As a student of and campaigner against genocide, I recently spoke on both Israel-USA joint genocide in Gaza, Palestine and Myanmar’s genocide of Rohingya people at two different online events. The first, “The Ongoing Genocide of Rohingya People”, was organized and hosted by the highly reputable Lemkin Institute on 18 July. The second event was hosted by Rohingya Academic Research Institute (or RAR), a group of young Rohingya researchers and scholars learning to empower themselves intellectually and academically.
The recording of the first one has not been posted yet at the organizer’s site. But a small segment has been posted on Facebook. For the full recording check at the Lemkin Institute site.
The Rohinga-organized event recording has been made available for public viewing here.
Rohingya and Palestinian people have been subjected to variously genocidal policies by the states of Israel and Burma or Myanmar for decades. The word genocide conjures up images of gas chambers, concentration camps, and high speed mass extermination ala the Nazi genocide, Rwanda, and Cambodia.
But genocides are, in essence and as a matter of fact, about policies and practices aimed at destroying a target population (s) by a state (often in collaboration with a small number of other states while a large number of other states stand by).
Besides the so-called state actors, (that is, UN member states that are clearly in breach of their treaty obligations under the Genocide Convention of 1948 ) that execute these policies of population destruction, respective societies are typically directly involved in state’s crimes against humanity in numerous tangible and intangible ways.
Photos on an exhibit wall inside Schindler’s Factory Museum, Krakow, Poland. Photo by Zarni, March 2017
Hitler personal lawyer and head of the Nazi Occupation Administration in Poland Hans Frank’s words captures chillingly Israel’s decades-long propaganda among the Jewish diaspora º that the majority Arab Palestine (and all the surrounding Arab areas) are the biblical Greater Israel for them. Aliyah | The Jewish Agency for Israel – U.S.
Both Israel’s ongoing genocidal destruction of Gaza and, to a lesser extent, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Myanmar’s genocide of Rohingya people in Western Myanmar are, without a doubt, a textbook Lemkinian genocide.
There are certainly fundamental differences in these two cases.
For instance, Myanmar perpetrators are treating Rohingyas as if the latter had no legitimate historical claim to Western Myanmar region as their ancestral land. In the last nearly 50-years, the state in Myanmar has devoted itself to erase any well-documented official and historical facts about Rohingya presence, ancestry and claim as natives to Myanmar, before the country was established as a post-WWII nation-state, whether the military or civilian democrats such as Aung San Suu Kyi are in power.
Aerial view of a burned Rohingya village in Rakhine state, Myanmar – September 2017. Wikipedia Commons
In sharp contrast, Israel and its almost exclusively Eastern European Jewish founders had to fabricate their ties to the alien land, legal and biblical. The founders of Israel – Zionist Jews – have done the fabrication in two specific ways: first, via the manufactured legality of the post-Holocaust inter-state organization called the United Nations which partitioned Palestine despite the strong objection from the overwhelming residential natives, namely the Arabs of Palestine, who had nothing whatsoever to do with Christian Europe’s numerous historical waves of genocidal persecutions – known as pogroms and ghettoization — of Jewish peoples as “Christ killers”; and second., framing their claim for alien lands in the language of the Old Testament as if the 2,000+ years old religious text filled with make-believe tales which only the faithful are expected to believe as historical facts and, worse, land deeds. The fact about all religions is this: No one outside the circles of the faithful or adherents is expected to share these fairy tales to be unquestionable facts, much less sacred or holy. That is the case with any text considered “sacred”.
As a Burmese native, the study of and activism against my own country’s genocide is anchored in my sense of obligation as someone who loves his own country of birth and the people with whom I shared “the soil, air and water”, irrespective of our tribal (racial/ethnic), faith and ideological differences.
In speaking out against Israel’s genocidal destruction and occupation of the UN-partitioned Palestine, I act out of my sense of human obligation. Genocides are crimes against humanity. And as such they are an affront to any human, with conscience and capacity for empathy.
A placard reads “Jews against the War on Gaza”, London March, 11 Nov. 2023. Photo: Maung Zarni
Hamas’ jail break on 7 October 2023 – Israel has long turned Gaza into a vast open air prison, as Ami Ayalon, former head of Shabek (or Shin Bet) and retired admiral of the Israel Defence Force has openly admitted in numerous public fora – is not unprecedented. On October 7, 1944, a group of Jewish inmates blew up the Crematorium complex #4, replete with a huge gas chamber and gold-teeth melting vault, at Auschwitz 2 or Auschwitz-Birkenau, after having killed the 4 SS officers’ whose primary mission was to ensure the death of the inmates by administering the dropping of Zyglone B poison gas cannisters in each “shower” cycle.
When there is repression there will be resistance. Where there is severe repression, there will be severe resistance.
These days whenever I am asked to speak on my own old country’s genocide, which is still ongoing, against the Rohingya people I insist on offering a comparative perspective.
I am painfully aware that there is, as I write, another genocide, still ongoing, in Sudan where the formerly European Union-funded militia group has been engaged in a genocidal war against the Sudanese people under the national military. But this is the genocide of which I have woefully inadequate understanding of. So, I speak on the two genocides which I feel sufficiently informed about.
Maung Zarni
Banner: Person holds up a sign saying Stop the Genocide at a Palestinian demonstration Toronto Canada against the war in Gaza. Photo: Greg finnegan, Shutterstock
Further readings/viewings:
On Myanmar’s genocide,
see The Slow-burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya (Washington International Law Journal, 2014) a 3-year study I conducted with my wife and scholar colleague Dr Natalie Brinham, then writing under the pseudonym Alice Cowley, and also see Natalie Brinham, Citizenship and Genocide Cards: IDs, Statelessness and Rohingya Resistance in Myanmar, Routledge, 2024.
On Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the genocidal occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, see Israel has built a vast Ecosystem of Genocidal Practices in Occupied Palestine – FORSEA, 8 September 2024.
“Israel Cannot Build Peace on Genocide” says 1976 Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire, FORSEA, 17 December 2023
Forever-Occupation, genocide, and profit: Special Rapporteur’s report exposes corporate forces behind destruction of Palestine, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), 3 July 2025
“I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”: Prof. Omer Bartov on the Growing Consensus on Gaza, Democracy Now!, July 17, 2025
Katie Halper interview Professor John Mearsheimer: “Israel is acting like Nazi Germany of 1941-45, 23 July 2025
PowerPoint presentation from a recent speaking engagement: A Comparative Perspective
