A group of 54 Israeli religious leaders, including rabbis, educators, and former government ministers, signed an open letter last week urging the Israeli government to cease all arms sales to Myanmar, which has been accused by rights groups and foreign governments of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya minority in Rakhine State.
Evidence collected by several human rights groups shows that Israeli arms companies have sold more than 100 tanks, as well as boats and light weapons, to the Myanmar military.
“As rabbis, female religious leaders, educators and communal leaders who go in the ways of the Torah [Jewish scripture], ‘whose ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peaceful,’ we cannot remain silent while the State of Israel supports the actions of powers bringing destruction to the world,” the religious leaders wrote in the letter, which is addressed to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin.
The letter cites a UN report from June 2016 that asserts that Myanmar’s actions against the Rohingya, including torture, disappearances, executions, and rape, should be considered crimes against humanity. It also mentions testimonies by Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh that suggest that these crimes have continued during the army’s clearance operations over the last several weeks.
The clearance operations began in response to what the letter calls “a terror attack by rebel Rohingya.”
“Our role as a nation ought to be to take positive action to help the dire situation there. But before we can engage in ‘doing good,’ we must first ‘shun evil.’ Before Israel can condemn the actions of the government in Burma, it must first stop supporting its military with weapons sales and training it provides,” the Jewish leaders wrote.
The letter points out although that Israel does not publicize a list of countries that buy its arms, evidence of Israeli arms exports to Myanmar has surfaced in the form of online posts by Myanmar’s commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, as well as by Israeli weapons exporters.
Another petition
The letter came days before Israel’s High Court of Justice was scheduled to hold a hearing on a petition submitted by lawyers and human rights activists that calls for an end to Israeli arms exports to Myanmar. The hearing will be held in Jerusalem today.
According to Eitay Mack, the lawyer representing the petition, information from the website of Israeli arms exporter TAR Ideal Concepts shows that the company has been “arming and training Burmese special forces who are operating in the Rakhine State right now.”
The petition was originally submitted to the court in December 2016. In March 2017, Israel’s Ministry of Defense argued that the court had no authority to approve or refuse arms export licenses.
Israeli human rights activist Ofer Neiman has said that Israel’s relationship with the Myanmar military is linked to its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank.
“Successive Israeli governments have been selling arms to the military dictatorship in Burma for years,” he told Middle East Eye earlier this month. “This policy is strongly related to Israel’s oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people. Weapons used against the Palestinians are being sold as ‘field-tested’ to some of the worst regimes on the planet.”
Last week, the UK government announced that it would suspend all military aid to Myanmar because of its “deep concern” about the military’s human rights abuses against Rohingya civilians.
