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GEORGIA ON MY MIND - BUT DON'T FORGET THE KURDS
Time to restore a moral alliance
by Victor Sharpe

With Russian aggression against the Georgian people and the loss by force of two of their provinces allowed to stand; with Serbia forced by the West to give away its historic heartland of Kosovo; with China basking in its Olympic limelight while illegaly occupying Tibet; and with Israel pressured by the world to abandon its biblical and ancestral heartland of Judea and Samaria (the west bank), it is also necessary to look again at another people whose national rights have been trampled - the Kurdish people.

The Kurds have been prevented for centuries from creating their own sovereign nation within their ancestral homeland. It is thus troubling to see Israel, a vibrant democracy long threatened by its genocidal and brutal Arab neighbors, continuing to ally itself with Turkey without any apparent understanding or knowledge of the fateful implications.
Recently, Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, spent a two-day visit to Israel during which time he showed interest in the Israel Aviations Industries’ long-range Heron unmanned aerial vehicles. These state of the art UAVs support the IDF’s counter-terror and counter-missile operations in the Gaza Strip.

What is troubling is that, according to Debka Report, the US admiral heard from American intelligence officers cooperating with Ankara’s campaign against Kurdish “rebel” bases in northern Iraq how the Heron on loan to Turkey radically turned the tide of their operation.

I received a plea some days ago from a Kurdish friend who is very supportive of Israel’s struggle to survive amongst its hostile Arab neighbors. He is also devoted to the Jewish people for he knows, as do I, of the close and shared ethnicities of both Jews and Kurds dating back millennia. He wrote an impassioned letter to me as follows:

“I wish the Israelis and Jews throughout the world would better know 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 cooperation, which benefits Turkey, does not take into account the misery that it imposes upon the Kurdish people who yearn, as the Jews have for centuries, to be free from terror and persecution?

“Of course the whole world is 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 the suffering of your neighbors.

“We Kurds have not harmed the Jews, instead we have shared so much culture together and we still remember the Jews who lived with us for millennia. 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 as exists throughout the Arab and Persian world.

“I know that you have championed the cause of Kurdistan. I remember your moving article http://www.infoisrael.net/cgi-local/text.pl?source=4/b/iv/300720071 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.

“You have also expressed what I also feel deeply, the yearning that one day 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.”

That was the latest impassioned letter I received from my Kurdish friend and correspondent. But in a previous letter, which I received last April 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 myopia of some in the Israeli leadership.

For instance, though he stated that he defends without question, “Israel's rights and the undying truth that Jews are the rightful owners of the historic Jewish lands now partially occupied by the Arabs ... unfortunately the legitimate arguments and rights Israel has are the same rights and truths it denies in its official policy towards the Kurds. It does this by actively supporting the Turkish state. That contradiction is sad and diminishes Israel’s credibility...”

A major point must be made. Unlike the Arabs, who brilliantly but fraudulently co-opted the name Palestine in order to undermine the legitimate Jewish ancestral homeland - perhaps the biggest scam perpetrated in centuries - the Kurds ancestral lands are historically uncontestable.

And unlike the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians and who engage in the most frightful atrocities against Jewish men, women and children - especially children - the Kurds restrict their struggle against regular armies. According to my Kurdish correspondent, they, unlike the Arabs, do not deliberately target civilians.

As he puts it, “… the real questions are why are the Kurds being denied their right of self-determination and independence? Why is there is no end to this oppression we suffer? Why must our natural rights be denied to us? 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 ...”

The last sentence reminds me of the series of essays written by the late Yaacov Herzog under the title “A people that dwells alone.” Included in the insights Herzog gave us was the abiding theme of how an ancient people, the Jews, learned anew the crafts of diplomacy and took their place as a state once again on the world’s stage.

But with the reality of Israel’s reconstitution as a sovereign nation within its ancestral and biblical homeland comes the equal reality of its uniqueness and isolation within a hostile world, just as the Jewish people endured isolation and hostility during their two thousand years of statelessness. In this, they share with the Kurds a familial fate.

We must remember that after the Exodus from Egypt, the Jewish people at Mount Sinai accepted the obligation of the Torah and were given the commandments from God. The heavy and demanding obligation upon them was to be “… a Kingdom of Priests and a Holy Nation” (Exodus Chap 19, verses 5 - 6). That is not to say that the Jews were to be better than any other people.

They were not chosen to be the way the Germans under Hitler thought of themselves as the master race - the herrenfolk - but rather chosen to carry a heavy burden of responsibility and morality in the way they lived their lives among themselves and how they behaved towards their neighbors. Chosen to suffer, if you will.

And of course, they were never to forget the immense challenge to bring to the peoples of the world the belief in the One and only God; invisible and indivisible.

In the re-born State of Israel the desire to honor the eternal commandment to be a holy people was challenged. There were many who desired that the Jewish state be like all other states and not remain unique.

In modern Israel’s early years, voices could be heard yearning for the day when bank robbers and criminals could exist just like in every other nation and that then Israel would be a “normal” nation.

But history and international politics have a way of not permitting Israel to be a normal state. Even though it lives in a terrible neighborhood and desperately seeks friends, Israel cannot and must not evade its unique responsibility towards another people who also suffer from violence and the depredations of its hostile neighbors - they cannot themselves ignore the thirty million Kurds who remain stateless and shunned by the world.

I had hoped that after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s vicious dictatorship the artificial entity known as Iraq, which had been carved out of Mesopotamia by Great Britain in the early 1920s, would have been allowed to reflect the ethnic yearnings of its many diverse peoples.

I suggested, in my article, Iraq’s Ethnic Yearnings, which I wrote in December 2003, www.infoisrael.net that this was the time, at last, for the Kurdish people to be granted the historic justice that they had craved for centuries but had been denied - an independent state of their own.

I wrote, “the Kurds are members of an ethnic group spread over northern Iraq, north western Iran, parts of Syria and south eastern Turkey. They lived mostly as a mountain people since the 7th century BCE and adopted Islam during the 7th century CE. The Kurds make up nearly 20% of Iraq’s population and have yearned for an independent Kurdistan for centuries.

“However, though natural justice calls for them to be given an independent state of their own, the United States would face enormous hostility to the idea. The objections would come from both Iran , Iraq and Turkey, and from Syria. These states are fearful that a future Kurdistan might require them to give up parts of their territories to satisfy Kurdish aspirations.”

Before concluding, I should point out that from the time that 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, Mr. Nisan pointed out that in 1966 the Kurdish leader, 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 instruction to the Kurdish resistance fighting against powerful Arab enemies.” One of the Israeli advisors was Rehavam Zeevi who was murdered in Jerusalem by a Palestinian Arab several years ago.

During the period Israel was providing assistance to the Kurds, the United States became involved and for a while helped facilitate the support. But for some unknown reason in 1975, America abandoned the Kurds. It seems that Israel was forced to follow suit but we may never know why in the murky world of geo-politics, especially as it relates to the Middle East.

The question then must be asked again. Is Israel making a pact with the devil or in this case, several devils, Turkey and Syria just as with Hamas and Hezbollah? Is Turkey really interested in facilitating peace between Israel and Syria or is it using Israel to gain brownie points with the international community?

Soner Cagaptay, who is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a visiting professor at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, wrote recently in an article in the Los Angeles Times titled - Turkey bows to the dark side - that "... Turkey has broken ranks with the West and the West can no longer take Turkey for granted as a staunch ally against Tehran.

"In the past, Turkey stood with the West, especially after the 1979 Islamist revolution in Iran. Since the Iraq war began, however, Iran has shifted tactics to win Turkey's heart. While the U.S. delayed taking action, Iran actually bombed Kurdish PKK camps in northern Iraq.

"During the visit by Iran's Ahmadinejad, the two countries agreed to make 2009 an "Iran-Turkey year of culture" - marked by regular cultural and political programs and exchanges - to bring the two countries closer. Years from now, Ahmadinejad's visit to Istanbul will be remembered as the tipping point at which the West lost Turkey, and Turkey lost its soul."

Is Israel, therefore, aiding and abetting an increasingly Islamist regime - Turkey - that is persecuting a lonely and isolated people - the Kurds? Is the Jewish state copying the mendacious policies that, alas, most other nations of the world have always indulged in - putting political and economic expediency over morality?

And with what is happening to the pro-Western and pro-American state of Georgia, are we seeing again before our very eyes the international community, especially Western Europe, displaying a squalid preference for silence and economic expediency over morality? Is it to be 1938 all over again?

We must ask if Israeli leaders, Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, Tzippi Livni and Shimon Peres, are unaware of the continuing injunction enshrined in Exodus 19: Verses 5-6? Are the Israeli and Jewish people mostly unaware of the plight and agony of their true ethnic cousins - the Kurds?

If so, perhaps this article will open eyes and help create a new and long overdue reality.

Copyright © Victor Sharpe 2008

Victor Sharpe writes about Jewish history and the Islamist-Israel conflict. He is the author of the highly acclaimed book: Politicide - The attempted murder of the Jewish state.