For more than two years, the United States government has used the armed forces of its Zionist settler colony, “Israel,” to carry out a brutal genocide in Palestine. As protests erupted across the world to visibly resist the ongoing genocide, Puerto Rico answered the call. As a colony since 1493, we understand the reality of having no control over your land and daily life. We have been held by the unrelenting grip of US colonial rule for more than 127 years. Forced displacement, sterilization, bombings, arrests, and assassinations are some of the overlapping features of colonial domination in Puerto Rico and Palestine. Driven by imperialism, Zionism, and settler colonialism, the occupation of land, displacement of the native population, and enactment of genocidal warfare are intentional tactics designed to repress resistance.

Zionism is deeply entrenched in Puerto Rico and it begins with the land. The somewhat unrecognizable impacts of Zionism are experienced by Puerto Ricans on a daily basis, leading to intentional confusion about who is friend vs. foe. Israeli migration increased to Ponce following Governor Luis Munoz Marin’s “¡Manos a la Obra!”(Operation Bootstrap) industrialization campaign that displaced millions of Puerto Ricans, primarily agricultural workers. Relatedly, Gan Eden is one of the largest farms run by Yoav Cohen and Menashe Mashiach, Zionists who immigrated to Puerto Rico from Occupied Palestine. This is only one of nearly twenty Israeli-owned agricultural businesses in Puerto Rico; meanwhile, Puerto Ricans have long been deprived of access to land ownership and struggle daily against food insecurity. Puerto Rico is home to the largest number of Jewish people in the region, estimated at 3,000; Jewish centers across the region continue to push Israeli propaganda; and the oppressive, violent impacts of Zionism are deepened through real estate projects, cryptocurrency endeavours, and political influence. 

In 2005, further embedding Zionism within the political sphere of Puerto Rico, the Senate of Puerto Rico approved Resolution 1480, recognizing the false contributions of the Jewish community to the Puerto Rican way of life, as well as the politicized “friendship” between Puerto Rico and Israel. This relationship was established and spread by the material propaganda in our communities prior to the government’s establishment of a formal “friendship.” This must be seen as a continuous attempt to normalize relations with the State of Israel and gain popular support amongst Puerto Ricans to support the state’s agenda.  

The response to the 1972 attack at the Lod airport in Tel Aviv, an operation by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) during which 17 Puerto Ricans were killed, further exemplifies this agenda.

This led to the installation of a memorial plaque outside of the Puerto Rican Capitol building. What the plaque fails to name is that the attack targeted Aharon Katzir, who was not only a member of Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary that defended the British mandate, but also one of the founders of HEMED, the scientific arm of the Israeli “Defense” Forces (known today as Rafael Advanced Defense Systems) that develops weapons and military technology used to slaughter Palestinians. The Memorial claims that this operation was a “cowardly terrorist attack” which “revealed the power of terrorist ideology to incite murder. A new form of violence, targeting civilian non-combatants with the intent to create a mood of fear and intimidation, became a means for terrorists to popularize extremist political and social agendas.”

Since the inception of the State of Israel in Occupied Palestine, daily attacks on innocent civilians in Gaza and the West Bank have been perpetrated and justified by Zionists. We must ask – who are the true terrorists? Those defending their land by any means necessary, or those who seek to eliminate an entire population to claim the land as their own? It is imperative that we understand the impact of these narratives in the context of Puerto Rico. Our revolutionaries and freedom fighters, like Filiberto Ojeda Rios, Lolita Lebron, and Oscar López Rivera, were also called “terrorists,” manufacturing consent for their arrest, and for some, their assassination. 

Additionally, there are strategies that seek to instill Zionism into Puerto Rico across the archipelago that are ongoing today. The Chabad Jewish Center of Puerto Rico, a seemingly harmless non-profit, conflates the relationship between Judaism and Zionism in order to normalize Zionism in Puerto Rican communities by delinking the shared solidarity of Puerto Ricans and Palestinians. They achieve this by buying up land, hosting war criminals, and influencing the Puerto Rican government.

Founded by Rabbi Mendel Zarchi in 1999, this center has consistently demonstrated its support for Israel’s war crimes. For example, Mendel Zarchi traveled alongside Governor Jenniffer Gonzalez on July 24th, 2024 for Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the US Congress. The center has also hosted former IDF soldiers like Rudy Rochman and New York City Congressman Ritchie Torres, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from AIPAC. Members of the Chabad Center have traveled to Israel since the start of the genocide and met directly with the IDF, who they claim are “securing borders and safeguarding them from the north.”

Well known crypto-colonizer and accused pedophile, Brock Pierce, has traveled to Israel to meet personally with Benjamin Netanyahu, while Netanyahu’s son, Yair, has also been seen in Puerto Rico. What they all have in common is their desire to exploit the land and people of occupied colonies for their financial gain, rooted in white supremacist ideology. Act 60 allows for these settlers to come to Puerto Rico and pay zero percent capital gains tax, allowing them to profit from the explosion of Airbnbs in Isla Verde, Dorado, and elsewhere, while they do the same in the occupied West Bank.

Chabad Jewish Centers are spread across the Caribbean with the aim of extending Zionist influence into our communities in all aspects. But this isn’t the only center that is spewing Zionist ideology in Puerto Rico. The Reform Temple Beth Shalom, led by Rabbi Hernan Rustein from Argentina, has hosted classes on the “history of Israel” and openly supported the Zionist state on their social media. The Holocaust Museum, located in Morovis, Puerto Rico, is affiliated with the Anti-Defamation League and Yod Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Center based in Israel. There is also the Jewish Community Center (JCC) of Puerto Rico led by the same people (and perpetuating the same agenda) as the Chabad Jewish Center.

At the head of this entire operation is the United States, not only allowing for Zionists to occupy our land and spread their hateful ideology, but providing material support to the state of Israel. Lockheed Martin benefits from the exploitation of Puerto Rican labor, specifically through their weapons manufacturing facility in Aguadilla. This complicity is widespread, driven by multiple corporations on the archipelago, including RTX (Raytheon), Pratt & Whitney, Boeing, Hewlett-Packard, and Honeywell, among others. Nearly all of these companies have direct ties to public higher education in Puerto Rico. For example, Pratt & Whitney sponsors a laboratory at the UPR in Aguadilla, while the Office of Management and Budget recently granted $3.5M to the Campus to strengthen its Aeronautics and Aerospace program. Puerto Rico continues to be used as a military base to attack neighboring countries in the Americas, while our land and labor are exploited to create weapons for a fascist, settler-colonial regime in Occupied Palestine.

Puerto Rico and Palestine are intrinsically linked through our resistance. And while the US and Israel intend to separate us from one another, the people continue to build bridges of solidarity as we struggle against our common enemy. The future of Puerto Rico is up to us as Puerto Ricans who refuse to align ourselves with imperialist and colonial powers like the United States and Israel. Not only has the Israeli government openly invoked the “Puerto Rico model”, but the Isaac Accords will enable Israelis to continue to emigrate to Puerto Rico to take advantage of Act 60 and spread Zionism across the archipelago, and more broadly, across the Caribbean and in Latin America. We must understand that the State of Israel and the vast array of Zionist forces (cultural, ideological, political, military) are backed, funded, and sustained by the United States government. The best way that we as Puerto Ricans, both in the archipelago and across the diaspora, can support the people of Palestine is by defeating US imperialism and gaining our independence.