Reading “Genocide in Gaza: Voices of Global Conscience” at the British Parliament

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 10 Nov 2025

Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service

The dying Western Civilization (or “The West”) has not learned a thing during its 500-years of failed attempts to subjugate the Global Majority: The elite or rulers may submit, but the people never surrender to the invading colonizers. Palestine will be free.

9 Nov 2025 – Two weeks ago, I went to a Palestine book launch by Ahmet Davutoğlu, hosted by a few British MPs at the Houses of Parliament in London.

“Genocide in Gaza: Voices of Global Conscience” (Clarity Press, 2025, 448 pages), which Ahmet Davutoğlu co-edited with Richard Falk, the renowned international law professor and former UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is a gold mine for many activists and citizens.

Our conscience has definitely been awakened by Israel’s livestreamed genocide in Gaza, but many of us feel we really need to school ourselves about the long-running historical, legal and fundamental issues regarding the 100-years of colonial dispossession, death, displacement and destruction of indigenous Arab Palestinians at the hands of what the Iranian scholar at Columbia University and “lifelong supporter of Palestinian liberation struggle” Hamid Dabashi called “the Western civilization.”

Professor Mahmood Mamdani of Columbia University, the justly proud father of the newly minted New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, has this to say about the volume:

“October 7 shattered the assumptions underlying our understanding of politics in the Middle East, urgently calling for an intellectual and political rethink. With great scholarly imagination and political insight, Richard Falk and Ahmet Davutoğlu, have put together a remarkable collection of writings from writers and activists, insiders and neighbours in this hour of need.”

The speaker, Professor Davutoğlu, has had a very distinguished career, both as a scholar of international relations, and as a politician, first as the Chief Advisor to the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then as Minister for Foreign Affairs and subsequently as the 26th Prime Minister of Republic of Türkiye.

Besides the calibre and distinguished background of the speaker, the subject matter, the genocide in and occupation of Palestine, is very close to my heart. It is one of the two issues that keep me awake at night. The other is the civil war in my native Myanmar, yet another mess which the British colonial policies produced and left behind. Along colonially refashioned ethnic lines, Myanmar has plunged into the war at home, initially fought with left-over WWII weapons since 28 March 1948, just weeks before the Zionist militia groups declared the establishment of Israel, via ethnic cleansing of 750,000 native Palestinian Arabs (2/3 of the total indigenous population), on 14 May the same year.

A word about the venue itself: the British Houses of Parliament.

I generally avoid these colonial monuments such as the British parliament, Westminster, etc., because I am visceral, beyond words, towards any symbols of imperialism, including landmarks which remind me of Britain’s global crimes, past and present.

For me, as a Fanon-inspired brown man from Myanmar, Nazism or Fascism and British (or French, Dutch, Spanish or American) imperialism differ only in degrees, not in kind. What the British Parliament or 10 Downing Street, or Whitehall or Westminster Abbey signifies is as criminal and evil as the Third Reich’s Swastika.

Britain’s contemporary crime is its direct participation in Israel’s genocidal war of extermination in Gaza.

This livestreamed textbook genocide is not perpetrated only by the Jewish Supremacist state of Israel, a European settler colony, “the most vicious”, in the words of Noam Chomsky. Emphatically, the British state’s direct participation in the genocide is well-documented, from hundreds of rounds of British spy aircraft over Gaza which are believed to be providing Israeli troops with real time on-site intelligence to vital parts of the F-35 fighter bombers which were used to decimate over 90% of physical infrastructure across Gaza to the BBC, in effect, serving as the mouthpiece of genocidal Israel.

Additionally, Britain has used all legal and discretionary powers to silence any British voices against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Those who run the British parliament had already shut down a previous book launch and documentary film screening organized by Anadolu News Agency, with the straightforward title, “The Evidence”, just one hour before the scheduled time.

The front and back covers of the coffee table book (to go with the Anadolu News documentary on Israel’s war crimes) which the British Parliament blocked from screening in 2024. (photo by Zarni)

Those of us 60 or so attendees made up of anti-genocide activists, representatives of different diplomatic missions, and Anadolu staff gathered in an ornate room to hear the Director-General of Anadolu, who commissioned the documentary and the coffee table book, only to be told by the DG that there would be neither film-screening nor book launch.

My Turkish journalist friend from Anadolu whispered to me, “We were instructed (by the British authorities in charge of the events) not to even put the coffee table books on the table, for display.” He handed me a complimentary copy of “The Evidence”, only after we exited the parliament’s premise, while subsequently taking out and lighting a cigarette on the street facing the Parliament Square, as if he needed puff away the justified disgust at this blatant act of British authorities blocking any efforts to disseminate evidence of Israel’s war crimes.

That was in the early months of Israel’s genocide. The British Prime Sir Keir Starmer never tired of reciting his un-concealed Zionist mantra Israel has a “right to self-defence” (including cutting off life’s essentials such as water, food, medicine and electricity to the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza).

As a Burmese or Myanmar native, I have always felt natural affinity with peoples from other formerly European-colonized countries around the world. That in the year 2025, Palestinian people continue to struggle to shake off the yoke of European settler colonial rule is something I personally find loathsome in the extreme. That, with Britain’s full collaboration and direct participation.

My old country, Myanmar, was under Britain’s colonial rule for 120 years, first under the control of the Calcutta-based East India Company and subsequently directly and indirectly from London. Before the British established its “rule of law”, the multi-ethnic indigenous populations who rose up organically, without the central overarching leadership or organization were subjected to the Kiplingesque White Man’s savagery – euphemistically called “The Pacification of Burma” formulated in these corridors of executive, judicial and legislative powers in London.

Watch the book launch by Ahmet Davutoğlu at the Houses of Parliament in London below:

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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 Media Service Editorial Committee, 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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