Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies
The Kurds:: Neither the Twin of Palestine Nor the Clone of Israel
Author(s): Jose V. Ciprut
Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (2017)
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The Kurds: Neither the Twin of Palestine
Nor the Clone of Israel
by Jose V. Ciprut
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 624, October 23, 2017
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The Kurds are an ancient tribal people indigenous
to West Asia. Between 1918 and 1925, they were made part of four newborn
countries, each of which continues to deny its Kurds their
fundamental freedoms, let alone nation-statehood. Neither “a second Israel”
nor “a second Palestine,” Iraqi Kurds are ready to govern themselves as a
functioning democratic nation – an authentic nation-state in a region
substantially constructed from without.
Not all Kurds seek sovereignty. Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria differ
from one another and from the Kurds of the Diaspora (western Europe and the
Americas). It is not inconceivable that Turkish, Iranian, and Syrian Kurds
would be content with autonomy alone, provided it were real. Nor is it
unthinkable that they might be citizens of a single Kurdish state but permanent
residents elsewhere, or might benefit from dual nationality.
Why, then, do the Iraqi Kurds seek sovereignty? And which set of
internationally unrecognized sovereign frontiers do they have in mind? Is it the
constitutionally demarcated contours of the KRG (Iraq’s internally
autonomous Kurdish Regional Government, now belatedly seeking
“negotiations”)? Or is it the borderlines that include Iraqi land controlled by
the KRG as a result of Baghdad’s war of liberation from ISIS (which are now
difficult to “renegotiate”)? Or perhaps they are thinking of an even newer
fence: enclosing the extra patches (including Kirkuk) of annexed remunerative
land (which is now “non-negotiable” after the recent military confrontation)?
More to the point, perhaps, what would the future of such a landlocked
sovereign entity augur, absent peaceful conditions conducive to regional
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acceptance and international acknowledgment likely to provide legitimacy and
security?
In that regard, the British-American consensus on the prematurity of the
referendum sounded right (even if, in ironic pseudo-equivalence, it would have
compelled Turkey to experience its own “Palestinian problem”). A mere
peaceful democratic referendum among the Iraqi Kurds – not even a
declaration of independence – triggered a harshly punitive blockade, with
explicit threats of military intervention, by both Turkey and Iran in prior
consultation with the government in Baghdad.
The “independence” project was doomed not so much by the recapture of
Kirkuk by Iraq as by the split induced by Iran between the Barzanis and the
Talibanis – a move that punishes US ambivalence, shatters Israeli hopes, and
reaffirms Tehran’s increasing clout in the region.
Turkey’s and Iran’s concerns over the emergence of a sovereign Kurdish state
along their border with Iraq, on lands directly connected with those inhabited
by their respective Kurdish minorities, are rational, given the inequalities long
inflicted on and repressions suffered by those minorities. The risk of these
minorities one day seeking to share the freedoms of Iraq’s Kurds could turn
into a real menace only if these states do not resolve their differences with their
minorities and with other regional stakeholders first.
Do not the 30 million Kurds living in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere,
constituting the largest dispersed tribal nation in the world, merit a sovereign
homeland of their own, on at least part of the vast lands to which they are
indigenous? The answer to this question is far from simple, if the history of
each constituent of this divided and scattered people is individually taken into
account. Yet this crisis was foreseeable. It could have been avoided if all the
parties involved had condescended to open up to one another in mutual respect
from the very beginning. Even now, should all the parties convene to discuss
matters, reach peace within and between the respective entities, and guarantee
proper latitudes for development with adequate freedoms, all could end well.
Turkey’s and Iraq’s declarations that they “would not allow a second Israel to
emerge in the region” were telling for purporting to place their resentment not
on Judaism as a faith, but on Zionism as a “land-grabbing ideology.” (Never
mind that their learning circles, madrassas, mosques, streets, markets, and
media all spew Jew-hatred.)
For centuries, Kurds who once governed from their own kingdom in the region
scraped by in distinct, tribally configured agglomerates. Propitious
circumstances caused the Iraqi Kurds to stumble on the opportunity and means
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to circumscribe, consolidate, and literally earn a lucrative conjoined area they
could democratically set out to govern, administer, and defend militarily.
These days, however, freedom cannot simply be just wrested; it needs also to
be conceded, especially when it is stuck in an unfriendly neighborhood.
Unlike Palestinian Arabs whose newly constructed national identity is still a
work in progress, Kurds have been not only historically autochthonous but also
unceasingly assertive of their national identity, despite the aspirational
differences in their respective worldviews. They never missed an occasion to
manifest their yearning for freedom as a people, whether under Arab, Turkish,
Iranian, Iraqi, or Syrian chauvinist domination. Kurds did not have to be
severed from their passports by their rulers to start wondering who they ought
to become and what befitting name they should acquire. If anything, they have
often had to downplay their national self-awareness, despite their readiness to
self-govern, and their ability – offered the proper conditions – to transform their
people into a functioning democratic polity.
Hence, all they now need to do, in order to concretize their ongoing pursuit of
freedom, would be to endeavor to build region-wide conciliatory means
through which their landlords and neighbors could agree to grant them their
coveted legal status – a tall order, indeed. Yet for any independent Kurdish
state ultimately to emerge, “the Kurdish problem” in each of these regional
countries will have to be solved first.
Like Israelis, Kurds too have a deep territorial attachment to their national
homeland. Unlike Israelis, however, Kurds were never internationally
recognized as a nation-state. The Lausanne Treaty (voiding and replacing the
Sèvres Treaty) at the end of World War I, as well as the United Nations
Organization at the close of World War II, conveniently ignored them. The
French and British, as potentates in charge, and their “creations” (Lebanon,
Syria, Iraq, and Jordan), like nationalist Turkey (itself a product of the ashes of
the Ottoman Empire), chose to pretend the Kurds did not matter. The Kurds’
effacement ought no more to be taken for granted.
The time would seem to have come for the international community to recognize
the grave mistakes committed by the West in the past, and to redress those
oversights in ways that at long last restore dignity to a stateless nation. It can do
this by granting sovereignty to the one Kurdish territorial branch now clearly
ready for it – before that readiness is compelled to manifest itself by force of arms.
Such a productive initiative should prove far more justified than any further
investment in time and effort towards concocting a state ex nihilo out of two nonnational
halves preordained to turn against each other. It is also preferable to the
hatching of a politically unstable, economically fragile entity, forever irredentist
and continually in need of outside assistance. Such an entity would be eternally
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dissatisfied and, if opportunistically allied to Islamist Sunni and/or
fundamentalist Shiite movements, could prove a constant threat to all its
neighbors, and well beyond.
Jose V. Ciprut is a conflict analyst, social systems scientist, and international political
economist.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
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