Palestinians’ Liberation Struggle Needs Solidarity: Cambodians Respond with Love & Art

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 14 Oct 2024

Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service

A graffiti poem of resistance and defiance on Israel’s Apartheid Wall, Bethlehem, Palestine, 30 Aug 2024. (Photo by Zarni)

“(Cambodian leaders and people) have spoken out against the hypocrisy of Western governments preaching human rights, international law and the rule-based world order while condoning and even aiding and abetting genocide in Cambodia in 1975-1979 and again today in Palestine.”

5 Oct 2024 – We are approaching one-year mark of the 7 October “acts of resistance”, as the renowned American social theorist Judith Butler put it, by caged Palestinians of Gaza. Israel responded with its Hitlerite physical destruction of the substantial segments of 2.3 million Palestinian people in Gaza.

Israel’s relentless mass destruction and mass extermination of Palestinians in Gaza has awoken the conscience of the moral majority in the world in ways that have been unprecedented – as evidenced in the most widespread and sustained mass protests around the world, calling for the immediate end to Israel’s genocidal occupation and establishing a Free Palestine, with its pre-1967 international borders.

What has emerged is a clear split in the world’s opinions into two categories.

On one hand is the pro-Israel camp comprising virtually all former European/Western colonizing states-regimes, with their common histories of variously genocidal loot, land grab, and crimes of aggression. On the other hand, the pro-Palestine camp has emerged made up of the formerly colonized peoples and states, coupled with people of conscience and compassion across Western societies.

On the eve of such history-making anniversary of the uprising of the Oppressed – a jail break, really – our justice-driven network, FORSEA, has put together a short selection of Palestinian voices calling for international solidarity for a Free Palestine. The three individuals are prominent Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories including Bethlehem, East Jerusalem and Haifa. Their voices are complimented by the story of how Cambodian and other Southeast Asian citizens, including artists, scholars, and painters were forming solidarity networks in the mainland Southeast Asia, a historical site of the White Man’s crimes – namely the American invasion of Vietnam and the resultant Khmer Rouge genocide, some 50 years ago. “The American war,” never officially declared as such, left 4 million Vietnamese dead while the Khmer Rouge genocide, which the American war eventually precipitated, took the lives of nearly 2 million Cambodians, 1/3 of the total population of Cambodia, between 1975-79.

Panoramic view of Al Aqsa Mosque, East Jerusalem, Aug. 2024. Photo: Zarni

Ankor Wat, Siem Reap, Cambodia. Photo: Zarni

Addressing the US Agency for International Development-funded international conference on Khmer Rouge genocide held at the former court room of Khmer Rouge Tribunal in May 2024, former Prime Minister Hun Sen named the United States-instigated military coup against a popular civilian leadership of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, (not to mention Washington’s carpet bombing in Vietnamese-Cambodian communities) as a key precipitating factor for the emergence of the genocidal Pol Pot regime in 1975.

If my memory serves me well, former PM Hun Sen recounted how Western powers objected to calling Pol Pol regime “genocidal”. Having teamed up with the anti-Soviet China of Henry Kissinger, US and UK protected and seated Pol Pot leadership at the United Nations for at least a decade, after the ugly facts of the genocide the red Khmers perpetrated, had come to light.

Hun Sen then went on to connect the West of 1970’s and the West of 2024: he asked pointedly and rhetorically, “Is it not genocide when Israel is slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza by the thousands?”

A straight face “No” has been the standardized answer from Washington, be it the certifiably senile US President Joe Biden – nicknamed “Genocide Joe” worldwide to the minions of US Government including a lowly political affairs officer at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, who received, and held a meeting with, a small group of the American interfaith delegation to Palestine with whom I travelled to Kerem Shalom crossing at Gaza on 29 August 2024.

Fast forward from Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero to Year 2024 in Palestine, both Gaza and West Bank.

Amply armed with the American-supplied “thousands of precision-guided missiles and 2,000-pound bombs that can devastate densely populated areas”, Israel has relentlessly destroyed much of Gaza’s residential infrastructure and directly mass-exterminated thousands of Palestinians, including 20,000 infants and children in Gaza, a vast open-air prison, all within a mere 11 months.

Ami Ayalon, retired IDF Naval Admiral former Director of Shabat or Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, was honest enough to admit that Israel runs Gaza like a vast prison, with the inmate population larger than Auschwitz-Birkenau where 1.2 million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazi SS.

When I returned from Israel and the occupied Palestine after my extremely intense stay for 9-days as a member of an international delegation of activists, I had characterised what I witness as “beyond what the Nazis embodied”, an observation that found its way into a UN Press Briefing.

This ongoing Hitlerite genocidal destruction has been carried out in the name of the Jewish State’s “self-defence”, as if settler colonizers anywhere had the right to defend their illegal occupation – since 1967 – and resort to the openly declared Nazi-like “collective punishment,” should “the nation under occupation”, as the late Raphael Lemkin, the father of the term “genocide”, would most certainly call Palestinians, dare resist.

A policy of collective punishment was a well-documented integral component of colonial and Fascist regimes. Here is a trilingual sign (in Polish, English and Hebrew) articulating specifically how Nazi SS introduced this at Auschwitz-1 or “the original Auschwitz”.

German concentration camp, Auschwitz I (the main camp), Poland (1940-1945). Photos: Zarni 2017

As a matter of fact, Israel’s collective punishment in Gaza – and subsequently, in West Bank refugee cities such as Tulkarm and Jenin – is a typical conduct of all colonizers and Fascists, from the British invaders in Burma in the 1890’s to the French occupiers in Algeria in the 1950’s, and Himmler’s Schutzstaffel (or SS) at Auschwitz camps and Japanese Fascists in Southeast Asia in the 1940’s in-between.

Against this backdrop, leading politicians, state officials and media pundits in USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and most of the EU states – for instance, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Olaf Scholz, Ursula von der Leyen, just to name the most despicable – have been parroting the Orwellian doublespeak – Israel’s “self-defence” – put out by the officially Jewish (Supremacist) State. The collaborators’ views and voices have long been amplified, on a daily or even hourly basis, by virtually all Western media outlets, from the BBC to CNN, to the Times of London to the New York Times.

So, FORSEA focuses on relaying Palestinian voices to other people of conscience.

Abdelfattah Abusrour’s Lifelong Quest: Peace with Justice and Opposition to Oppression

Dr Abdelfattah Abusrour is the first-generation refugee whose parents were among the survivors of the Nakba of 1948, the Palestinian equivalent of the Holocaust at the hands of the Zionist Jewish settlers led by David Ben-Gurion from Warsaw, Poland. Dr Abusrour’s parents were violently displaced from one of the villages 17 kilometres from Bethlehem to the refugee camp named Aida. Despite his humble beginning as a child of the refugees, he went on to become a biochemist with a French PhD, taught as a faculty at the University of Bethlehem and eventually opted to set up an art education centre – Alrowwad Cultural and Arts Society – in the middle of Aida refugee camp.

In his nearly 4-minutes video message to the world’s people, he explained why he devotes his life to nurturing intellectually and morally Palestinian refugee youth using various forms of learning including art and science. Importantly, he stressed that the Palestinian struggle for liberation is not against any religion or racial or ethnic group, but rather against the Oppressor, whatever the name. He welcomes any acts of global solidarity.

A glimpse of a small section of the apartheid wall (810 kilometre in total length) with a typical Israelis sniper tower, a view from Abusrour’s education centre. Photo: Zarni

Sami Abu Shehadeh

The next distinguished Palestinian whose voice needs to be heard is Sami Abu Shehadeh.

Born in 1975, Sami Abu Shehadeh (سامي ابو شحادة) is a member of the Joint List representing the Arab nationalist Balad. Abu Shehadeh was first elected to the Knesset in October 2019 where he served until 2022. He was previously Director of the Yaffa Youth Movement and a member of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa City Council. He is a historian by training. In October 2023, Sami Abu Shehadeh was arrested by Israeli authorities over his public opposition to the war in Gaza.” (source: Sami Abu Shehadeh | ECFR)

At the meeting held at the Yaffa Youth Movement office in Jeffa or Yaffa, Sami explained how Israel, “the Jewish democracy”, has set up a multi-tiered and elaborate system of apartheid as an effective method of splintering the Palestinian population under its Zionist occupation since 1967 (not in this recording). In the recording Sami listed the “four front” war Israel’s Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu had declared, including Gaza, West Bank (all under Israeli’s illegal occupation since 1967), Lebanon and “internal front” (the Palestinian citizens of Israel).

Omar Haramy

Omar Haramy (on the right with glasses) with Fakri Abu Diab (left, holding a paper plate), August 2024. Photo: Zarni.
[Fakri is a well-respected Palestinian resident and anti-demolition activist in Silwan neighbourhood of Jerusalem whose home where he grew up was demolished by Israeli authorities in February 2024 (after US Sec. of State Anthony Blinken and team’s visit to the still-standing house), despite his (Fakri’s) legal ownership from pre-Israel Palestine days.]

The 3rd and last Palestinian voice FORSEA would like to introduce is Omar Haramy, a Palestinian Christian from Jerusalem who directs Sabeel, the center for the development of Palestinian Liberation Theology. Omar is a very dynamic and extremely witty Palestinian leader with an indomitably defiant spirit towards both his immediate oppressor, Israel, and the latter’s imperialist patron and protector, the United States. Educated in Cyprus and Palestine, Omar offered the visiting N. American-British interfaith delegation of 28 members his grounded and richly textured understanding of the 70+ years of systemic repression of Palestinian people from whom Israel has been stealing land through conflicts and wars of choice since its founding in 1948.

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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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