Malaysia as a “Second Palestine”: Dangerous Reframing of Siege Mentality

Ahmad Marzuk Shaary’s recent comparison of Malaysia to Palestine illustrates a reframing of the siege mentality among segments of the Muslim community. By equating a sovereign nation with a stateless territory whose people have been suffering at the hands of illegal occupying forces, such a misleading framing of inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations risks further polarising Malaysian society.

On 19 October, the Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) Member of Parliament (MP) for Pengkalan Chepa wrote on Facebook a post titled “Learning from Palestinian History: Let us not Repeat the Same Mistakes”. In it, he claimed that Malaysia’s Muslims have been “exiled from their own homeland” by non-Muslims. 

In his post, Marzuk writes that the Jewish immigrants (“pendatang”) 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”. Consequently, the Palestinians became “refugees in their own land”, and “signs are already beginning to appear” that this history is 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. This has long been the narrative peddled by segments of Malay-Muslims in Malaysia, particularly the political elite, who see non-Malays as disloyal immigrants threatening the rights of Malay-Muslims. This is the foundation of a siege mentality which has grown since the 1970s, under the guise of the ketuanan Melayu (Malay lordship/ supremacy) narrative, which seeks to uphold their ethnic supremacy and special birthrights. 

This is a false analogy. While Palestine has been illegally occupied by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip and to varying degrees in the West Bank, Malaysia is an independent, sovereign nation. While most Malaysians have a legal entity they can call home, Palestinians are technically stateless. While the occupying forces in Palestine adhere to the colonial ideology of Zionism that seeks the construction of an “exclusivist homeland … through the displacement of the region’s Indigenous populations”, there is no ideology uniting the so-called pendatang in Malaysia. Malaysia’s legal and socio-political framework functions based on a constitutional democracy which enshrines the rights of racial and religious minorities. Thus, Marzuk falsely equates the systematic dispossession of Palestinians with the alleged loss of power of Malay-Muslims.

Marzuk’s remarks and those of his party colleagues are reflective of the increasing prevalence of a reframed siege mentality which distorts the socio-political and legal realities in the country through the lens of global Muslim victimhood. 

This is a false analogy. While Palestine has been illegally occupied by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip and to varying degrees across the West Bank, Malaysia is an independent, sovereign nation. While most Malaysians have a legal entity they can call home, Palestinians are technically stateless.

This is not the first time a PAS member has employed this false equation. In 2021, for example, Penang PAS Secretary Iszuree Ibrahim claimed that the North Seberang Perai and Barat Daya districts — located on the mainland and island of the state respectively — had become like the West Bank and Gaza Strip in terms of the loss of Malay-Muslim ownership. Since Penang is governed by the Chinese-dominated Democratic Action Party (DAP) and led by a non-Malay, non-Muslim Chief Minister, this analogy has been politically effective, especially during election campaigns. 

This same narrative has been repurposed to oppose the proposed Urban Renewal Act (URA). The URA seeks to redevelop ageing urban buildings to improve safety, housing quality, and infrastructure, while reducing the consent threshold among property owners to 80 per cent, 75 per cent, or 51 per cent, depending on the condition of the buildings. Although the government guarantees a “one-for-one” replacement for affected residents, critics fear forced evictions, developer dominance, rising property taxes, and the displacement of lower-income urban communities. Many urban developers in Penang are Chinese-owned, and some evictions have occurred in Malay-majority areas such as Kampong Baru. 

While the framework has existed since 2013, the URA 2025 Bill was tabled for its first reading in Parliament in August. To show their rejection of the bill, PAS organised a rally in Kuala Lumpur in October, claiming that the country would fall to “DAP control” if the “Urban Robbery Act” were passed. Held in conjunction with a rally organised in solidarity with the Global Sumud Flotilla activists detained by Israel, PAS Secretary-General Takiyuddin Hassan took the opportunity to link the URA to the Palestinians’ loss of land, an illogical comparison given the entirely differing contexts in Malaysia and Palestine. 

This rhetorical manoeuvre allows PAS to infuse religious sentiment and anti-colonial sentiment into a local housing policy debate. This has transformed a development issue into a charged narrative of ethnic and religious dispossession. In fact, this narrative is being promoted to influence the urban Malay vote, a segment where PAS has far less traction compared to the rural or semi-rural areas. PAS has also said it will address the issue during the 16^th General Election. 

Marzuk has faced strong backlash from DAP MPs, and even from within the wider Perikatan Nasional opposition coalition. They have called his remarks “extreme and unacceptable”, and akin to declaring a “cultural war”. This narrative, if allowed to persist, poses a genuine threat to Malaysia’s political stability and social cohesion. The Madani government might be hesitant to respond firmly, possibly fearing that harsh measures would only reinforce the opposition’s portrayal of the administration as oppressive and unjust. That same reticence was evident during the PAS-led anti-Trump protests in Kuala Lumpur during US President Trump’s visit to the city for the ASEAN Summit, thus suggesting general caution on the government’s part.

Ultimately, the only institution capable of intervening with moral authority to remind PAS of the peril inherent in propagating such a distorted narrative is none other than the Conference of Malay Rulers (Majlis Raja-Raja Melayu), the key institution responsible for addressing racial and religious issues. By doing so, the Conference would be able to safeguard national unity and intercommunal harmony in the face of such misleading narratives.

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