Above photo: The Coconut Trees View Deck in Siargao, Philippines in April 2023. Michael Angelo Luna/Wikimedia.
Siargao, a small island in the Philippines’ Mindanao region, might seem far from the Gaza genocide.
But as the island becomes a popular spot for Israelis completing their military service, local Filipinos are starting to reject Israeli tourism.
Siargao seems like the most unlikely place where the ongoing genocide in Gaza might enter public discourse. A small island in the Philippines’ Mindanao region, it is best known as a top international surfing destination. It has a reputation for being laid-back, slow-paced, and largely tolerant of the influx of outsiders despite the rapid changes they have brought to island life. In the past several months, things have changed.
In mid-2024, as the genocide in Gaza intensified, a number of local Filipinos in Siargao began to show their support for a free Palestine in small ways. Some covered over Israeli stickers posted in public spaces with their own Free Palestine messages. Others talked about holding a protest event—a plan that fizzled out. A few began to be vocal on social media, linking their views understanding of Israel’s treatment of Palestine to a growing list of Israeli tourist abuses in Siargao.
They were met with confusion at best, and hostility at worst. Siargao’s tourist establishments include several owned and operated by Israeli nationals, and Israelis made up a growing segment of the island’s tourists. Any denunciation of Israel’s violence in Gaza was bound to draw attention from Israeli business owners and tourists, as well as local government officials and business owners concerned with how these criticisms might affect Siargao’s image.
Locals in Siargao know tourism to be a volatile mistress. Today the island is finally recovering from the one-two punch of the COVID-19 pandemic and Super Typhoon Odette in 2021. In the aftermath of both disasters, Siargao has once again returned to its reliance on tourism as a primary economic driver.
This dependence on tourism influenced the island’s rebuilding, orienting Siargao’s infrastructure to ease visitor experience. Today Siargao’s roads are modern and cemented, allowing fleets of transport vans to whisk tourists from the airport to the beach town of General Luna, the epicenter of tourist life. There, “Tourist Road” is lined with restobars, cafes, and souvenir shops, and crowds of tourists navigate the scene on foot and on rented motor scooters.
As with places defined by tourism, Siargao’s rapid development in the last decade had given rise to inevitable tensions between displaced locals, enterprising outsiders, and entitled tourists, and conflicts over whose vision of the future would dictate Siargao’s path. Not everyone is happy with how tourism has changFed life on the island. Beach access is blocked by the construction of resorts. Longtime residents complain that their access to water and electricity residential connections are delayed in favor of commercial clients building resort hotels for transient guests. The disposal of trash is a critical problem.
In early 2025, this growing local discontent about tourism development and its displacements in Siargao collided with continuing news about worsening conditions in Gaza and the arrival of what locals noted were a distinctly new set of Israeli tourists.
Soon after Israel’s military campaign in Gaza began, Siargao had increasingly become a destination of choice for young Israelis finishing a stint in the military. David Haldane, reporting for the Manila Times, quotes Elazar Moshe, 24, an Israel Defense Forces soldier vacationing in Siargao: “We come for fun, quiet, and rest, especially after the war… We are all soldiers, so after our service we come for vacation.” Local Filipinos report that Israeli business owners in Siargao actively funneled Israeli tourists to the island through their networks. Most recently, these tourists happen to be soldiers fresh from military campaigns in Gaza.
Siargao’s residents noticed.
For several months, service staff in the town of General Luna, the tourism epicenter of the island, had been sharing stories about Israeli tourist maltreatment among themselves. Many had felt too intimidated to voice their concern and anger in public. One local Filipina described the expectations of ex-soldiers coming to Siargao as a therapeutic holiday, with local Siargao residents taking the brunt of their “trauma-dumping.”
In March 2025, posts about patterns of Israeli tourist harassment and abuse began to appear publicly in the Siargao Business Association Facebook page, a virtual public forum that reaches over 80,000 followers. The majority of posts described Israeli tourists not paying for their food—“they suddenly disappeared when our establishment is super busy attending other guest”—or behaving arrogantly—“taking seats in restaurants without ordering…and getting angry when asked to vacate for paying guests” and threatening to leave negative reviews, or “calling a filipino staffs a ‘SLAVE.’” Arguably, these kinds of behaviors are not unusual in an industry that positions paying guests above serving “hosts.”
Some conflicts turned violent, especially when locals or other tourists pushed back with critiques of Israel and support of Palestine. One anonymous local recounted a shouting match between a British or American man “backed by a group of Israelis” against a DJ at a resort party whose laptop sported “Libre Palestina” stickers. The skirmish escalated, with the men assaulting “the workers of the establishment.” Alexis Gumera, a Manila-based Filipina who regularly visits friends in Siargao, describes a face-off with an Israeli tourist who boasted to her friends “We kill all of Palestine,” which ended with the tourists throwing rocks at her group. A young girl passing by was struck. The perpetrators fled the island by the time the police began their investigation.
“Little Israel”
Israeli tourists have been a fixture in Siargao even before the invasion of Gaza, eased by relationships long forged on state and interpersonal levels. Some of them have stayed and settled in the Philippines, including in Siargao. Every one of the locals I interviewed described their interactions with Israeli tourists in the past as friendly, until they began to be vocal about the uptick in Israeli tourist harassment, criticism of the genocide in Gaza, or support for Palestine.
The Philippines, a majority Christian Catholic nation with close ties to the United States, was the sole Asian country that supported the 1947 UN partition plan. The two nations have since had close diplomatic ties, including over a dozen bilateral economic agreements. The Philippines is also a key beneficiary of Israel’s arm’s diplomacy approach, receiving both military training for its police force and access to advance military armaments, despite its poor human rights record. Meanwhile as late as 2019, nearly 25,000 Filipino caregivers worked in Israel.
When the public airing out of grievances against Israeli tourist abuse in Siargao reached national and international media outlets, representatives from the Israeli consulate in Manila attended a town hall convened by a local NGO. No elected officials from Siargao attended. At the meeting, locals expressed concerns about how unchecked tourism development in Siargao was creating conditions for tourist disrespect and abuse of local workers and residents.
The town hall meeting had surfaced a previously unknown plan to build a Chabad house in Siargao. Showing me the fenced off land where the house is planned, a local resident tells me despondently, “They’re calling it Little Israel.”
In the end, despite efforts to diffuse criticism about Israeli tourist behavior, to characterize it as discriminatory, or harmful to Siargao’s reputation, these criticisms have become more tethered to a critique of Israel’s settler colonial violence in Palestine. Maria Tokong, an Indigenous Lumad artist and singer whose family has resided in Siargao for generations, draws connections between the “growing presence of young Israeli travelers on our island—many of whom arrive straight from military service” and their mistreatment of locals, and the ways in in which the tourism economy devalues local voices.
In is in this messy mix of local dispossession under tourism’s extractive forces and a spotlight on Israeli tourist injuries that a growing number of Siargao locals are finding themselves more openly talking about genocide in Gaza and connecting it to the dispossessions they are experiencing in Siargao. These moves toward solidarity are not isolated to Siargao. Filipinos in the Philippines and the diaspora have actively made linked US militarization in Asia and the Pacific and the persecution of political dissent and in the Philippines to the United States’ continued support of Israel in the Middle East.
In Malapascua, another tourist island destination in the Visayas region of the Philippines, Anna Borromeo Reed, a Filipina gym and café owner, describes how at the outset of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, she had put up “watermelons on the gate” not only in support of Palestine, but also as a way to “protect this island” against what she viewed as the encroachments of Israeli power in the Philippines. She states, “as the war progressed and the intensity of what was happening sunk in, the flag went up” despite intimidation and one-star reviews of her businesses.
Meanwhile, in Siargao, an active and open campaign against the Chabad house is under way, tying a local campaign for more autonomy and security to resistance against Israeli overreach in the Philippines and elsewhere. They see that they are not alone in pushing back, citing recent incidents in Greece and Thailand that refused to roll out welcome mats to Israeli tourists in the midst of a genocide.
On September 18, 2025, several dozen Siargao residents organized a peaceful march to the iconic Sunset Bridge. Typically the site for tourist selfies and local food and souvenir vendors, the bridge was instead filled with Siargao natives, migrants, allies, and tourists affirming solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide and against settler-colonization in Siargao and other sites in the Philippines, such as Mindanao and the Cordilleras.
Maria Tokong’s statement about this stand is a reminder of what is at stake in this moment, not just for Filipinos, or places that are marked by tourism, but also for Palestine: “We all have the right to feel safe and the right to feel respected, in the only home we’ve ever known.”
