the Philippines. Political energy is finite. Every sustained campaign that treats the Middle East conflict as the central moral and political question of the moment is energy not spent on the concrete, material struggles that actually shape Filipino working-class life: land reform, contractualization, wage stagnation, dynastic politics, Chinese maritime aggression in the West Philippine Sea, and the chronic failures of the Philippine state.
The national democratic left has long argued that the main enemy is imperialism and its local agents. Fair enough. But when that analysis is applied with rigor only to one side of a distant conflict while the character of the forces on the other side is romanticized, the claim to scientific socialism or materialist analysis becomes performative. The flag replaces the method.
There is also a deeper irony. The same tradition that once warned against the dangers of religious obscurantism and feudal ideology now finds itself in practical alignment with an Islamist movement whose social vision is far removed from secular, egalitarian, or class-based liberation. The vocabulary of anti-imperialism has been stretched to cover political forces that would, in other contexts, be recognized as reactionary.
Not All the Left
It is important to be precise. Not every progressive Filipino organization has adopted this posture. Some groups and individuals have condemned civilian targeting on both sides, affirmed Palestinian self-determination while rejecting the methods and ideology of Hamas, and kept the focus on humanitarian outcomes rather than the romanticization of particular armed groups. Those voices exist. They are simply quieter and less visible in the dominant campus and activist narrative that has taken shape since late 2023.
The Real Abandonment
The problem is not solidarity with Palestinians suffering under occupation and war. That solidarity is legitimate and necessary. The problem is the abandonment of the analytical tools that once allowed the left to distinguish between the oppressed and the political projects that claim to represent them.
When critical thinking is treated as optional—or worse, as a form of betrayal—once a favored narrative is in place, the left ceases to be a critical force. It becomes another identity franchise, complete with approved symbols, forbidden questions, and imported talking points. The backbone was never the flag. It was the method. When the method is discarded, only the costume remains.
The Filipino left that still claims the inheritance of Marxism and radical analysis faces a choice. It can recover the habit of examining political forces as they actually are, or it can continue performing solidarity while quietly leaving its own intellectual tradition behind. The first path is harder. The second is already well underway.
Comments
Post a Comment