Photo Credit: Zarni holding a protest sign at Kerem Shalom Gaza crossing, by Will Allen-DuPraw
On 19 September, on his eyewitness first-person observations of Israel’s Nazi-like policies and practises throughout the Occupied Territories of Palestine, and his focused research on the ongoing Rohingya genocide in his native Burma or Myanmar, FORSEA Co-founder, exiled Burmese dissident and scholar of genocide Maung Zarni talked to Democracy Now.
From 26 August to 5 September, Zarni spent 9 days in the Occupied Territories of Palestine and Israel as part of a 28-person delegation of inter-faith activists from USA and UK. They were there to bear witness and to offer what the local Palestinian hosts called “protective presence” to the locals who resist daily threats and intimidations by both Jewish settlers (or more accurately, land thieves) and Israeli security forces.
The visit was co-organized by US-based Rabbis for Ceasefire and Christians for Ceasefire, and principally hosted and led by Jerusalem-based liberation theology centre Sabeel.
Photo Credit: Rev. Sara Webb Philipps, Atlanta, Georgia
The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya. Washington International Law Journal Vol. 23, No. 4, 684-754. https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wilj/vol23/iss3/8/
Two days before the Democracy Now interview, the United Nations Office of the High Commission for Human Rights released its one-year report detailing horrific and widespread violations of human rights norms and international humanitarian law by Myanmar’s coup junta, as well as by some of the anti-junta armed organizations such as the Arakan Army, an ultra-nationalist Buddhist group in Western Myanmar.
In the interview, Zarni called attention to the decades-long close security ties between the two perpetrating UN member states, Israel and Myanmar. In her 496-page autobiography, My Life the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, a Kyiv-born Zionist settler from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, characterised as “a love affair” the bilateral relations between the then two new countries (both established in 1948). Israel’s founders and military men had made state visits including David Ben-Gurion, the architect of Palestinian equivalent of the Holocaust – known in Arabic as the Nakba (or the Catastrophe) and General Moshe Dayan – to Burma as early as 1950’s.
View on Democracy now along with Transcript. https://www.democracynow.org/2024/9/19/burma
As a young boy from an extended military family in Mandalay, Zarni grew up as a supporter of Israel in the Zionists’ “(settler colonizers) wars of choice” with immediate Arab neighbours such as Jordan, Syria and Egypt. He has a vivid memory of the pro-Israel Burmese media coverage of the 1973 war. Israel has fought these wars with the sole purpose of stealing vast swarths of land, “from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea,” in the face of decades of Palestinian armed and non-violence resistance. (See a teach-in video by one of the foremost scholars of Israel-Palestine conflict Brief History of Israel-Palestine Conflict | Norman Finkelstein Teach-In on Gaza, Israel, and Hamas (YouTube.com).
A Palestinian local historian showed a well-known Zionist artist propaganda piece, who painted the land with people (the black and white picture of an old neighborhood in the pre-1948 Yaffah) into a land only with sand dunes on the Mediterranean in the background), Sept. 2024. (photo by Zarni)
As early 2009, the Burmese dissident had confronted some of the retired senior Israeli officials such as Ami Ayalon with the question of the right of return of Palestinians. Zarni has been deeply disturbed by what he came to understand as Israel’s genocidal land theft, under a century-old Zionist lie, “Land without People for the People without Land.”
In the old Yaffah or Jeffa, Zarni and fellow inter-faith delegates were given an educational tour by a brilliant local Palestinian historian from Zochrot who gave the last count of the villages and towns destroyed and depopulated (609 and 11 respectively) in the UN-designated Palestine area and months before Israel’s Declaration of Statehood in May.
The old city of Jeffa is now a run-down neighbourhood of Tel Aviv, which was founded only in 1906, the year the Zionist settler from Warsaw named David Ben-Gurion arrived. The local historian said before the Nakba, Jeffa or Yaffah’s Palestinian population was roughly 89,000 of which only 3,000 remained after the thriving city’s destruction in the establishment of Israel.
Some years ago, Zarni heard a chilling parallel story of the Polish city of Krakow and its Jewish population from the Galicia Jewish Museum (Krakow is only 68-kilometers from Auschwitz). The museum guide, a Polish sociologist, told him that before the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939 with Krakow as the Nazi administrative headquarters, Krakow was a thriving city with the Jewish population numbering over 70,000. After the Nazi genocide, only 2,000 Polish Jews returned or remained in the city’s old Jewish Quarter called Kazamia. (See the excellent Al Nakba Tour site.)
Omar Haramy of Sabeel, our Palestinian host and tour leader from Sabeel, the Jerusalem-based Christian liberation theology movement, explaining the most infamous incident among numerous massacres of Palestine women, men, children and elderly people by Zionist militia groups. David Ben-Gurion, the key Zionist leader, who settled from Warsaw, Poland in Palestine in 1906, ordered his militias to line up Palestinian villages, mass-execute them, and spread the news of “the Jewish terror”. The objective was to terrorise the native populations across UN-partitioned Palestine into never thinking of ever returning to their own villages, hamlets and towns, after the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, annexing even the land which UN-mandated to the Palestinian population, the overwhelming majority of Palestine in 1947.
Besides the story of the Nakba, the Burmese dissident was shocked and horrified by what he actually witnessed first-hand throughout the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Over the decades since its founding in 1948, Israel has succeeded in establishing a vast ecosystem of very elaborate, inventive and evolving genocidal methods. In a very clear breach of the Genocide Convention, Israel has subjected different sub-populations of Palestinian peoples to this system of depopulating historic Palestine with the singular purpose of making all occupied territories Jewish Majority.
Shortly after he left Palestine on 5 September, Zarni had discussed at length his fresh observations with the co-founder of Civilian Agenda and refugee lawyer Ousman Noor in the now widely viewed 22-minutes interview.
Similarly, in his native country of Burma or Myanmar, the Burmese military, with the support of the non-Rohingya but multi-ethnic society at large and the ousted democracy icon Aung San Kyi have institutionalized the slow-burning genocide of the Rohingya people since the late 1970’s. Additionally, the emergence of a militarily strong local Buddhist group called Arakan Army has come to pose an existential threat the remaining Rohingya population of roughly 0.5 million as the civil war rages on in Rakhine.
As of today, both Israel and Myanmar, state parties to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, stand credibly accused of breaching the binding inter-state treaty. The two genocide cases against these criminal states are now in the Merit Phase.
View the interview on Democracy Now website (along with the transcript): https://www.democracynow.org/2024/9/19/burma
On YouTube below:
Also on X: https://x.com/democracynow/status/1836770328556568924
Crucial links for the Palestine trip and further reading
Israel’s Naziesque indoctrination of generations of its children through all channels of mass communications
https://x.com/a_amayreh/status/1832747461871378745?t=n-oCTzjSkhifJNmKB7Ozlg&s=19
On “Judaeo-Nazism”: MAVERICK ISRAELI PROFESSOR GIVES UP STATE PRIZE AMID FLAP
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/01/25/maverick-israeli-professor-gives-up-state-prize-amid-flap/f0890de2-e571-454d-b1e5-a835932e060e/
Palestine Diary: Where the Gaza Genocide Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg. https://thewire.in/rights/palestine-diary-gaza-genocide
Interfaith delegation shows solidarity with Palestinians facing Israeli apartheid, violence, and displacement
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/09/interfaith-delegation-shows-solidarity-with-palestinians-facing-israeli-apartheid-violence-and-displacement/
Buddhist Scholar Maung Zarni among Interfaith Delegation Visiting Palestine
https://www.buddhistdoor.net/news/buddhist-scholar-maung-zarni-among-interfaith-delegation-visiting-palestine/
https://www.thenation.com/?post_type=article&p=518474
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