Any Israeli alliances should include the restoration of a profoundly just, moral, and enduring pact with the Kurdish people, as in the days of Mustafa Barazani. Opinion.
Kurd MilitantIsrale news photo Creative Commons
Iran, Turkey, and Qatar have swiftly mobilized to falsely condemn Israel’s defensive operations in Syria following the overthrow of the Assad dictatorship. These three nations, notorious for their own troubling actions in Syria, are now hiding their own nefarious involvement in the region by predictably and falsely singling out Israel.
Iran has long backed hostile Arab militias by smuggling weapons across Syria to its Hezbollah terror proxy, while Turkey under the Caliph wannabee, President Tayip Erdogan, has illegally occupied both northern Cyprus while also carrying out airstrikes targeting Kurdish resistance and civilians in northern Syria. Turkish-backed militias have been accused of heinous crimes, including civilian killings and kidnappings and Qatar is both duplicitous and no true friend of the West. Yet these three named nations are now urging the new Syrian leadership to criticize Israel, attempting to isolate the Jewish state further on the global stage.
And it should never be forgotten that in Erdogan’s view, Turkey is now in the position it should rightfully have: becoming the greatest Muslim power in the Middle East, fulfilling Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman imperialist vision of restoring the loss of Turkey’s four hundred years of leadership of the Muslim world.
The Middle East remains an extremely volatile and dangerous region for Israel. With ongoing threats from the remnants of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian backed Houthis and, of course, the head of the evil snake, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Israel cannot afford to let its guard down from protecting its people in such turbulent times.
According to a early Report dated July 5, 2008, Adm. Mike Mullen, then Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Israel. During his time there he showed interest in the Israel Aviation Industries’ long-range Heron unmanned aerial vehicles. The UAVs had been loaned by Israel to the Turkish military for use against Kurdish “rebel” bases in northern Iraq and had radically turned the tide of their operation.
At the same time, I received a plea from a Kurdish friend who was very supportive of Israel’s struggle to survive among its hostile Arab and Islamist neighbors. He was, and remains, devoted to the Jewish people for he knows of the shared alliances that exist between Jews and Kurds dating back millennia. He referred to the help ancient Kurds had provided to Jewish Judea by sending troops to fight alongside the embattled Jews during their uprising against ruthless Roman occupation. Adiabene’s Kurdish queen and her people had embraced the Jewish faith and some believe Kurds may share ethnicity.
Here is part of my Kurdish friend’s impassioned letter:
“I wish the Jews in Israel and abroad would know better about the policy of their leaders concerning the Kurds, because it happens in the name of Israel, and that should matter to all Jews. The cooperation by Israel with the Turkish military is no secret, but Turkish oppression of the Kurds is unknown to most Israelis. It is hard for me to understand how Israel’s recent cooperation, which benefits Turkey, does not consider the misery that it imposes upon the Kurdish people who yearn, as the Jews have for centuries, to be free from terror and persecution?
“Not so long ago, the Jews in Europe endured the Shoah (he used the Hebrew term for the Holocaust) and they know better than anyone else the horrors of that experience. How can they be insensitive therefore towards the suffering of we, a neighboring people? These questions should be asked by the Jewish nation and answered by its politicians. How can they justify it?
“Of course, it was not only Israel but the whole world that was pro-Turkish and anti-Kurdish. It is not fair to criticize Israel only, but given the history of the Jewish people, there should be a heightened sensitivity towards those of us who are suffering.
“We Kurds did not harm the Jews; instead, we have shared so much culture together and we still remember fondly the Jews who lived with us for centuries. But the Turks waxed and waned in their attitude towards the Jews; sometimes they were tolerant and sometimes hostile. There are many Turks today who share Islamist ideas and proclaim hostility towards the Jewish state. Within Turkey lies the same pestilence of anti-Semitism that exists throughout the Arab and Persian world.
“I remember your moving article in which you categorically made clear that the people who truly deserve an independent sovereign state are the Kurds; not the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. I also feel deeply that one day soon there will be an abiding and honorable alliance between the Jewish state and a free and independent Kurdistan. But arming Turkey, our people’s oppressor, is morally and geographically not to Israel’s advantage. Israel’s cooperation with Turkey is, in reality, a misguided support for political Islam and its oppression of the Kurds. It undermines Israel’s credibility with the only true friend it has in the Middle East next to the Druze.”
In another later letter, which I received as Turkish troops were invading Kurdistan and jet aircraft were bombarding Kurdish communities in northern Iraq, my friend was more pointed in his criticism of the Israeli leadership’s shortsightedness. He defended without question what he called, “Israel’s cause and the undying truth that Jews are the rightful owners of the historic Jewish lands now partially and illegally occupied by those Arabs who falsely call themselves Palestinians.
But he also pointed out that “the legitimate arguments and rights Israel has are the same rights and truths it denies in its official policy towards the Kurds. For now, and for the future, everything looks black. I fear the worst for us. The whole world is against us, and on the Turkish side there is no change….” He concluded, “Today, when we need your support, it is not there. Why?”
Why, indeed?
Coincidentally, Ruth King, a fine freelance writer, urged those who read “feel good stories about Turkey” to remember the ship, Struma. In 1941, while carrying 769 Jewish refugees from German Nazi persecution and genocide, it was not permitted to land in Turkey and sank with appalling loss of life.
With the reality of Israel’s reconstitution as a sovereign nation in its ancestral and Biblical homeland came the equal reality of its uniqueness and isolation within a hostile world. In this, they share with the Kurds a familial fate. Even though it lives in a terrible neighborhood and desperately seeks friends, Israel cannot and must not evade its unique responsibility towards the Kurdish people, who also suffer from the depredations of their hostile neighbors. The Jewish state must not ignore the Kurds, who remain stateless and shunned by the world and who seek, at last, the historic justice they have craved for centuries but been denied – an independent state of their own.
From the time the current Kurdish liberation struggle began in 1961, the Jewish state was the only nation to actively support Kurdish aspirations. According to Mordechai Nisan in his book Minorities in the Middle East, published by McFarlane in 2002, in 1966 the Kurdish leader at the time, Mustafa Barzani, told a visiting Israeli emissary, Arieh Lova Eliav, that “in truth, only the Jews cared about the Kurds.” Mr. Nisan also added that in 1980, Menachem Begin revealed that “from 1965 to 1975 Israel provided weapons and military advisors to the Kurdish resistance fighting against powerful Arab enemies.”
Israeli alliances should include the restoration of a profoundly just, moral and enduring pact with the Kurdish people.
During the period Israel was assisting the Kurds, the United States became involved and, for a while, helped facilitate the support. In 1975, America abandoned the Kurds, forcing Israel to follow suit.
Was Israel aiding and abetting a state – Turkey – that is persecuting a lonely and isolated people – the Kurds? Was the Jewish state copying the mendacious policies of other nations; namely, putting political and economic expediency above morality? Were Israeli leaders, including leftwing politicians, Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni, truly unaware of the agony of the Kurds? It would seem not for just as in other countries the Left always creates doom and gloom.
According to an early article by James Lewis in American Thinker, titled “Can Israel make it alone?”, “Nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests – like survival.” With the danger then of a profoundly less friendly Obama Administration, he wrote: “If the United States abandons the Jewish State, Jerusalem will have to seek new alliances.”
Any Israeli alliances should include the restoration of a profoundly just, moral, and enduring pact with the Kurdish people, and assistance towards creating a future independent State of Kurdistan in Syria.
Is now the time? I unequivocally say yes.
Victor Sharpeis a prolific writer and author of several published books including the four acclaimed volumes of, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
Well, I agree.
What can we do about it?
Forward this letter to Netanyahu…