Israel and Myanmar agree to edit each other's history. What could go wrong?

If you want to manipulate the future, first you must manipulate the past. It’s a maxim known and adopted by all rising totalitarian regimes, and thus explains why academics, schools, and textbooks often find themselves among the first victims of those who seek absolute power via the subjugation and pacification of those beneath them.

Education and critical thinking are the twin enemies of authoritarian rule, and there’s nothing more pesky to an emerging dictatorship or a regime that seeks to pull down the democratic institutions around it than a citizenry that is cognisant of objective reality.

Stalin’s Soviet Union knew this, as did Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and as does Assad’s Syria. Also, it turns out you can add the respective states of Israel and Myanmar to this non-exhaustive list.

This week, Israel and Myanmar signed a cooperation agreement that allows each state to review and edit each other’s history textbooks. 

In other words, authorities from each state may now review the other’s schoolbooks, "particularly concerning the passages referring to the history of the other state and, where needed, introduce corrections to these textbooks," reads the agreement.

While the agreement outlines an intent to 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,” it’s real intended purpose is pretty clear: to provide each state the ability to rewrite each other’s history.

Let’s say an Israeli high school textbook makes mention of Myanmar’s campaign of terror against its one million Rohingya Muslims. Well, Myanmar authorities can now demand that Israel remove any mention of the country’s atrocities against its minorities, of which the United Nations described as “textbook ethnic cleansing.”

Equally, Israel may instruct the government in Myanmar to remove any mention of Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, its seven decades long effort to ethnically cleanse Palestine, its laws of discrimination and segregation, and even its recent killing of unarmed Palestinian protesters.

"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," Penny Green, professor of law and globalisation at Queen Mary University of London, told Middle East Eye.

Israel and Myanmar share more than just “state crime denial,” however. They also cooperate in the killing and forced displacement of the Rohingya.

Investigations by human rights groups have found that Israel has sold more than 100 tanks, light weapons, and patrol boats, which have been an instrumental tool used by Myanmar to attack Rohingya fishermen, and it’s doing it shamelessly - even declaring it will continue to arm the genocidal Myanmar regime despite the pleas and High Court petitions of Israeli peace activists.

Moreover, Israel continues to arm Myanmar’s military while the European Union and the United States deepen their respective trade embargoes against the South East Asian state.

“Historically, whenever there was a US embargo [on a certain country], Israel filled the gap,” Itay Mach, an Israeli human rights lawyer told the Jerusalem Post. “Israel has always been one of the main weapons suppliers to many regimes around the world, including to countries in Africa and Latin America.”

This new “education” agreement, which allows Israel and Myanmar a say on how they are depicted in each other's textbooks, allows these crimes against humanity and human rights violations to be whitewashed from history, at least in the minds of future Israeli and Burmese generations, preventing reconciliation and remedy of the past.

It is for this reason post-war Germany mandated that its schools must teach the history of the Holocaust – in an effort to prevent the repeating of past sins by future German generations. Failure to accurately and honestly recognize the past is to betray those who were victims of the very atrocity one is attempting to erase.

For instance, the abuse US soldiers inflicted upon Iraqi civilians came as no surprise to those who have studied the abuse US soldiers inflicted upon Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War. But as observed by Nick Turse for Mother Jones, of the 30,000 published books on the Vietnam War, almost none mention the systemic rape of Vietnamese women by US soldiers.

“Vietnamese are bit characters in American histories of the war, Vietnamese civilians most of all. Americans who tromped, humped, and slogged through Vietnam on one-year tours of duty are invariably the focus of those histories, while Vietnamese who endured a decade or even decades of war remain, at best, in the background or almost totally missing,” writes Turse.

Equally, Palestinians and the Rohingya will now either be reduced to “bit characters” or wiped entirely from the respective histories of Israel and Myanmar. 

For school students in both countries, the forced eviction of 700,000 Palestinians during the Nakba and 500,000 Rohingya during the 2017/18 crackdown will never have happened, while any number of grotesque human rights violations will be erased from the collective conscience of future Israeli and Myanmarese generations.