To Know Genocide is to Oppose It at Any Cost to Self: Burmese Activist Reflects on the Gaza Tribunal

Inside the main auditorium on the campus of Istanbul University (founded in AD 1453), Turkiye’s oldest and most prestigious centre of higher learning, the Gaza Tribunal ended its year-long fact-finding work including expert testimonies and Palestinian eyewitness accounts, and deliberations among the members of the Jury of Conscience.

On behalf of the 6-member jury, the Chair Christine Chinkin, Professor of Law at the London School of Economic, read out the jury’s damning moral judgment that Israel is committing the grave crime of genocide in Gaza. I was pleasantly surprised to see Professor Chinkin as we welcomed the then globally admired Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi as our guest of honour on the televised LSE Rule of Law Roundtable presided over by Professor Mary Kaldor thirteen years ago.”

As both the Chair of the Jury of Conscience and the organizing Chair of the Gaza Tribunal pointedly noted, when the system of states has failed to discharge their legal obligations under the international law to prevent and end genocides and hold the perpetrators – organizations, states and individuals – to account, the global civil society have to step in and exercise the collective moral conscience in the spirit of the Russell Tribunal amidst the American War in Vietnam, never declared a war nor legal.

The tribunal’s Final Session came on the heel of the release of the latest report (dated 20 October 2025) entitled “Gaza: A Collective Crime”, by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1967.

In her ground-breaking report, Albanese rightly called Israel’s Gaza genocide “a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential Third States that have enabled longstanding systemic violations of international law by Israel”.

The report’s summary reads: “Framed by colonial narratives that dehumanize the Palestinians, this livestreamed atrocity has been facilitated through Third States’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection and, in some cases, active participation.

It has exposed an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest. The world now stands on a knife-edge between the collapse of the international rule of law and hope for renewal. Renewal is only possible if complicity is confronted, responsibilities are met and justice is upheld.”

The report named 63 UN member states, mostly European or Western nations –Hindutva (Islamophobic Hindu Ultra-Nationalist) India is the exception among the Global Majority of non-Western countries – as enabling and collaborating parties to Israel’s crimes against humanity including genocide in Gaza.

The Tribunal’s Final Outcome, the moral judgment of the Jury of Conscience, did not spend much time on the complicity of these third-party states that the said UN report found to be in clear breach of their treaty obligations as “state parties” to (that is, signatories of) the legally binding UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. But the final judgment read out by Professor Chinkin did make a specific mention of “the complicity” of certain western states while singling out the United States’ important role in Israel’s crimes in Gaza.

The choice of the word “complicity” in reference to states such as the United States caught my attention as woefully inadequate. For Washington’s support for Israel’s genocide is “complete,” as Israeli Jewish Professor Lee Modechai of Hebrew University of Jerusalem told our small delegation of international scholars in Jerusalem in January this year.

In his words, “(i)t would be impossible for Israel to wage this war (of annihilation) in the way it has been waged without the American support.”

Mordechai’s observation has since been corroborated by the report released on 15 October by the Quincy Institute and the Costs of War Project at Brown University, which found that “the U.S. has supplied $21.7 billion in military aid.” In the most shockingly self-incriminating manner, US President Donald J. Trump publicly bragged about how “very well Bibi used them (Made-in-USA weapons in Gaza) “ in his address to the Israeli legislature known as Knesset on 13 October 2025, to the apparent delight of the Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, with an ICC arrest warrant on him.

Beyond arming Israel and financing genocide, there are multiple enabling ways in which Washington has supported the Jewish Supremacist settler colonial state of Israel as the latter pursues its own “Mein Kampf in reverse”, to borrow the disapproving words of ex-Defence Minister and ex-IDF chief Moshe Yaalon. The direct participation of the United Kingdom in Israeli’s genocide against the largely defenceless population of Palestine has also been well-documented.

In the following 5-minutes video interview, Dr Helen Jarvis, vice President of the Permanent Peoples Tribunal (PPT) headquartered in Rome, Italy and formerly Inaugural Head of Public Affairs at the UN-Cambodia Hybrid Tribunal on the Crimes of Khmer Rouge (Khmer Rouge Tribunal) shared her thoughts on the importance of the Gaza Tribunal as a way of documenting Israel crimes in which Western states have directly participated.

Watch below the Interview with Dr Helen Jarvis, Vice President of the Permanent Peoples Tribunal and Recipient of Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS).

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pATrw5VqC58

As a matter of fact, the Tribunal in Istanbul was our 3rd involvement together in various capacities in a moral tribunal on genocides.

First, we were both members of the Jury in the Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Sri Lanka held in Bremen, Germany in December 2013. Again in the fall of 2017, Helen served as both a jury and an o

fficer of the PPT in the Tribunal on Myanmar’s State Crimes against Rohingya, Other Muslims and Kachin People held at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur amidst the ethnic cleansing of Rohingyas in Rakhine state and the televised national address by Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi who justified genocide as “security clearance operations” against “(Rohingya Muslim) terrorists. I was “the instigator” behind the establishment of the PPT on Myanmar wherein I also testified as an expert witness to the Rohingya genocide.

The Gaza Tribunal was chaired and organized by the indefatigable, almost 95-years old Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and former UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (2008-2014).

Inside the main auditorium, one heard from the multiple panels of experts, both alestinians themselves and international scholars and humanitarians, who offered their testimonies in various foundations of the Palestinian society in Gaza which have been intentional targets of destruction, including health, education, food systems, physical shelters/homes, places of worships, reproductive capacity and so on.

Concurrently, there were side events such as book signings by well-known authors on Palestine, public-talks by participating experts such as Wadie Said, a University of Colorado Law Professor and the son of the late Edward Said, Professor Richard Falk, and many others, exhibits of photos and political cartoons by well-known Palestinian artists, public conversations with some prominent members of the Gaza Summud Flotilla whom Israel kidnapped in the international waters and detained in its notorious prisons in Negev desert, and some live inspirational musical performances. The side event were set up and held in multiple locations immediately adjacent to the main hall.

YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsTn-WFkXAk

On the overview of the Gaza Tribunal and the question of comparative genocides such as Myanmar and Israeli genocides, both on-going, I’ll give my dear friend Professor Penny Green of Queen Mary University of London, one of the tribunal’s key organizers alongside Richard Falk, the last word.

Watch you YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEkFSDOSweI

Post-Script

Some years ago, the late Anita Roddick (1942-2007), the British Italian founder of Body Shop, who lent her genuine personal support for social justice, human rights and environmental causes – including our Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004) which I co-founded and led – exhorted her followers to take injustices personally which are caused by powerful institutions and confront those who would slit a granny’s throat for a dime. In fact, she published a book entitled “Take It Personally: How Globalisation Affects You and Powerful Ways To Challenge It” (2003).

Roddick would most certainly agree that genocides are an affront to humanity. That we must take them personally and challenge those who perpetrate them. For those who study genocides, ongoing genocides in our lifetime in particular, genocides must never be just subjects of our intellectual curiosity, a matter of our scholarly gazes or yet another research project or “field work”. Both as scholars and members of the human community at large, we are doubly obligated to speak out against and stand in solidarity with the targeted communities, such as Palestinians and Rohingyas singled out for ethnic cleansing.

My take-away from this powerful global civil society event is this:

 To know genocide is to confront it in every conceivable way we humanly can: name it, oppose it, help end it and document it for posterity. For it is an affront to every human with a conscience and compassion.

Maung Zarni