This keynote address was delivered by APN Chairperson and PCFS Global Co-chairperson Razan Zuayter in the webinar “Resistance Until Return: 78th Nakba Day Commemoration,” held May 13, 2026. The activity was organized by the Philippines-Palestine Friendship Association in partnership with the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty, International League of Peoples’ Struggle – Philippines, International League of Peoples’ Struggle Commission 10, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, and the Moro-Christian People’s Alliance.

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To my dear comrades, 

We have reached 78 years of the ongoing Nakba. As our people shed blood in the fight for liberation, we honour them by keeping our compassed unwaveringly fixed on this goal. Palestine represents the most brutal face of settler colonialism: genocide, ecocide and forced starvation. These tools, and the Zionist lust for death and hegemony that wields them, have been empowered through the silence, arms and lies of the colonial north and its allies.  

In 1948, 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their lands. 530 villages were destroyed and pillaged. Over 15,000 Palestinians were massacred in defense of their homeland, planting within us a sacred anger that sparked our enduring hatred of injustice which has long predated the Nakba and will long outlast it. 

The footsteps of the Zionist death squads of ‘48 followed those left in 1799, when Napoleon’s colonial plans first envisioned a Jewish entity in Palestine. Imperialism worshipped this idea. Zionists lobbied for it in Britain in 1840; French Zionists financed the first agricultural settlements in Palestine in 1870 and facilitated the occupation’s nuclear capacities. Plans for a Jewish national homeland devised in 1897 in Switzerland were made concrete by Britain’s Balfour declaration in 1917. As a self-declared “US aircraft carrier”, a outpost of so-called European “civilisation”, the Zionist entity is a transnational invention, beating to the rhythm of eradication within and beyond Palestine. 

The Nakba cut a wound into our sacred land. They hoped this wound would fester across the region by creating wars and wastelands, or by exploiting the greed of wealthy regional actors to secure allies and normalise zionist presence within their nations too. The goal is to neutralise resistance to the formation of a “Greater Israel” from the Nile to the Eurphates, and the major wars in the region have been financed and fought in pursuit of it. 

Turn to Iran. An entire civilisation can be threatened with destruction by the president of the imperial core. How? Through consent manufactured over decades of western and Zionist demonization of Iran’s revolutionary sovereignty. In 1953, Iran’s Prime Minister was overthrown for attempting to nationalise their oil, which was then redirected to the Zionist entity and apartheid South Africa under a puppet regime. Iranian revolutionaries reclaimed control over their destinies, cut oil supply lines to colonial outposts, and made resistance to oppression a constitutional duty of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The response was punitive sanctions and now a ruthless war of aggression claiming to “free” Iran’s people, a war met with undying Iranian unity and military preparedness. These imperial wars fought in the name of so-called “freedom” have been paid for with the blood of millions of our people and the pillaging of our resources.

And colonisers have been receiving all of this as a divine guarantee of their impunity: the existence of the Zionist entity functions to normalise settler-colonialism across the world, and feed potential for its expansion. 

This is a world where everything is up for grabs – bodies, labor, lands, resources. From Cuba to Venezuela, Greenland, Iran, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, they seek not only coups, but the dismantling of societies to thwart the inevitable shift to a multipolar world.

But the veil has fallen from the eyes of the people, who have risen worldwide in incredible resistance; who refuse to be thrust into hopelessness as the Epstein class try to exploit and widen the gap between awareness and action.

Look to the freedom-loving souls of the world and the axis of resistance, who are ushering this shift as we speak. Their sacrifices are inconceivable, ground-shifting and will never be forgotten. With the firepower of 13 hiroshima bombs in Gaza, the Zionists and its enablers have stolen hundreds of thousands of lives and futures, yet they remain dwarfed in humanity, skill, and steadfastness, by the Palestinian resistance —  from the student who arrives at a makeshift tent classroom, to our fighters refusing disarmament as a baseless condition of genocidal “peace”. In Lebanon, the colonial army trained solely in aerial bombardment and murder of defenseless civilians is floundering against the resistance’s military brilliance, with the IOF being forced into retreat from parts of the south and now said to be facing an imminent collapse due to an extreme shortage of reservists. While civilian infrastructure has been pummeled by US, Zionist and enabling states in Iran, its people formed human chains in love of their land and revolutionary sovereignty. With the axis of resistance, they have incapacitated US military bases across the region and are collapsing the petrodollar system through which sanctions have been leveled against us. A decolonized world order is possible and taking root.

Together, we must retain this momentum and institutionalize the resistance. For our organization, APN, supported 38,000 farmers across Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan in green resistance. We have cultivated 11 million kilograms of vegetables in Gaza with 987 farmers, breaking the genocidal siege from within. This not only keeps our people rooted in their land – fed in freedom and sovereignty – but roots a concrete path to liberation and return for our people.

To our comrades in the Philippines, we are honored to stand alongside you in this fight and are inspired by your resistance. We know you contend with Zionism on your own land, incubated by American neocolonialism. We know your battle is great: with a state that has traded counterinsurgency training and arms with the Zionist entity, genociders holidaying on your soil, Israeli agri-tech trying to permeate food systems, and messianic Zionism, seeking in vain, to corrupt the minds and hearts of your people. You too will break the siege from within. 

We stand with you in tracing and expunging zionist and neocolonial fingerprints from your economies and institutions. In your vital BDS efforts, celebrate successes and present accessible alternatives for all to join and live the resistance in their daily lives. Together, we must grasp this historic opportunity to strengthen south-to-south integration through economic and cultural connections with sanctioned and resisting nations. We stand with you in the fight against colonial indoctrination through religious entities, and encourage you to connect with churches in Palestine and Lebanon, healing the spiritual disunity manufactured by Christian Zionism.

This is our collective fight to decolonise our lands, hearts, and souls. And we will prevail. ###