One might think that as a people struggling for statehood and demanding recognition of their own right to self-determination, Palestinians would have backed the Kurds as they held their historic referendum on statehood Monday.
Indeed, the veteran Palestinian journalist and columnist for The Jordan Times, Daoud Kuttab, expressed this sentiment in an interview from Amman with The Jerusalem Post.
“The referendum is a very risky move. But as a concept, the right of a people to have the right to self-determination is something we as Palestinians have been fighting for, and we certainly can’t oppose it for anyone else,” he said on Monday.
“I, as a Palestinian, think they have the right to determine their future. How they want to exercise that right is something they should think long and hard about in a world that is so interconnected,” he continued. “Whether they exercise that right within the existing government of Iraq or as a separate country, they have to decide.
But I favor the Kurds in Iraq being able to express their right to self-determination through a referendum.”
Kuttab added that there were differences between the Kurdish and Palestinian cases.
“The Iraqi government is not occupying Kurdish areas and settling foreigners in the country the way the Israelis are,” he explained. “There are differences, but still there is a need for us to understand the ethos of people wanting their right to self-determination permitted.”
Despite Kuttab’s views, the Palestinian leadership and much of the political elite opposed the referendum in keeping with the position of the Arab League and because Israel is the main backer of Kurdish independence.
A Palestinian delegation was part of an Arab League consensus that, at Iraq’s request on September 13, rejected a referendum “because of its illegality and opposition to the Iraqi constitution,” media reports quoted Iraqi Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmad Jamal as saying. Jamal added that the Arab League decision cited the unity of Iraq as a “main part of security and stability in the region.”
PLO executive committee member Wasel Abu Yusuf, in remarks to the Post, said the leadership was against the referendum.
“The important thing is affirming the unity of Iraq,” he said. “There can’t be divisions.
It can’t be that there are divisions of Iraq, Syria and other countries. All peoples that demand self-determination should get it, but on the basis of unity, not division. There should be freedom, but within the framework of unity.”
Abdullah Abdullah, a legislator and supporter of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said: “We are part of the Arab League and we recognize the State of Iraq, which is a country for all its citizens, including the Kurds. It’s not easy for us to take a different stand.”
And it is not just the Arab League. Backing the referendum would have gone against a virtual international consensus, with the US, Russia, the EU, China and the UN all coming out against the Kurdish move.
The fact that Israel supported the referendum was also a decisive factor in the Palestinians’ opposition.
“The Kurds are a nation, same as Arabs, French and English,” said Hasan Khreisheh, deputy speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council. “But this referendum is not an innocent step. The only country behind them is Israel. Once Israel is behind them, then from my point of view, we have to be careful.”
Khreisheh noted the presence of Israeli flags at gatherings in the run-up to the referendum.
“They want to put another Israel in the heart of Arab countries, Muslim countries,” he said.
Ghassan Khatib, a former PA minister and current vice president of Bir Zeit University, said the “exaggerated propaganda” of photos showing Israeli flags and statements of Kurdish-Israeli friendship turned some Palestinians against the referendum.
“I think Palestinians are confused,” he said. “There is a certain sympathy with the call [for independence], but also some suspicion and reservation because of the propaganda linking this referendum with Israel.”
Kuttab, The Jordan Times columnist, termed the Israeli stance on Kurdish independence “very hypocritical.”
“They want the Kurds to have an independent state but are not allowing the Palestinians to have an independent state,” he said.
It’s also really ironic and hypocritical that the Left discounts the League of Nations endorsement of the Balfour Declaration as unrepresentative since it was prior to decolonization of Africa and Asia and therefore, they say, it represented simply a confab of colonialist powers.
But, in the case of Iraq, which was created by the same body and at the same time, they do recognize the legitimacy of that body. Except during the war, they didn’t recognize the legitimacy of Kuwait which was also created through the same mandate system though it got its independence from Great Britain 30 years later.
It’s like the Dems who want to abolish the Constitution because they couldnt’ win under the electoral college system despite having a slight majority in certain states — which they want to dominate the rest of the country — though that majority steadily shrinks as more and more of their votes are shown to have been fraudulent. And when they didn’t have either, they wanted to rule through Judges, still do. And when they didn’t have all three, they supported terrorism and insurrection. The House that the Weather Underground blew up accidentally with themselves in it instead of the innocent young soldiers they had intended to target in the Village, is like a shrine to these gouls. They don’t really mean anything they say, which changes on a dime, like a parody of the CPUSA and the Comintern in the 30s.
Anymore than the Bolsheviks really meant anything they said about ultra-democracy in Lenin’s “State and Revolution”
like:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch03.htm#s3
or about the right to self-determination in Stalin’s “Marxism and the National Question”
A former comrade, incensed at my echoing criticism of the vicious lyrics in rap music in the 90s echoing criticisms by conservative pundits in print asked me challengingly” Do you go by what people say?” or words to that effect. Intimidated, I replied sheepisly in a small voice; “no.”
It’s just about power.
Demanding that Kurdistan return to Iraq now is like demanding that German Jews return to Germany in 1948. Or Poland.
I’m glad Kurdistan’s response in 2017 was that of Israel in 1948.
“We are that we are.” An ancient people asserting its sovereignty in its homeland. Slaves and victims no more. And whoever doesn’t like it should know where they can go. And Jump.
Also the Kurds don’t hate Jews or Israel. That last, of course, is unforgiveable in the eyes of the “international community.” so-called.
Especially as Iran, Iraq and Turkey, all of which sit on parts of Kurdistan, grow closer together. The Kurds are a lot like the Armenians.
These SOB’s still haven’t taken responsibility for the last one.
Turkey threatens ‘serious consequences’ after US vote on Armenian genocide
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/05/turkey-us-vote-armenian-genocide
Why is Israel part of the West? Because only Westerners apologize and they do so even when they’re not in the wrong! And those who do not remember are destined to repeat history.
Which became a Baathist dictatorship whose leader, Sadaam Hussein, which the Left supported, gassed the Kurds. Iraq committed genocide against the Kurds. So, of course, if they want to leave and assert full sovereignty in the areas they currently populate and control, they are violating Iraq’s right to self-determination.
Breaking: Iraqi PM gives Kurdish regime 72 hours to give control of airports, border to Baghdad
By Leith Fadel – 26/09/20170
https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/breaking-iraqi-pm-gives-kurdish-regime-72-hours-give-control-airports-border-baghdad/
Or what? They’ll gas them again? Yeah, right. If I were a Kurd, I’d be real enthusiastic about giving control of anything to do with airspace to the state of “Iraq.”
From just before the 2nd war in Iraq
Sean Penn Questions U.S. Policy, Visits Iraq
http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/story?id=118513&page=1
Sorry, Russia. From last year:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/210084
Iraq was created in 1920 as a League of Nations Mandate and gained its independence from Great Britain in 1932. As a monarchy which became a Baathist dictatorship in the ’60s. The Kurds are an ancient people. So, of course, the Left supports self-determination for who?
The state of Iraq, of course. Peoples don’t deserve self-determination, silly. States do. Except when they don’t. Like Israel. Or Kuwait (which was created the same way and around the same time) during the Gulf war. Or Western countries that want to have borders. or Israel. Always Israel. Always the Jews. No matter who wants us dead. Or why. From Crown Heights to Oslo to Hebron.
You see this hypocritical Orwellian nonsense from the “anti-colonialist” Left all the time. They opposed the independence movement of the English speaking Mesquito indians from the Nicaraguan Sandinistas who savagely repressed them. They oppose self-detertemination for Taiwan and Tibet.
Haj Amin Al Husseini, he was Grand Mufti, fought for the Ottoman Empire during World War One and later wanted to federate with Syria or some other combination of Arab countries. This was the Pal position until the ’60s. The PLO charter of 1964 explicitly renounces any claim to the “West Bank” and Gaza. This, of course changed after 1967.
When I told a liberal that I supported the right of the Russian majority Crimeans to secede from the Ukraine and rejoin the Soviet Union if they wanted to, especially after they had been robbed of the rights they had been granted under the now shredded Constitution after the Obama/EU/Soros-backed coup in the Ukraine, she retorted in outraged disbelief: “Don’t you support the right of self-determination?”
The so-called Palestinians have a state, it is called Jordan. The Kurds do not have a state, yet they are threatened, harassed, murdered and denied any rights by every Arab country including Turkey. Israel supports them because their goal is to have a peaceful country devoid of radical islamic oppression. Palestinians could have had another country separate from Jordan but that is not what they want… They want to destroy Israel so that they can establish yet another despotic 7th century oppressive Islamic State like the rest of the Middle East and much of North Africa and Asia. My goodness what garbage this guy spews, the Middle East needs many more countries like Israel and far less murderous oppressive human-rights-violating Islamic slave camps of which there are already at least 22.