Artículo World Politics Review, 10.10.2017 Eli Meixler, periodista independiente y fotógrafo basado en Hong Kong
Members of the Islamic Movement in Israel protest Myanmar’s treatment of the Muslim Rohingya minority. (AP Oded Balilty).
As Israel’s High Court weighs a ban on weapons sales to Myanmar, where the United Nations’ top human rights official has denounced a military campaign as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” Israel’s Defense Ministry—no stranger to isolation—is unrepentant.
In the latest outburst of violence in Myanmar’s volatile Rakhine state, the military’s blistering crackdown in response to attacks in August from Rohingya insurgents has triggered an unprecedented exodus. More than 500,000 Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority, have fled into Bangladesh.
International condemnation has been swift, with rights groups exerting pressure on Western nations to cut military-to-military engagement. The United States and the United Kingdom have already backpedaled on planned military trainings as allegations of atrocities mount.
Activists hoped Israel would follow suit. Israel’s High Court opened hearings on a petition to freeze weapons sales and investigate Israel’s complicity in rights violations on Sept. 25. The same day, Human Rights Watch said that research and satellite image analysis confirmed the Myanmar military had committed “crimes against humanity,” including forced relocation, extrajudicial killings, arson and systematic sexual violence.
“I cannot imagine ... when it comes to crimes against humanity, that the court will not intervene,” the human rights attorney behind the petition in Israel, Eitay Mack, told the court in Jerusalem. “It is never too late to do the right thing,” Tamar Zandberg, another co-petitioner and member of Israel’s Knesset, wrote in an open letter to Israel’s defense minister.
Lawyers for Israel’s Defense Ministry have responded by challenging the High Court’s jurisdiction. Lawyers for the Israeli government have previously cast bilateral arms trade as a foreign policy matter, and the courts have historically agreed, granting the Defense and Foreign Ministries broad leeway to pursue arms agreements with less-reputable regimes.
On Sept. 26, the High Court accepted a request by the government’s lawyer to institute a gag order on the verdict, which was delivered the next day. The court has suppressed records of past arms deals, but Mack noted the incongruity of concealing ongoing deals when activists’ future efforts to stop them would be public knowledge. The decision also seems to provide cover for Israel’s defense industry to continue sales while violence continues to be perpetrated in Myanmar.
“Moving closer to [Myanmar’s] military at the same time they violate international laws fosters a sense of impunity for their actions and enables further violations,” says Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, a London-based NGO.
Israel’s defense industry, valued at $7 billion in 2012, doesn’t fill Myanmar’s armories. That falls to China. Since 2012, Myanmar has accounted for 10 percent of Chinese weapons exports, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Israel has mostly supplied small arms and intelligence systems, according to security analysts. But its willingness to defy past international arms embargoes made it a lifeline to Myanmar’s former ruling junta under the stranglehold of sanctions and isolation.
Ties between Israel and Burma, as Myanmar was then known, go back to 1948, when they both declared their independence; Burma was among the first countries to recognize the state of Israel. The young nations were bound by post-colonial experience and socialist ideology, as well as the friendship of their leaders. In 1955, Burma’s U Nu became the first foreign head of state to visit Israel. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, returned the honor in 1961, declaring “in all of Asia, there is no more friendly nation to Israel than Burma.”
Israel considered these early ties “a major diplomatic success, ‘as extensive as it was unexpected,’” as Andrew Selth wrote in “Burma’s Secret Military Partners.” Given its status as part of the nonaligned movement during the Cold War, Burma proved to be a valuable ally for Israel that it could rely on in international forums.
Burma’s feeble government, threatened by numerous insurgencies, closely observed Israel’s organization of its pre-state paramilitary groups into a professional defense force. U Nu was especially taken by Israel’s kibbutzes, which influenced Burma’s 1955 village defense scheme. The same year, Israel sold Myanmar 29 Spitfire fighter planes, the first confirmed arms transaction.
Relations deteriorated following Burma’s 1962 coup. But after pro-democracy uprisings were crushed in 1988, the generals, cornered by American and European arms embargoes, turned back to Israel. By then, they were also buying arms from China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Singapore.
Between 1997 and 2007, Israel provided Myanmar with a range of military services: a small quantity of second-hand hardware, facilities to manufacture small arms and assault weapons, as well as intelligence and surveillance training, according to unconfirmed but widespread reports. Israel has continuously denied these arms links.
In September 2015, photos posted to Myanmar military chief Min Aung Hlaing’s Facebook page documented a previously unreported goodwill trip to Israel, which included meetings with Israel’s president and defense chiefs, tours of arms contractors and visits to air and sea bases, where he examined a coastal patrol boat. Myanmar later bought six of them. Photos on the website of military contractor TAR Ideal Concepts showed Myanmar military officers, some in uniform, receiving training in specially modified assault rifles.
In October 2016, Mack requested information on the sales from Israel’s Defense Ministry, citing the photos on Min Aung Hlaing’s Facebook page. His request was denied. Last December, as military reprisals against an earlier Rohingya insurgent attack displaced 87,000, Mack, Zandberg and their colleagues filed the petition with Israel’s High Court advising a sales freeze.
After the petition was filed, Mack noted, the post on TAR Ideal Concepts’ website was retitled to remove reference to Myanmar, though many of the photos remained. In an email, a representative for TAR Ideal Concepts wrote that the company “adheres to all regulations of the Israeli [Ministry of Defense] and export control for all projects.”
Israel’s Defense Ministry denies liability for the use of its weapons abroad. But Mack argued before the court that awareness of possible atrocities implicates Israel under precedents set by the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
“Even if [Israel] gave training to one unit that [was] used to commit crimes against humanity in Rakhine, or war crimes in Kachin state”—where armed ethnic groups have fought Myanmar’s government for decades—“Israel is responsible,” Mack told me before the trial.
Israel has gone to lengths to hide its arms sales to dubious governments in the past. In 2016, the High Court maintained a gag order on arms sales to Rwanda in the 1990s during the Rwandan genocide and to the Bosnian Serb Army of Ratko Mladic during the Bosnian War.
“Israel doesn’t have a lot of friends in the world,” says Washington-based security analyst Zachary Abuza.
“But I don’t see how there’s any diplomatic or strategic benefit to be arming a military that is committing genocide.”
Since the latest crackdown began, Myanmar has faced little more than strongly worded condemnations. The U.N. Security Council has met twice but issued only an informal statement of concern. Myanmar officials have expressed confidence that China and Russia will obstruct any forceful resolution. China skipped a Sept. 18 meeting about Myanmar on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.
“Practical steps such as a U.N.-mandated global arms embargo don’t seem to be being considered,” Farmaner says.
But pressure is intensifying. Last month, a resolution introduced in the European Parliament threatened sanctions and the withdrawal of trade preferences, while the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, called for suspending the shipment of foreign arms to Myanmar’s military.
Abuza points out that the threat of censure hasn’t inhibited Israel in the past.
“Israel was not part of the international opprobrium or sanctions against the junta,” he says. “When the EU and the United States had arms embargoes, Israel did not. And this is not lost on the Burmese leadership.”
Mack acknowledges that international outcry is unlikely to deter Israel’s policymakers.
“Israel is always looking for someone who will vote with it unconditionally in international forums, where there won’t be any questions about policy—and Burma is a good client.”
