Asian Angle | Malaysia is not Palestine. False equivalence fuels ethnic polarisation
Such rhetoric paints Malays as the dispossessed natives of their own land and non-Malays as the occupiers
By equating a sovereign nation with a stateless territory whose people have suffered decades of occupation and displacement, this distortion of reality risks deepening existing ethnic and religious divides in Malaysia.
On October 19, Ahmad Marzuk Shaary, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) MP for Pengkalan Chepa, wrote a social media post titled “Learning from Palestinian History: Let us not Repeat the Same Mistakes”. In it, he claimed that Malaysia’s Muslims had been “exiled from their own homeland” by non-Muslims.
Marzuk wrote that Jewish pendatang (Malay for immigrants) had initially gone to Palestine as visitors and were accepted on humanitarian grounds by the noble-hearted Palestinians. Eventually, they “controlled the economy, seized strategic cities, seized important lands and finally dominated politics”, he said. Consequently, Marzuk said the Palestinians became “refugees in their own land”, adding that “signs are already beginning to appear” that this history was repeating itself in Malaysia.
From Marzuk’s perspective – and that of his fellow party members – the situation of Malay-Muslims is similar to that of the Palestinians. In their minds, Malay-Muslims no longer have control over major resources, including land and properties. The pendatang to whom they have lost these resources are the non-Malays, specifically the Chinese, who are allegedly “arranging the map of political power” directly from Putrajaya.