Why the Kurds deserve a state, not the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians Victor Sharpe
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe
There are some twenty sovereign Arab states throughout the Middle East and North Africa, but much of the world demands in a chorus of barely disguised animosity towards tiny Israel, that yet another Arab state be created. It would be imposed upon the Biblical and ancestral Jewish heartland of Israel, known as Judea and Samaria – or still called by a maliciously hostile world, the ‘West Bank.’ That was the grotesque name the Jordanians gave it during their invasion and 19 year old theft from 1948 to 1967 of the ancient and Biblical Jewish heartland – an illegal occupation recognized only by Pakistan and Britain.
Reconstituted Israel, a territory no larger than the tiny principality of Wales or the state of New Jersey, would be forced to share its G-d given inheritance with a deeply hostile Arab jihadist entity, already termed the ‘Palestinian Authority.’ It would then be criminally elevated and demonically sanctified with the name ‘State of Palestine’ by those throughout the world whose hatred of the Jewish faith knows no bounds. This would result in Israel’s present narrow waist reduced yet again to a suicidal width at its most populous region – what an earlier Israeli statesman, Abba Eban, described as the Auschwitz borders and for good reason.
There has never existed in all of recorded history an independent sovereign nation called Palestine – and certainly not an Arab one. The term “Palestine” has always been the name given to a non-state geographical territory, as for instance, Siberia or Patagonia. It has never been a sovereign independent state even though the Arab League and the 57 member Islamic states in the corrupt UN routinely pressure the equally corrupt UNESCO to falsely add Western Sahara and so-called Palestine as sovereign Arab states.
But there is an indigenous people in the Middle East who deserve a state and, like the Jews, trace their ancestry back thousands of years They are the Kurds, and it is highly instructive to review their remarkable history in conjunction with that of the indigenous Jews. It is also necessary to review the historical injustice imposed upon them over the centuries by hostile neighbors and empires.
Let us go back to the Biblical captivity of the Ten Tribes of Israel, who were exiled from the ancient Kingdom of Israel by the Assyrian conquerors in 722 BC. Biblical Israel was forcibly and mostly depopulated, its Jewish inhabitants deported to an area in the region of ancient Media and Assyria – a territory roughly corresponding to that of modern-day Kurdistan. Assyria was, in turn, conquered by Babylonia, which led to the Babylonians eventual destruction of the southern Jewish kingdom of Judah in 586 BC. along with the First Temple in Jerusalem. The remaining two Jewish tribes were exiled to the same area as that of their brethren from the northern kingdom. Its all in the Bible.
When the Persian conqueror of Babylonia, Cyrus the Great, allowed the Jews to return to their ancestral lands, many Jews returned while others remained and continued to live with their neighbors in Babylon – an area which, again, included parts of modern-day Kurdistan.
The Babylonian Talmud refers in one section to the Jewish deportees from Judah receiving rabbinical permission to offer Judaism to the local population. The Kurdish royal house and a large segment of the general population in later years embraced the Jewish faith. Indeed, when the Jews rose up against Roman occupation of Judea in the 1st century AD, the Kurdish queen sent troops and provisions to support the embattled Jews.
By the beginning of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was firmly established in Kurdistan, and Kurdish Jews in Israel today often speak an ancient form of Aramaic in their homes and synagogues. Kurdish and Jewish life became interwoven to such a remarkable degree that many Kurdish folk tales are connected with Jews.
It is interesting to note that several tombs of biblical Jewish prophets are to be found in or near Kurdistan. For example, the prophet Nachum is in Alikush, while Jonah’s tomb can be found in Nabi Yunis, which is ancient Nineveh. Daniel’s tomb is in the oil-rich Kurdistan province of Kirkuk; Habbabuk is in Tuisirkan; and Queen Hadassah, or Esther, along with her uncle Mordechai, is in Hamadan.
After the failed revolt against Rome, many rabbis found refuge in what is now Kurdistan. The rabbis joined with their fellow scholars, and by the 3rd century AD, Jewish academies were flourishing. But the later Sassanid and Persian occupations of the region ushered in a time of persecution for both the Jews and Kurds, which lasted until the Muslim Arab invasion in the 7th century. Indeed, the Jews and Kurds joined with the invading Arabs in the hope that it would bring relief from the Sassanid depredations they had suffered.
Shortly after the Arab conquest, Jews from the autonomous Jewish state of Himyar in what is today’s Saudi Arabia joined the Jews in the Kurdish regions. However, under the now-Muslim Arab occupation, matters worsened, and the Jews suffered as dhimmis in the Islamic-controlled territory. The Jews found themselves driven from their agricultural lands because of onerous taxation by their Muslim overlords. They thus left the land to become traders and craftsmen in the cities. Many of the Jewish peasants were forcibly converted to Islam.
From out of this population arose a great historical figure. In 1138, a boy was born into a family of Kurdish warriors and adventurers. His name was Salah-al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub – better known in the West as Saladin. He drove the Christian crusaders out of Jerusalem even though he was distrusted by the Muslim Arabs because he was a Kurd. Even then, the Arabs were aware of the close relationship that existed between the Kurdish people and the Jews.
Saladin employed justice and humane measures in both war and peace. This was in contrast to the methods employed by the Arabs. Indeed, it is believed that Saladin not only was just to the Christians, but he allowed the Jews to flourish again in Jerusalem their eternal capital. He is credited with finding the Western Wall of the Jewish Temple, which had been buried under tons of rubbish during the Byzantine occupation. The great Jewish philosopher, rabbi and doctor, Maimonides, was for a time Saladin’s personal physician.
According to a team of international scientists, a remarkable discovery was made in 2001. Doing DNA research, a team of Israeli, German, and Indian scientists found that many modern Jews have a closer genetic relationship to populations in the northern Mediterranean area (Kurds and Armenians) than to the Arabs and Bedouins of the southern Mediterranean region.
But let us return to the present day and to why the world clamors for a Palestinian Arab state, but strangely turns its back upon Kurdish aspirations for national independence and statehood. The universally accepted principle of self-determination seems not to apply to the Kurds.
The brutal fact in realpolitik is that the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians have many supporters who are motivated far more by labyrinthine and Judeophobic hatred – sadly motivated by Christian and Islamic texts – than by real concern for the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. The Kurds, like the Jews, have few friends, and the Kurds have little or no influence in the international corridors of power.
As Melanie Phillips explains in a recent article, and I fully agree with her, most people don’t care about the Palestinians but what does animate a terrifying number of their supporters is a deep desire for the Jews to vanish from the world. As she writes, “Palestinianism is not just about the eradication of Israel. It has weaponized Israel against the Jewish people.”
Literary critic and novelist, Hillel Halkin, wrote that, “The Kurds have a far better case for statehood than do the Palestinians. They have their own unique language and culture, which the Palestinian Arabs do not have. They have had a sense of themselves as a distinct people for many centuries, which the Palestinian Arabs have not had. They have been betrayed repeatedly in the past 100 years by the international community and its promises, while the Palestinian Arabs have been betrayed only by their fellow Arabs.”
The old nostrum that only when the Palestinian Arabs finally have a state will there be peace in the world is a mirage in the desert. Fellow writer Gerald Honigman also writes on the world’s preoccupation with the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians while ignoring the plight of the Kurds, Berbers, Assyrians, Copts and Yazidis and millions of other non-Arab peoples of the Middle East and North Africa.
During the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, the Kurds were gassed and slaughtered in large numbers. They suffered ethnic cleansing by the Turks and continue to be oppressed by the present Turkish government. On the basis of pure realpolitik, the legality and morality of the Kurds’ cause is infinitely stronger than that of the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.
After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Kurds displayed great political and economic wisdom. How different from the example of the Arabs in Gaza who, when foolishly given full control by Israel over the Gaza Strip, chose not to build hospitals and schools, but instead bunkers and missile launchers. To this they have added the imposition of sharia law, with its attendant denigration of women and non-Muslims.
The Kurdish experiment, in at least the territory’s current quasi-independence, has shown the world a decent society where all its inhabitants enjoy far greater freedoms than can be found anywhere else in most of the Arab and Muslim world.
A Palestinian Arab state will immediately become a haven for anti-Western terrorism, a base for al-Qaeda and Hamas (the junior partner of the Muslim Brotherhood), and a non-democratic land carved out of much of the Jewish homeland including the ancestral and Biblical lands of Judea and Samaria. In short, it will be established with one purpose: to destroy what is left of embattled Israel.
The Kurdish people number over thirty million souls scattered throughout northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, Syria and Turkey. It is natural justice for the Jewish State, with its millennial association of shared history alongside the Kurds, to fight in the world’s forums for the speedy establishment of an independent and proud Kurdistan. An enduring alliance between Israel and Kurdistan would be a vindication of history, a recognition of the shared sufferings of both peoples, and bring closer the advent of a brighter future for both non-Arab nations in a very nasty neighborhood.
Mahmoud Abbas, Holocaust denier and head of the so-called Palestinian Authority, has never and never will abrogate publicly in English or in Arabic the malignant articles in Fatah’s constitution, which essentially imply the de-facto destruction of the Jewish State and the genocide of its citizens. This mirror’s the call for the genocide of Israel and its people by the monstrous Hamas occupiers of Gaza.
So much for the fraudulent Arabs who call themselves Palestinians, those whom Joe Biden and the immoral UN and European Union now shower with money, much of which enriches the private bank accounts of Fatah and Hamas apparatchiks or funds deadly anti-Israel terrorism.
It is the Kurds who unreservedly deserve a state. As I wrote in an earlier article during Obama’s presidency, the invented Palestinian Arabs have forfeited that right by their relentless aggression, crimes, and genocidal intentions towards Israel and the Jewish state.
© Victor Sharpe
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