Does the Israeli Experience Offer Any Lessons to the Kurds?

The Kurds in Iraq sometimes look to the Zionist experience in founding a state and draw inspiration from it. The Jews, after all, managed to persevere against seemingly insurmountable odds to found a powerful state of their own. Before the foundation of Israel, the Jews lived as minorities wherever they found themselves.  Sometimes their situation in host countries was relatively good and they managed to thrive, while other times they were hounded, persecuted and massacred.  For many Jews, Israel’s founding salvaged a sense of dignity and pride they had lost over the centuries of living as a powerless minority at the mercy of others. They had spent too long a time as victims, barely tolerated in their ghettos, reviled and unwanted.

It’s not difficult to understand how Kurds could have empathy for such an experience. Although others in the region greatly resent them for it, especially Kurds in Iraq tend to have sympathy towards Israel.  For one thing, they remember the Israeli assistance they received during their revolts of the 1960s and 70s. For decades, Israel was the sworn enemy of the Kurds’ enemy in Baghdad. It was therefore not surprising that this summer, Israel became the first state to buy a tanker of South Kurdish crude oil and publically pronounce itself in favor of Kurdish independence. Israel’s population also includes more than a hundred thousand Kurdish Jews who were expelled from Zakho, Kirkuk, Suleimani and other parts of Kurdistan by the Iraqi government during the 1950s.  These people maintained a proud Kurdish identity, while “Arab Jews” long ago shed their attachment to an Arab identity.

There exist many great differences that have to be taken into account when comparing the Jewish experience to today’s push for Kurdish independence, however.  Three huge ones immediately come to mind.  First of all, in 1948 Israel was born at the expense of almost a million Palestinian refugees, whose descendants still fester in refugee camps to this day. Other Palestinians became grudging citizens of Israel, while still others in the West Bank and Gaza Strip fell under the control of Jordan, Egypt and then Israel in 1967.  Second, the Jewish state of Israel found itself isolated in an overwhelmingly Arab Muslim region. That isolation largely continues to this day. Third and not least, the Zionist movement enjoyed the advantage of access to the sea, using it to get around an encirclement of unfriendly states.

Although South Kurdistan includes many minorities – especially Arabs, Turkmen and Christians – the creation of a Kurdish state would not necessitate the same kind of calamity for these groups.  An independent Kurdistan could nonetheless expect some degree of trouble from non-Kurds, especially if the state’s name and symbols come from a Kurdish ethnic identity that some groups have difficulty subscribing to. The majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, however, which lessens the chance of their isolation at the same time as it risks inserting them into a growing Sunni-Shiite conflict engulfing the region. More troublesome for Kurdish independence, however, is Kurdistan’s landlocked status – making any future Kurdish state very dependent on the goodwill of at least one of its neighbors.

There are also, of course, many similarities one could draw attention to. A motivated population in search of security, dignity and a place to call its own can accomplish wonders. Just as the Jews were willing to bleed and shed blood for a state of their own, so too with the Kurds. Like the Jewish Agency that set up a de facto Jewish state in Palestine long before 1948, the Kurds in Iraq also  enjoyed many years of autonomy to prepare their institutions for statehood. Just as Israel continues to suffer and bleed from contested borders, so too in all likelihood would Kurdistan.

I could go on listing similarities, but one final point in common strikes me as the most interesting and noteworthy: If one looks at the historical record from the period, before being presented with a fait accompli the international community was not at all in favor of the creation of an independent Jewish state. Most people said the Jews would never survive an Arab attack against them and that their whole national project was doomed. Even Britain, which famously issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917 (declaring Her Majesty’s Government “in favour of the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine”), had changed its mind by the 1930s. London came to view a Jewish state as just too destabilizing of a proposition. The preeminent world power of the day thus worked actively against the establishment of Israel. Foreign Office officials had no sympathy for romantic Jewish national aspirations and little patience for a people that kept bringing up how it was victimized by others in the past. They did not care that others too wished to become “masters in their own home.” The Jews went ahead and founded their state anyhow.

David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since August 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of the forthcoming Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).