Rohingya and Palestine Genocides: Zarni’s Comparative Analysis

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 4 Aug 2025

Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service

Person holds up a sign saying Stop the Genocide at a Palestinian demonstration Toronto Canada against the war in Gaza.  Photo: Greg finnegan, Shutterstock

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.

28 Jul 2025 – 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.

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.

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.

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.

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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

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