Both Accused of Ethnic Cleansing: Myanmar, Israel Sign Education Deal to Rewrite History

Israel and Myanmar signed an education cooperation agreement to rewrite their own history in each other's textbooks. (Photo: via Twitter

The governments of both Israel and Myanmar signed an education cooperation agreement Monday allowing them to rewrite their own history in each other’s textbooks, contributing to a more benevolent image of them and their responsibility in ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians by Israel and against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

According to the agreement, of which the Israeli newspaper Haaretz got a copy, the countries will,

“cooperate to develop programs for the teaching of the Holocaust and its lessons of the negative consequences of intolerance, racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia as a part of the school curriculum in the Republic of the Union of Myanmar.”

The agreement will also promote academic cooperation, including conferences, training courses and even the development of Israeli and Jewish studies programs in Myanmar and Myanmar studies in Israel, including language programs.

The countries will be able to “mutually verify school textbooks, particularly concerning the passages referring to the history of the other state and, where needed, introduce corrections to these textbooks,” a move that will basically allow them to write their own nationalist narratives in each others’ textbooks and ignore that fact that Israel and Myanmar have been respectively ethnic cleansing their territories from the Palestinian and Rohingya peoples.

The United Nations has said Myanmar’s campaign against the Rohingya Muslim population “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Penny Green, professor of law and globalization at Queen Mary University of London, told Middle East Eye:

“Of course, Israel sees Myanmar as a friend. Both states share the same exclusionist worldview. Both states have engaged in mass state crime criminality against those they have defined as non-citizens. Both states operate systems of apartheid, structural discrimination, and unfettered state brutality. It is entirely predictable that they now engage in a shared educational program of state crime denial.”

But cooperation between Israel and Myanmar is not only ideological. More than 100 tanks, as well as boats and light weapons, have been sold to the Myanmar government by Israeli arms companies, according to investigations by several human rights groups, despite the United States and the European Union imposing an arms embargo against Myanmar.

One Israeli company, TAR Ideal Concepts, has also trained Myanmar special forces in northern Rakhine state, where much of the violence is taking place.

Israel has a long history of contributing to other countries’ own ethnic cleansing.

(Telesur, PC, Social Media)

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