The Rohingya: Southeast Asia’s Palestinians by Nada Elia

This is despite the fact that the UN’s own definition of genocide would incriminate Israel. Additionally, Israel has maintained its Jewish supremacy against the “demographic threat” posed by the Palestinian people through a violent military occupation, punctuated by episodes of all-out wars against the Gaza Strip. It describes these episodes as “mowing the lawn”, a sanitised expression that erases the indiscriminate violence against the two million mostly-civilian refugees trapped in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Myanmar stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship in 1982, and has since engaged in episodic attacks against this community, repeatedly forcing them to flee into neighboring countries, with harrowing stories of murder, rape and torched villages. Myanmar’s official position is that the Rohingya are originally from Bangladesh, and it refers to them as “Bengalis,” just as Israel would have the Palestinians be “southern Syrians,” (as Golda Meir put it) or “Jordanian,” and refers to them as “Arab,” rather than Palestinian.