May 17, 2017
The experienced international aid workers and UN
officials I met during my visit were also making repeated comparisons with
Palestine. Is Myanmar the next Palestine? Is it already an almost identical
crisis?
Let’s look at the rhetoric. Militant Buddhist monks
insist that the whole of Myanmar is a Buddhist state first and foremost; Israel
describes itself as a Jewish state. These hardliners, who enjoy considerable
political power and can incite anti-Muslim mobs at a moment’s notice, say that
non-Buddhists live there only by their grace; this is what Zionist ideologues
in Israel say about Gentiles.
Read: Israel’s
non-implementation of UN resolutions on Occupied Palestine: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20170501-above-the-law-israels-non-implementation-of-un-resolutions-on-occupied-palestine/
Muslims are also accused of “out-breeding” Buddhists,
just as hard-line Zionists talk about a “demographic bomb” in Israel, for which
read “Palestinians and their higher birth-rate”. One hardliner to whom we spoke
in Myanmar called this “jihad with babies.” Laws even exist to limit the number
of children that Muslims can have to two per couple, although these are not
always enforced. Before marrying however, Muslims must pay a punitive (and
often completely unaffordable) fee of $750, and face five years in prison if
they do not do so.
A body of literature has also emerged re-writing the
history of the Rohingya — Myanmar’s Muslim community — and claiming that they
are not a “real” ethnic group, and have no rightful home in the country once
known as Burma. So, too has the history of the Palestinians been re-written in
Israel to eradicate their existence as a distinct people. There is a new
narrative in use, an invented truth which underpins slow-burn ethnic cleansing
in both Myanmar and Palestine.
Among other things, the Muslim Rohingya are accused, en
masse, of being prone to violence. Buddhist monks justify their own violence
against them as “self-defence”, just as Israeli politicians put a spin on the
disproportionate violence of its modern army against Palestinian civilians as —
you guessed — “self-defence”. I heard the hard-line anti-Muslim fanatics in
Myanmar talk repeatedly about “Islamification”, which is an allegation
reminiscent not just of Israeli right-wingers, but also of far-right parties
across Europe. The belief that all Muslims secretly want to “Islamise” the
country, and convert others by the sword or other savagery, is palpably
endemic.
There is also a constant allusion to shadowy foreign
powers. I heard a great deal about the Rohingya being tools of Pakistan or
Saudi Arabia. In Israel, you hear the same about the Palestinians, except their
alleged foreign manipulators are Qatar and Iran. Of course, there is a grain of
truth to each of these allegations, but the detractors of Palestinians and
Rohingya like to overemphasise foreign involvement in order to denigrate the
very real grievances of both.
Those spouting this rhetoric – largely hard-line Buddhist
monks and their ultra-nationalist allies in Myanmar — have a curiously similar
relationship with the state as the illegal Jewish settlers and the Netanyahu
government in Israel. While on the one hand Buddhist monasteries were raided in
the week I visited, and vicious anti-Muslim monks were taken away by police officers,
we also visited a recently closed Islamic school which had been beset by a
crowd of baying monks and nationalists just two weeks before, as the police and
even a Member of Parliament looked on and did nothing.
It was the humanitarian situation, however, where the
parallels between Myanmar and Palestine were most acute. As Palestinians are in
the occupied West Bank and Gaza, Rohingya are effectively stateless and denied
freedom of movement, having been herded into various camps after both the 2012
violence, as well as a more recent crackdown in late 2016. As with the
Palestinian fishermen in Gaza, their all-important fishing rights have also
been taken from them.
Several observers told me that they could foresee a
situation in which these camps would be standing for as long as their
Palestinian equivalents. “Is this the next Palestine?” one of them asked me,
rhetorically. “Are the Rohingya the new Palestinians?”
They have already been stuck in these camps for five
years. There is definitely a sense that they could be in them for five more,
perhaps even a decade; perhaps even as long as the Palestinians have been.
There is one more, horrifying parallel; the complete
indifference of the international community. There is no talk of military
intervention. The suggestion of UN peacekeepers is generally scoffed at and
brushed aside. “This is not a failed state,” claims the UN as it cites the need
to work with the government, the same government which is behind the ethnic
cleansing, as a good enough reason for not doing very much to help the
Rohingya.
Read: The UN is
biased towards Israel, not Palestine: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20170429-the-facts-are-clear-the-un-is-biased-towards-israel-not-palestine/
Much of Rakhine state is closed off by the military; if
there was more ethnic cleansing or even genocide, nobody would know about it
until it is too late. That would suit the Myanmar government very well, of
course.
Perhaps the nationalists and their hard-line Buddhist
friends see how indifferent the “international community” has been — and
remains — to Palestinian Muslims (and Christians, it must be said), and know
that they will probably get away with many more atrocities against the
Rohingya.
There is a good chance that Zionist colonialism and
expansionism – which sees no place for a state of Palestine — has emboldened
others involved in or contemplating ethnic cleansing elsewhere, inspired by
Israel’s apparent impunity. If that is so — and it certainly looks like it —
what a legacy that would be for the Zionist state, which was founded allegedly
to protect a minority, the Jews, but has along the way become the inspiration
for oppressors to destroy other minorities. The irony is rich, but will no
doubt be lost among those responsible in Tel Aviv and their Western supporters.