{"id":275303,"date":"2024-09-30T12:00:55","date_gmt":"2024-09-30T11:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=275303"},"modified":"2024-09-28T10:54:07","modified_gmt":"2024-09-28T09:54:07","slug":"on-democracy-now-a-tale-of-two-ongoing-genocides-in-israel-and-myanmar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/09\/on-democracy-now-a-tale-of-two-ongoing-genocides-in-israel-and-myanmar\/","title":{"rendered":"On Democracy NOW!–A Tale of Two Ongoing Genocides in Israel and Myanmar"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Maung Zarni<\/p><\/div>\n

Over the decades since its founding in 1948, Israel has succeeded in establishing a vast ecosystem of very elaborate, inventive and evolving genocidal methods. In a very clear breach of the Genocide Convention, Israel has subjected different sub-populations of Palestinian peoples to this system of depopulating historic Palestine with the singular purpose of making all occupied territories Jewish Majority.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

22 Sep 2024 <\/em>– On 19 September, on his eyewitness first-person observations of Israel\u2019s Nazi-like policies and practises<\/a> throughout the Occupied Territories of Palestine, and his focused research on the ongoing Rohingya genocide<\/a> in his native Burma or Myanmar, FORSEA Co-founder, exiled Burmese dissident and scholar of genocide Maung Zarni<\/a> talked to Democracy Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n

From 26 August to 5 September, Zarni spent 9 days in the Occupied Territories of Palestine and Israel as part of a 28-person delegation of inter-faith activists from USA and UK. They were there to bear witness and to offer what the local Palestinian hosts called \u201cprotective presence\u201d to the locals who resist daily threats and intimidations by both Jewish settlers (or more accurately, land thieves) and Israeli security forces.<\/p>\n

The visit was co-organized by US-based Rabbis for Ceasefire and Christians for Ceasefire, and principally hosted and led by Jerusalem-based liberation theology centre Sabeel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Photo Credit: Rev. Sara Webb Philipps, Atlanta, Georgia<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar\u2019s Rohingya. Washington International Law Journal Vol. 23, No. 4, 684-754. https:\/\/digitalcommons.law.uw.edu\/wilj\/vol23\/iss3\/8\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Two days before the Democracy Now interview, the United Nations Office of the High Commission for Human Rights<\/a> released its one-year report detailing horrific and widespread violations of human rights norms and international humanitarian law by Myanmar\u2019s coup junta, as well as by some of the anti-junta armed organizations such as the Arakan Army, an ultra-nationalist Buddhist group in Western Myanmar.<\/p>\n

In the interview, Zarni called attention to the decades-long close security ties between the two perpetrating UN member states, Israel and Myanmar. In her 496-page autobiography, My Life the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, a Kyiv-born Zionist settler from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, characterised as \u201ca love affair\u201d the bilateral relations between the then two new countries (both established in 1948). Israel\u2019s founders and military men had made state visits including David Ben-Gurion, the architect of Palestinian equivalent of the Holocaust \u2013 known in Arabic as the Nakba (or the Catastrophe) and General Moshe Dayan \u2013 to Burma as early as 1950\u2019s.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>View on Democracy now along with Transcript. https:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/2024\/9\/19\/burma<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

As a young boy from an extended military family in Mandalay, Zarni grew up as a supporter of Israel in the Zionists\u2019 \u201c(settler colonizers) wars of choice\u201d with immediate Arab neighbours such as Jordan, Syria and Egypt. He has a vivid memory of the pro-Israel Burmese media coverage of the 1973 war. Israel has fought these wars with the sole purpose of stealing vast swarths of land, \u201cfrom the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea,\u201d in the face of decades of Palestinian armed and non-violence resistance. (See a teach-in video by one of the foremost scholars of Israel-Palestine conflict Brief History of Israel-Palestine Conflict | Norman Finkelstein Teach-In on Gaza, Israel, and Hamas (YouTube.com)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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A Palestinian local historian showed a well-known Zionist artist propaganda piece, who painted the land with people (the black and white picture of an old neighborhood in the pre-1948 Yaffah) into a land only with sand dunes on the Mediterranean in the background), Sept. 2024. (photo by Zarni)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As early 2009, the Burmese dissident had confronted some of the retired senior Israeli officials such as Ami Ayalon<\/a> with the question of the right of return of Palestinians. Zarni has been deeply disturbed by what he came to understand as Israel\u2019s genocidal land theft, under a century-old Zionist lie, \u201cLand without People for the People without Land.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the old Yaffah or Jeffa, Zarni and fellow inter-faith delegates were given an educational tour by a brilliant local Palestinian historian from Zochrot who gave the last count of the villages and towns destroyed and depopulated (609 and 11 respectively) in the UN-designated Palestine area and months before Israel\u2019s Declaration of Statehood in May.<\/p>\n

The old city of Jeffa is now a run-down neighbourhood of Tel Aviv, which was founded only in 1906, the year the Zionist settler from Warsaw named David Ben-Gurion arrived. The local historian said before the Nakba, Jeffa or Yaffah\u2019s Palestinian population was roughly 89,000 of which only 3,000 remained after the thriving city\u2019s destruction in the establishment of Israel.<\/p>\n

Some years ago, Zarni heard a chilling parallel story of the Polish city of Krakow and its Jewish population from the Galicia Jewish Museum (Krakow is only 68-kilometers from Auschwitz). The museum guide, a Polish sociologist, told him that before the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939 with Krakow as the Nazi administrative headquarters, Krakow was a thriving city with the Jewish population numbering over 70,000. After the Nazi genocide, only 2,000 Polish Jews returned or remained in the city\u2019s old Jewish Quarter called Kazamia. (See the excellent Al Nakba Tour site.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

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