As the Kurdish journalist and researcher Suzan Quitaz put it recently: “Standing with Jewish people in the face of antisemitism is the opposite of being racist.
“It is about standing up against hatred, discrimination, and violence toward people because of their religion or ethnicity. It is standing up against one of the oldest and strongest forms of racism: antisemitism.”
In a twisted way, the closer Kurds and Jews get, and the more visible that becomes, the more people start seeing Kurds as another kind of Jew. Not in a way that changes those people’s attitude toward Kurds, because we were alone in our struggle anyway, but in how they frame the Kurdish political struggle.
Those same people, on the global Left and on the libertarian American Right alike, were always antisemitic, and always on the side of Ankara and Tehran in the name of anti-Americanism (which they veil with the term anti-imperialism).
They stand with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Ankara and the mullahs’ Tehran; they sided with Saddam’s Baghdad and Assad’s Damascus, and never with the Kurds.
Now they cannot openly side with Ankara or Tehran, but they can present themselves as against American interventionism, against the Gaza genocide.
With Kurds, they have a difficulty: they cannot frame Kurds as imperialist interventionists or Gaza genociders.
In an interview, the American right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson called the Kurds “the most brutal people” he had ever met.
This is the opposite of the truth of Kurdish armed struggles: with exceptions, which the Kurdish movements themselves apologized for and corrected, Kurdish armed struggle has never become uncontrolled violence.
The Kurdish struggle has always taken its legitimacy from its demands for recognition, equality, and self-rule.
On the other side, Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign of 1988 murdered (or disappeared) between 50,000 and 182,000 Kurdish civilians.
In September 1979, two weeks after Khomeini declared holy war on the Kurds, Revolutionary Guards entered the unarmed village of Qarna and slaughtered dozens of civilians, children and the elderly among them.
In March 2004, when Kurdish spectators were attacked at a football match in Qamishli, former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s security forces opened fire on the Kurdish crowd, and some 30 people were killed in the days that followed.
And Turkey, having successfully labeled Kurdish fighters terrorists, respected none of the rights that any human law would otherwise have protected.
There is a historical connection between treating Kurds this way and antisemitism in its various forms. Charles Dickens hardly needed to name the villain of Oliver Twist; “the Jew” was good enough to describe him.
Hitler and his allies all over Europe needed nothing other than anti-Jewish rhetoric to mass-murder Jews.
Together, we can be a strong alliance
The same can be seen in how people handle suffering in the Middle East. The same people who defend the right of Palestinians to go to their homes never mention the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had to leave Yemen, Iraq, or Syria.
They never mention the depopulation of Kurds in Turkey, Syria, or Iraq in the same way. Antisemitism is not seeing what Jews suffer, and the same formula applies to Kurds today.
This gives the Kurds, my people, the chance to review how they see the world. People do not take sides because of their “beliefs”. Not even the most educated, those we sometimes admire. The litmus paper is our own struggle.
How can they side with Ankara, Moscow, or Tehran, but not with us?
If Israel is so bad, if US interventionism is so bad, how come we benefit from their actions in our region?
The no-fly zone of 1991. The air support at Kobani in 2014. Israel’s public backing of the 2017 independence referendum, when no other state would give it.
Not that American support has ever been more than tactical, but we have lived the fact that these interventions saved our lives and our habitat.
Israel’s rising rhetoric may also be what the moment requires of Israel, in answer to Turkey’s adversarial politics in the region. But it also shows that Kurds have enough argument to build their own representative political organs and to build on those.
These are perfect times, in my opinion. We Kurds are learning what realpolitik is about. Not pity but power struggle.
And there is one way to win: make allies, become stronger, and instead of begging for pity, make your point in a way that forces them to choose sides.
Israel has legitimacy because it is a sovereign country. Kurds have legitimacy because we are imprisoned by outsiders on our own ancestral lands, denied our identity.
Let’s raise our flags together. It means working together in the diaspora.
Jews have the advantage of having been settled in these communities for centuries. Kurds have the advantage of both numbers and an unshakeable legitimacy to live sovereign on our ancestral land.
Combined, this forms one of the strongest aligned diaspora coalitions. We both offer something, and we both benefit. It is a loop that feeds itself and grows stronger.
Let them choose to be on the wrong side. By standing together, we break their perverted “non-legitimacy and oppression” rhetoric.
The writer, based in Vancouver, is a commentator on Kurdish affairs, Kurdistan, and international politics.
