Israel Is Hell-Bent on Dispossessing All Palestinians Including Christians of Their Land

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 25 Aug 2025

Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service

Tales of Accelerated Land Theft in the Holly Land of Jerusalem, Hebron and Bethlehem

from FORSEA

16 Aug 2025 – “The Tent of Nations continues to live out its mission under occupation—surrounded by settlements, locked gates, flying checkpoints, and daily restrictions that try to suffocate hope. It feels at times like we are in an open-air prison.”

In his 90-minute interview with an American Christian clergy who lived in Israel for years, the  journalist and MAGA standard-bearer Tucker Carlson was visibly surprised that Israel is dispossessing Christians among the native Palestinian population.

In a nutshell, if you are Christians living in the occupied territories of Palestine – where most of the historical Christian activities were rooted (East Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Jacob’s Well, etc.) your life is as equally effected as Muslim Palestinians by the symptoms and methods of Israel’s military occupation, in place for nearly 60-years.

Carlson was unaware that the genocidal ethnostate of Israel is no exception to the general observation that victim populations in cases of genocide tend to be multiple identity-based peoples although a genocide may come to be associated with a singular ID-based victim population (say, predominantly Muslim Palestinians).

Carlson may be forgiven for thinking that Israel would spare Christians of Palestine.

For Christian Zionists have been a crucial faith-based Western population clamouring for the creation and maintenance of Israel. For instance, imperialist Britain’s Christian Zionists in high offices made it possible for the Zionists to take a slice of Arab land for the creation of “the Jewish national homeland” with its so-called Balfour Declaration of October 1917. In the United States, the unconditional support for Israel has come from small but very well-organized and influential networks of Christian Zionists, whose support is anchored in their fanatical belief in the biblical “end times” and the second coming of their messiah in Jerusalem.

In December 2013, I joined Daniel Feierstein, the noted Jewish Argentinian scholar (who at the time was serving President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars) and a dozen other distinguished activists and scholars in the old industrial city of Bremen, Germany. We were there to deliberate as the judges of the Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Sri Lanka.

One of the crucial points Professor Feierstein drove home during the deliberations was that in most cases of genocides, the genocidal state, typically backed by the majoritarian society already imbued with ethno – or religious-supremacist worldviews, persecutes more than a single targeted population. For instance, while the single largest number of victims that were physically destroyed (exterminated or annihilated) and mass deported, were Jewish, other identity-based victim populations included Soviet Prisoners of War, Polish political dissidents, German Communists and trade unionists, disabled German children, Roma and Sinti people and Jehovah Witness Christians.

In Myanmar’s military-led genocide case, Rohingyas have certainly fared worst as the principal targeted population singled out for physical destruction, land dispossession and violent mass deportation from their ancestral land of Northern Rakhine across Myanmar’s borders – into neighbouring Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal. Other ethnic groups, including Kachin, and Myanmar Muslims, (as well as Chin, Karenni, Karen, Mon, Shan, etc.) have also faced persecution due to their identity or the central state’s internal colonization of land.

The acquisition of land with residential population with a different ethnic, religious, national and racial identity is typically a goal of genocidal regimes – and society, be it Nazi Germany, the military-ruled Buddhist Supremacist Myanmar or Israel.

Despite its vocal opposition to Netanyahu and his far right allies such as Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, also with a key position in the Ministry of Defence, the fact that even the country’s oldest newspaper, considered “liberal” or “soft Zionist”, is deceptively entitled Haaretz “the people of the land”, established by Eastern European Zionist settlers in 1918 and biblically narrated, speaks volumes.

Land is a very crucial goal.

In his infamously vile and racist Mein Kampf, Hitler called it “Lebensraum—or “living space”, to be cleansed of Untermensch or subhuman residential populations.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum explains this (genocidally acquired) living space thus: The concept of Lebensraum—or “living space”—served as a critical component in the Nazi worldview that drove both its military conquests and racial policy.

It is rather chilling for me, as a student of genocide, to hear the echoes of Adolf Hitler’s “I could see the Fate has decreed my destiny” – which appeared as a promotional line on the cover of Mein Kampf – in Netanyahu’s “historic and spiritual mission” to build Greater Israel, based on the bible as the Jewish State’s map!

Today’s Israel’s senior leaders openly defy any existing post-World War II and post-Holocaust international law, treaties and conventions – including the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and grab the land only for the Jewish Israelis. It has adopted policies of multiple economic sweeteners to entice Zionist Jews from the diaspora worldwide.

To date there are estimated 800,000 settlers a large percentage of whom are Americans. About 200,000 of these settlers have been issued automatic assault rifles and plenty of munition by the state of Israel. As an additional instrument of the Zionist state’s attempt to expand its land grab, Israel has accorded these settlers complete impunity to harass, obstruct and otherwise terrorise native Palestinians under occupation with the singular objective of making Palestinian life impossible, thereby abandon their ancestral land “voluntarily”.

Lemkin would be turning in his grave that the Zionist state of Israel and its Western allies have, for all intents and purposes, butchered the law that is meant to prevent this crime of barbarism against fellow human populations – in Israel’s unfolding case both Christians and Muslims of Palestine – for want of their land only for the Zionist Jews.

The Times of Israel has recently quoted Smotrich as saying, “(a)fter decades of international pressure and freezes, we are breaking conventions and connecting Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem. This is Zionism at its best – building, settling and strengthening our sovereignty in the Land of Israel.”

In my second visit to the West Bank and Israel with a small international delegation of scholars hosted by Jerusalem-based Liberation Theology centre Sabeel, I learned a variety of methods of land grab the state of Israel (comprising of all executive, legislature and judicial branches) is resorting

Our delegation spoke to representatives and activists of different Palestinian populations, including Palestinian family farmers, rural-based Bedouin villagers, Armenian Christians and “black Palestinians” in and around East Jerusalem.

East Jerusalem is officially designated by the United Nations as the capital for the full sovereign state of Palestine, already recognized by over 140 out of 190 member states of the UN.

Justifiably, the fully fledged genocide of Gaza’s 2.3 million people – the figures at the start of Israel’s biblical war against Hamas) – whom Israel has been starving to their slow deaths and slaughtering, on a daily basis, at the perversely named “humanitarian aid distribution centres” – 4 in total, from the original 400 run by the United Nations before – makes daily headline news.

Equally troubling is the fact that Israel is speeding up its unconcealed plan to colonially annex the entire West Bank (and East Jerusalem), which it has militarily occupied since 1967.

The West Bank has a 500+ kilometre long “apartheid wall”, which has proven effective in producing mass pauperization of the 3 million Palestinians in this occupied section of the UN-recognized Palestinian territories. In fact, Israel has been running all occupied territories like its unacknowledged de facto colonies. The Palestinian Authority on the European Union payroll has long been rendered impotent to protect the Palestinian population under decades of illegal occupation.

In the recorded interviews here, you will hear firsthand tales of Israel’s various strategies and policies aimed at dispossessing indigenous and ancient Palestinian populations from their land, be they Christians, Muslims, atheists, communists, sheep-herding Bedouin and their land, church-owned, residential, rural, or Islamic.

These land-thieving Zionists have, for over a century now, been patronized, financed, armed and promoted by the equally genocidal imperialist Western states since Britain gave away the 94% Arab majority land with a single personal letter from the then British Foreign Secretary and known Christian Zionist Lord Balfour addressed to the Zionist banker Lord Rothschild.

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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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